When launching a new website, many estate agents focus on design interfaces and graphics that look great. But there is one step in the web development process that is often overlooked: content planning.

When people go online, their primary aim is to look at content, so communicating effectively with clients, providing them with the information that they seek is easily one of the most important aspects of a website. With the vast majority of property enquiries coming from the web, it is essential that your website forms the communication hub for your target audience. Poor communication
is a surefire way to damage any professional relationship or potential business.

Most customers will look at your website before they even think of picking up the phone.” Laura Harris TechnicWeb

“The way people search for businesses they want to use has completely changed over the last few years,” said Laura Harris, Marketing manager at TechnicWeb. “The majority of customers now search for you online and take a look at your website before they even think about picking up the phone to speak to you.”

Your website: As your shop window

One of the problems some estate agents face, especially the smaller independent firms with restricted resources, is how to promote themselves online. Spending money on an attractive website might look impressive, but will it generate fresh business and encourage more vendors and landlords to sell or let their properties through your company?

Aside from impressive imagery, it is crucial that the words and information displayed on a website are right in order to portray the right image and present a company in the best possible light – this should be a top priority and not an afterthought.

Harris added, “Your website is now your virtual shop window and in the same way that communication on the high street is essential for you, so is your website. You have to engage people quickly with the information they want, so you need to consider this as part of your overall online strategy.”

What about content ?

As the public face of a business, your website should offer a host of information, including up-to-date listings of all the properties in your portfolio, accompanied by great quality photographs and well written descriptions.

Be an authoritative voice and you may find that as your local profile grows,
so does your portfolio.” Mark Howlett Technology Blueprint

It may also be worth trying to enrich the search experience, with a host of additional features, such as the distance to the nearest train station or similar properties that are available. “You may also want to include ‘meta’ content like maps of the area, incorporating the Google Street View so potential clients can see the area, as well as floor plans, EPCs, and a other information for potential buyers and tenants,” said Mark Howlett, Commercial Director of PropCo. Many agents aim to build on relationships with existing clients by making additional information available on their website, such as notifying them of any new regulations or considerations that may affect them.

Howlett continued, “Many of our PropCo software clients add secure online login areas for their landlords, providing a service akin to online banking full of valuable information regarding their portfolio, from editable property listings and contact details to online statements and payment portals. For them, their website becomes an extension of their office, open 24/7.”

Hold the front page

Offering regularly updated news is a service that can add valuable rich content to your website and encourage repeat web traffic, with a host of internet users, including home hunters, vendors and landlords, likely to habitually log-on in order to stay updated with the latest market news and information.

“If you keep your news up to date, you can ensure that your website is a regular location for people to visit when they are online,” added Howlett. Like any content, however, you need to make sure that you are selecting news that is genuinely interesting and useful, and that fits with your business image. Blogs can also be highly beneficial.

The Commercial Director of PropCo advised, “Keep it [news] local and relevant is probably the best advice. More important for your business may be your expert opinion and commentary: be an authoritative voice and you may find that as your profile grows in the community, so too does the size of your portfolio and the quality of your stock.”

Search ranking

Quality content, such as news stories and blogs, incorporating targeted keywords, that is regularly updated, can, aside from appealing to users, help to boost a website’s search ranking position on the main search engines, including the all-important Google.

My number one tip is to write great, unique, relevant text content for your website. Lots of it.” Troy Stanley Resource Techniques

“Without the ability to add news or blogs to your own company website, you are limiting your website to static content,” said Troy Stanley of Resource Technology, “Google’s mantra is ‘content is king’ and without a mechanism to add news content, that’s unique, relevant and constantly changing, your website is very likely to perform poorly within search engines. With 80 to 90 per cent of your business enquires now coming from the web, news is critical.”

How to appeal to Google

Search engine optimisation (SEO) – which we looked at in last month’s Negotiator – is an incredibly important online marketing devise that can significantly boost your website’s presence and search engine rankings. Yet, according to Stanley, this is often the area that most estate agent websites tend to neglect. He said, “Having an ongoing proactive approach to your website’s SEO is an absolute must.”

Stanley highlights the fact that Google makes many hundreds of changes to its search algorithm every year, some relatively small, and some that are mammoth and which can have an adverse impact on a site’s search engine ranking. But ultimately, Google can only crawl (read) the text content of a website.

“It [Google] crawls your site and indexes against its algorithm to determine you site’s rank. My number one tip is to write great, unique, relevant text content for your website and write lots of it.”

Striking a balance

On-page optimisation methods are an important part of content marketing and should therefore not be underestimated. But the days of being able to trick Google into optimising your site through aggressive keyword repetition stuffing, otherwise known as Black Hat SEO, are long gone.

Today, the best and most successful on-page techniques involve finding the right balance between optimisation of keywords – crucial to any SEO campaign – and high quality content. In other words, this involves finding the right balance between consumer-friendly content and Google-friendly content.

Oliver Chapple, CEO of Webdadi, said, “It’s a realistic objective to do both; done properly there’s no conflict between consumer- and Google-friendly content.

Google’s ambition is to share the most relevant content available with its users and what we’re witnessing is a clear migration away from calculated Google-friendly content to relevant local content.”

Chapple advises agents to kick-off by researching which keywords and phrases generate the highest volume of searches for their business, and then factor these into unique content for a human audience, keeping the end-user, or reader, in mind.

He added: “It is worth targeting phrases which generate a good volume [of web traffic] but with less competition fighting for the top spots. The challenge then is to produce a content plan that scopes how you’re going to produce articles on these particular keywords and phrases.

“If you over-reach on Google-friendly content and it’s not particularly interesting, you may attract the visitor but stand very little chance of converting them into a customer.” Another great way to communicate with customers and attract more visitors to your website is through social media.

Social media

When thinking about SEO and generating higher web traffic levels, many people tend to focus on Keywords, H1 Tags and META Tags and although all are import components,
it is the whole picture that needs to be considered, when it comes to online communication.

Once all the basics have been sorted on a website, agents should turn their attentions to promoting their brand through social media, by making themselves and their firm a leading authority in their field by discussing interesting topics that attract fresh customers.

With millions of tweets now being posted every day, Twitter, like other social media such as Facebook and LinkedIn, has become a fabric of our digital culture, influencing how we connect and communicate with others.

“Engaging in social media is a great way to interact directly with customers and potential clients, build relationships, receive feedback, share your services and create and share useful content,” said Lucy Soper of GMG Property Services.

While social media can equip an agency with the right online platform to promote properties, strengthen their brand, generate business and boost web traffic levels, it can have a negative impact if tweets or messages are not frequently posted or website content is not up-to-date.

Nick Hubbard of Estate IT said, “It is important that content is regularly updated, especially as far as news is concerned. Commit to realistic objectives, from a couple of news stories per month on your website, to spending at least five to ten hours per month interacting on social media sites.”

Screen ready?

A company’s website and wider online presence, such as social media, is an online platform in which to plug a business, helping a firm to distinguish itself from its competitors. While an agent’s website should, as standard, include features like ‘contact us’ and ‘property listings’ accompanied by high quality photographs and descriptions, an agency also needs to think about how best to stand out from the crowd, demonstrate how they can be of service and most importantly, properly communicate how it is that they can fulfil their needs of their clients.

Contacts:
Resource Techniques www.resourcetechniques.co.uk
Estates IT www.estatesit.com
TechnicWeb www.technicweb.com
PropCo www.propco.co.uk
Webdadi www.webdadi.com