HEADER & MENU
The header is responsible for the first impression your visitor gets when arriving on your site. A well thought design will establish a connection and will awake interest. Keep it minimal if you want your audience to focus on your offer. On the other hand, a big interactive header will impress your visitors and highlight your brand personality.
The navigation menu should be visible, useful and concise with emphasis on your real estate business. To facilitate navigation avoid vague terms and include only items that would be relevant to the visitor. Use dropdowns to include submenus that will provide and refine additional site reading.
SEARCH PROPERTIES TOOL
If your site provides consistent listings or you have an integrated IDX service, a property search tool is a vital element. Adding this useful tool for your audience will prove to be a beneficial step in your SEO strategy and will ease your marketing effort.
An effective search meets your audience expectations and is a conversion trigger. Capture leads in no time with options to save searches and to get notifications of new listings.
A simple form needs to have a clear text, appealing design and a smart placement (such as sticky searches). An advanced search form ensures additional property filters and map search. This proves especially useful if you operate in a specific real estate niche.
SORTING PROPERTIES OPTION
Offer additional navigation through your listings by allowing users to arrange properties by featured, latest, by price or other characteristics. This will prove to be more than helping for your audience and will save them precious time. Instead of going from one page to another they will find what properties they were looking for with just one click.
FEATURED PROPERTIES
This special category attracts visitors to view the latest listings or the properties that are most profitable to purchase. If you monetize your website with paid listing submitting, you can get extra money by offering the featured position to your agent users. Allow your visitors to reach this category first by including it in the main menu or creating a call to action button on your homepage.
GOOGLE MAP INTEGRATION
This is another vital tool for a real estate website that enables visitors to view properties on a map. This is a custom feature that requires a little more work but it is worth all the effort. After all, a property information without map view is inopportune for a real estate site.
Additional to Google Map you can integrate a very effective system to search and display which is AJAX. This filter ensures that your visitors are accessing the searched listing in real-time, over the map as well as in the list.
IMAGE GALLERIES
Professional photography is a must have for your real estate website. The more photos a property has the more views will get. For each property a good number of high rez pics range around 10 to 15. Highlight every room and property feature with excellent photography, it is time and money well spent. You will decide next how to display your beautiful pictures in slider galleries or virtual tours.
CONTACT FORM
This is an obvious element of your site but we thought we should include it in the list. Many websites leave this important information in a poorly positioned place. To ensure visibility one solution is to create a dedicate Contact Us page in the main menu bar.
You can also create an additional bar above the menu with just your contact details. This way potential buyers will find it easy to communicate with you when they decide to enquire about a property.
START A BLOG
The blog post has dethroned the ubiquitous about me page. Share with your audience your opinions and knowledge and they will gain more interest in your business. A blog is an important asset of strong SEO strategy and a good tip is to offer email subscriptions.
This will ensure they will hear about you regularly and for this you should keep your blog updated with relevant and interesting topics.
CLIENT REVIEWS
Positive reviews are a fast and reliable way of building a strong online reputation. Consider adding a testimonial page to your website and ask your customers to leave a feedback with some personal information such as name and photo or logo. This will enhance the trustines factor for Google ranking, while for your audience it will prove that it is a pleasure to make business with you.
SOCIAL NETWORKING
Work up those social profiles as this will boost your online visibility and brand awareness. You can use these networking tools to spread information about your offer and get more potential customers.
Think of the following social platforms: Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter and Youtube as the loud speaker for your real estate business. So ensure that you give each one of them a purpose and effectively communicate with your target audience.
In conclusion, if you took care of the foundation, you can next decorate your real estate site with the latest trends in web design. Be sure you include these 10 elements into your website and you will become a go to expert in no time.
