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Are you committing this mistake on your real estate website? Part 1 of 2

Peter Kolat
2 min read

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Real estate websites are all over the place.  Just type in “real estate website’  into Google and you’ll get thousands of results. Some real estate websites are good but most of them are pretty bad and I’m being nice here.

Today, I want to talk to you about the first problem I see made on hundreds of real estate websites and this one problem is causing those websites thousands of leads and possible deals.

Make Sure Your Real Estate Website is Focused on Your Target User

The first big mistake I see many real estate websites make is that they are very unfocused.  What do I mean by that?  Let me give you an example.  A typical real estate investing website will target sellers who are in foreclosure.  Let’s say they hire a good SEO company or do a pretty good job themselves and make it on the first page of Google.  Great!

Now, this website can bring in some targeted sellers to the site.  But when that seller who is heading for foreclosure clicks on the link to go to the site, he does NOT get what he asked for.  Most of the time, he ends up landing on the main page and/or very unfocused page.  So what happens next?  The visitor clicks the back button.

What happens to that website?  Not only does it loose the visitor and a possible deal but it’s bounce rate goes up. (bounce rate is a % rate that tells Google how targeted the site is.  If the bounce rate is high, that means that people leave the site (bounce) without exploring it further and Google will give it a negative point to it’s quality score.)

As you can see, that one problem can have a big effect on your website.  So here is the solution:  Whenever you are designing your web pages, make sure that they are TARGETED to your end visitor, to the person you want to bring to the site.  If your target audience is a seller who is heading for foreclosure, make sure that the page DELIVERS on it’s promise that was given to the visitor in the search engine result and that it ONLY targets that one person.

Remember, you always need to talk to just ONE person on your web page.  Think about it, at any given time, there is just one person reading your page unless he has his wife or a group of people reading the web page together.  Hopefully, you see my point by now.

Make Adjustments Until You Speak to Your Visitors

If you change this one element on your page, you should see a difference in your bounce rate (it should go down), time a visitor spends on your site and the # of page views should increase.  And that’s just for starters.

In conclusion, talk to one person on the page and make sure that the page focuses and ANSWERS the problem the visitor came to see.  Also, make sure that you don’t have a lot of distractions on that page like adsense ads, many links to other distractions, flashing buttons and so forth.  You need to stay focused.

That’s it for today.  Next week, I’ll discuss the other issue I see many real estate websites make and believe me, that problem is costing those sites a LOT of money.  Those websites are leaving a lot of money on the table.  So make sure that you come back here next week or add me to your colleague list here on Bigger Pockets and you’ll know when I write part 2.

One last thing, if you have any questions or comments, let me know in the comments below.

To Your Success,

Peter Kolat

Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.