If you’re not all that familiar with website terminology, you might be thinking that making visitors bounce is a good thing. But make no mistake, visitors who bounce - open your website and leave without even a single click - are not what you want, especially on a real estate website where one of the aims is to gather leads.
Once you’ve learned how to measure your bounce rate, and if you’ve found it’s higher than you’d like, the next step is to figure out why. To get you started, we’ve put together this list of factors that will almost certainly send visitors straight to the “back” button:
1. Too slow to load. Patience is in short supply on the web, so if your website is taking forever to appear you will lose at least some of your visitors. To check how fast your website is, you can plug it into any number of free online tools, such as Pingdom.
2. Visitors don’t know what to do. Put yourself in your website visitors shoes for a moment. Are the buyers or sellers you’re targeting going to find exactly what within a few seconds of landing on your homepage? If not, make sure you spell out what you’re offering on your homepage, and back up your message with clear calls to action.
3. Unprofessional design. You’ve been to these websites before. The content might be fantastic, but you didn’t stick around long enough to find out as the outdated fonts, cheesy stock photography and overall clunkiness of the design sent you straight back to Google. Of course, one person’s “unprofessional” is another’s “just fine,” so a few outside opinions on the look of your website could be useful here.
4. Homepage content is outdated. Nothing will make you doubt a real estate website more than finding a blog post from two or three months ago gracing the front page. If you’re not confident you can update your blog on a regular basis, better to move it to a less prominent position.
5. Property isn’t the focus. Some will argue that no real estate website should include a photo of the agent on the front page. We don’t agree - at least not 100 percent. You can keep your photo, as long as the other images of your neighbourhood and the kinds of properties for sale are more prominent. Remember, property is what home buyers and sellers are most interested in.
[Image: williamcromar]
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