Why visitors to your website are hard to catch (and what to do about it)

How to catch more website visitors

Butterflies have a habit of flying from flower to flower to drink their delicious nectar. As a kid, I always wished they’d stay still on a flower for long enough so that I could actually catch one. In many ways, website visitors are like butterflies. They jump from website to website getting bits of info to quench their thirst for information. And as a website owner, it’s seems hard to have them stay long enough on your site.

In Real Estate, visitors tend to jump around even more than on other sites
Visitors use one real estate website to find a home they like, then they jump to the next, and on and on. With a little luck, they find a house that they like on your site and they stay long enough to connect with you. But very often, this connection is short-lived and not long enough to convert these visitors onto viable leads (i.e. to “catch” them).

Even worse, your little personal website, gets to compete for attention with the big aggregators who have deep pockets and can afford fancy search engines with lots of extras that are more attractive to the visitor than your modest site.

So how can you compete with the big aggregators and catch those visitors?

First, let’s analyze what’s happening on most real estate websites:
1. Most real estate websites, big and small, have THE EXACT SAME catalog of homes as the main attraction
2. Aside from the catalog of homes, there is very little “what’s in it for me” for a visitor
3. Many real estate websites are stuffed with keywords

Let’s analyze these issues in detail:

1. Most real estate websites, big and small, have THE EXACT SAME catalog of homes as the main attraction
The issue with most real estate websites is that they’re all built the same way: with a catalog of homes at the center of their visitor attraction strategy. And the catalog of homes is practically the same across ALL websites. So the visitor sees no reason to stay on one site when they can get the exact same info on the next one.

2. Aside from the catalog of homes, there is very little “what’s in it for me” for a visitor
As I mentioned above, most sites don’t have much more than a home search widget on them. The other content that one can find on a real estate website is fluffy text about how great the agent is, and about how they’re committed to their clients, etc. etc. Occassionally, there are also standard tools such as a mortgage calculator and canned Seller Tips and Buyer Guides. The problem with this content is that very little of it is unique, fresh, or directly beneficial to the visitor.

Thus, the visitor clicks away hoping to find specific details to answer his questions. And what do they find instead? Websites stuffed with keywords.

3. Many real estate websites are stuffed with keywords
Some website owners seem to be exclusively focused on getting listed higher on the search engines so that they can be found by visitors. So they stuff their home pages with long lists of every zip code, city, and area code possible so that the search engine finds them whenever a potential visitor performs a search using any of those keywords. The problem is that the visitor might click through to the site from the search engine result, but then click away just as fast when he realizes that the website is merely a list of zip codes and cities with no further substance to it. Or maybe there is some substance behind the massive lists, but it’s so packed together and hard to read that the visitor would rather go off and smell the flowers somewhere else.

Now that you know what makes visitors go somewhere else, you can focus on making sure that your website doesn’t have these issues and you can start gaining ground over your competition by building a visitor-friendly website.

To build a visitor-friendly website:
1. Consider what it is that visitors are looking for
2. Focus your content for a specific kind of visitor
3. Narrow your focus to a small area

1. Consider what it is that your visitors are looking for
Most of real estate website visitors are looking to move. Therefore, a successful website must focus on helping its visitors achive their goal of moving. To a visitor, moving means a lot more than finding homes for sale on a long list. Actually, each kind of visitor is looking for slightly different information.

2. Focus your content to a specific kind of visitor
Ideally, you’d want to focus on either buyers or on sellers because each of their needs are very different. Don’t worry, you can always have two websites. One dedicated to buyers and the other one to sellers. By keeping the sites separate, you can really tailor the content to what each kind of visitor wants to see.

For example, what content would be of help to a buyer?
Buyers want detailed information about the area where they want to move to. They are looking for in-depth information about the area’s: safety, transportation, schools, home prices, shopping, recreation. They also want to know what the area looks like. And, what is there to do? How bad is the traffic? But remember that they want to know these things in detail. Otherwise, they might as well head over to Wikipedia for an overview.

As you can see, the info that a buyer wants isn’t very useful for a seller. After all, sellers already know most of that information – because they’ve been living in those areas. They could even write the details out for you (hint, hint). So if you want to give potential sellers the information that they crave, you have to consider what it is that a seller needs to know.

What info would be of help to a seller?
Sellers want to know what they need to do to sell their home. They want to know how to get top dollar for it. They want to know what their competition looks like. Most sellers are looking for ultra-local statistics which you could give them and become their instant hero. But be careful of not quoting nationwide or even city-wide statistics- they’ve already been to the local newspaper to get those numbers.

Now, how can you provide such in-depth information and still have time to sell real estate?

3. Narrow your focus to a small area
The trick to satisfy your visitors’ need for detail on your website (without losing your sanity) is to have a very narrow focus. Besides, trying to give out details on an entire city or county is not going to work as well as focusing on a zip code or better yet, a neighborhood.

Let’s summarize.

Now that you know that these three issues scare away website visitors:
1. having the same content as every other site out there (and nothing else),
2. lack of “what’s in it for me” for a visitor, and
3. keyword-stuffing;
you can avoid making these mistakes on your website.

Further, you can build a visitor-friendly website by:
1. considering what it is that visitors are looking for,
2. focusing your content to a specific kind of visitor, and
3. narrowing your focus to a small area.

If you have the right elements on your website, then you are well on your way to catching more visitors and converting them into happy, and satisfied clients.