If you feel you are not getting the traction or achieving your expectations for your commercial real estate and property investments, you might be missing out on a lot of opportunities to get your real estate or property investments moving on the right track.

Sometimes you wonder how your online channels are underperforming or are not giving you the results you are expecting out of them.

You are not alone.

There are a lot of real estate websites that look very attractive but do not perform well in generating leads, potential clients and sales.

There’s no doubt websites can take a huge chunk of your budget, more so that it requires time to design, build, manage, and sustain their operations. When done right, real estate websites are a wise and smart investment because it can be a source of revenue and help you realise your return on investment.

Does it earn or bleed money for your business?

For real estate investors especially commercial or rental assets, timing is critical and the longer your property is vacant, you lose more money.

Having a beautiful and contemporary website design is one thing, but is it effective in attracting or engaging people to click through the rest of your web pages or respond to your calls for subscribers or take action?

If not, then you need to re-assess the purpose of having a website and focus your attention on making it work for your property investment or real estate business.

Aesthetics is good, but what matters next is how your online presence enhances brand awareness.

Here are three key things to consider to help you understand how your website is faring.

Strong social proof

While social proof is a very powerful tool in websites as it has been known to help build authority and credibility, sadly studies have shown that in Australian real estate websites, the most traffic to the testimonial pages comes from within the agency staff.

So, is this a bad thing? Of course not. While such findings point to a number of reasons such as staff members wanting a good morale-boosting or simply want to revel in the idea of being recognised or accepted for their efforts, but can also be strategically used to focus on external organic traffic.

With that said, ensuring that all web pages have a testimonial or two on every page plus a link that directs traffic to all testimonials is a great way to leverage it to win your audience and generate more leads.

Social proof gives you evidence of people’s confidence and affirmation of your service or product, so make sure to use this well to your advantage.

You can provide testimonials from tenants or landlords, include several testimonials inside your Sell With Us or Buy With Us page or on your agent profile page where it can be appropriately incorporated such as how you were able to help them with the desired real estate outcomes, helped them sell property faster, etc.

Compelling and clear calls to action

While many real estate websites throughout Australia are taking advantage of the property search feature as a major tool embedded in their sites, many fail to realise its relevance in a rapidly changing market environment and changing consumer behaviours and preferences.

Many have taken the path mentioned above, however, studies have shown that more than half of all buyers and sellers go to the major real estate portals rather than to a specific real estate agency.

Mind you, the property search feature is a very effective tool, however, it loses its appeal when it is overused and abused by most websites, so why not take a different path and focus on improving and creating compelling calls to action (CTA).

It would be greatly valuable to carefully plan a visitor’s navigation that would direct them to your CTA and encourage them to take action.

Remember, start by focusing on a need then find ways to have a solution or provide it to them, surely you will have people making that step to take action.

Simple journey take-offs

Ok, perhaps your next question would be on how your leads begin with your journey. By filling out a long-form?

Of course not, people just hate filling out long forms asking for personal and professional details.

While getting more details helps in creating your client profiles, every time a field in a form is added, the greater the risk of losing a potential client.

Help your audience get started on the journey with your business by simplifying it into a two-step opt-in process by asking only for contact information such as their primary contact information and address.

Remember, the moment someone fills out your form, you have a 50 per cent chance of winning a client. Besides, you only need an email address to use for your offline marketing or social media campaigns, so thing about it.

So, try to be in the shoes of a potential client and check out your website to see if it meets your expectations and help you achieve your goals. If not, then re-assess your website’s functionality and apply changes when necessary so that it meets the demands of your consumer market.

By doing so, you can be assured of a highly-functional and performing real estate website.