We formally review websites with clients and suggest to them how we together we can improve performance. EastmanRealEstate.net attracts great Google search traffic but still needs improvement in it’s ability to convince a website visitor to connect with Jeff, the agent. Watch now to see what we recommend to improve the performance of Jeff’s website:
Website performance review transcript:
Today, we’re doing a website performance review for Eastman super broker, Jeff Adie at EastmanRealEstate.net. This blog’s been up for a little while now: not quite a year. I don’t think.
It’s attracting some traffic but needs some conversion help. In other words, once people land on here, we need to keep them interested and get them to connect with Jeff in some fashion. So, here it goes. Before we start to jump into the site, we are going to take a look at some of the analysis that Jordan did here. Look at the top five pages, on the site. We have the home page, the second most popular page, area home values, and number three through five are all blog related.
We have “Things to do in Napa Valley” as a blog post. Eastman Lake is a category of posts: multiple posts. Then, another Eastman New Hampshire average cost per square foot is another blog post.
Here’s the big deal: “area home values”. The second, I should say, the most important page, after the home page, this is the one people are gravitating to is “how much is my house worth?” area home values. If I click on “area home values” and I can click here…Or, I can go down here, and click on market snapshot. I end up on a page that is less than inspiring. People are going here, and they’re going away.
They’re not going to the market snapshot. This market snapshot takes us to a form, which tells us to fill in information. Then, maybe, somebody like Jeff will get back to you. It’s a little cold. People aren’t filling it out. Now, what you need to do here is A) create some expectations for what someone’s going to get, when it comes to an area home value. Now, maybe this is an opportunity to do some list building or to get an email address to connect with somebody.
In other words, maybe there’s something that, Jeff, that you can do to require an email address. Then, connect with that person to provide them with some sort of basic information, for the area. I think that would be a good thing. Imagery would be good here. Some beautiful Eastman photo would warm this page up quite a lot, but I think this is a area for people. It’s going to require some information for them to understand what’s going to happen if they either A) connect with this market snapshot and fill that out.
In other words, to encourage them to fill that out. Or, B) maybe you’re going to do something yourself, to connect with that person. Maybe there is a report you can send them or perhaps you can do a little legwork for somebody who takes the time to give you an email address. But, in any case, you end up with an email address. That’s a list building opportunity. You can communicate with them via email. So, that’s the second most important page on the entire site.
OK. Let’s go back to the home page here real quick. This site, from the beginning, this is nature of blogs. It’s very content rich. It’s text heavy. There’s a lot of information here. By definition, it makes it a little difficult to get around. One thing I’d recommend is possibly just add a block here, right in the middle of the website, with a nice image or maybe a nice video of the Eastman area that helps to sell Eastman.
Then, maybe under that block, you can have some of this more benefit text for the potential buyer or lister. But, breaking this up, visually, I think it would go a long way to making this easier to consume. OK.
By the way, Jeff, if you would send Jordan Brown five to 10 beautiful Eastman photos, we’ll build you a free video for that section. How’s that sound? OK. That’ll see if you’ve actually watched the video.
OK. Next thing here. One thing that I missed about area home values: I think a great thing to do would be to create a category, a blog category called “area home values” or “Eastman home values.”
Something that is specific to any article your write about, maybe its sales statistics, but that really said. What we can do: we can feed that one category into the area home values page. So, not only will somebody get information about how to get a sense of what a home is worth. But, they’ll also see related blog posts of all the articles that you’ve written that talk about the value of homes in general, in the Eastman area, which helps build the trust factor and will motivate people to connect with you.
OK. I want to go into a blog post here, and we’re going to shoot down to this one here. OK. One of the things we see is that people are coming to the site, and they are looking at 2.3 pages here. Pages per visit is 2.3. It’s OK, but we want to bump that over three or more is really what we want to do. We want to keep people on the site, digging through the information. An easy way to do that is we have this plug-in called “related posts.” We plug it in, and what it does is it looks at the category of the Eastman Lake land, with 160 foot posts and says, “What category is that in?” It will serve up all other blog posts that are also in this category.
So, related blog articles will show up, along with this one, at the bottom. So, if I finish reading this – I find it’s interesting, and I see that there are three other articles or five other articles that have to do with this category, Eastman real estate – then they will show up as well. That’s an easy thing to do. The other thing to do – it’s very important at the end of a blog post – is to create a call to action. Right? So, you want somebody to come to the end of the article and do something.
Now, there are lots of calls to action. You can become a Facebook fan. You can subscribe via email. In this case, you can get more information on this piece of property at your other site, which is OK.
It takes the person off your site. It’s a little confusing for the customer, because now they’re on a whole different site with a whole different layout. But, you’re contact information is here. That’s pretty easy to get to.
I think it’s a good short-term solution. However, what if someone just wants to connect with you now? Why not give them the ability, every time you write an article, along with the link to your other site, always have, invite them to contact you for more information or to talk about their buying needs or their listing needs. Have a sentence here that says, “Hey, if you’re interested in talking a little bit more about Eastman real estate, I’d like to chat with you. Then, you can contact me here”. Give a link, at the end of every blog post to your contact page.
You always giving people a chance to get there easily. The last thing you want to do is make people work to get to you, because they’ll quit. OK. While we’re on the contact page, let’s talk about this a little bit. This is a cold contact page. There’s basically information here and a form, and it’s not telling me anything. “So, I don’t really know what to do. I understand that you want some information here, but it’s pretty cold.”
Why not warm the person up? Why not write a nice paragraph or one sentence or two sentences: “Hey, I’m in Eastman everyday, and the market is changing daily. Why don’t you get in touch with me, by filling out the form below, by contacting me by phone?
We can chat about your needs”. Something on top of this form to warm it up. Another thing that I would do is add a nice, beautiful picture of the Eastman Lake here or something like that: something to just warm this up. People are moving into Eastman, because they’re excited. They want the woods, the beauty, the lake, the golf course, or whatever. We need to add some of that in here. OK. So, we covered that.
I’m just checking my list here. We talked about that. OK. Let’s talk a little bit about the sidebar here. We’re looking at this website here, on the average, older laptop screen. The resolution is 1028 by 764. What we have here is a sidebar that’s really crammed with stuff, but you’ve got to scroll down to get to it. This is really the challenge: how to leverage the most important things in this sidebar. What I would do is move…
First of all, what makes me a great realtor doesn’t really help me. Why I can help you or what’s the benefit to me, as a buyer, is really what I’m more interested in. So, rather than talking about more about you, you can sort of just flip the language so it’s: “if you’re looking for the best realtor in Eastman, this is my specialty. I’ll help you, not my buyers.” It helps to just use the you language and make it a little more personal, a little more benefit oriented to the potential buyer/lister. Then, I would take this information and move it.
Move it on to the home page. I’m going to give you that nice video here, in the middle. Put that information right under the video, which describes the benefits of working with you. You’ll have yourself a super friendly home page, with that sort of main benefit information right in the middle, on the home page. Then, you can move everything on the sidebar up.
What I would do is: I’d take this Facebook icon, and I would move it down below. You have a Facebook connect up here. This is great and all, and it should be there. But, I think you can move this down below, probably, below the tags.
We’ll talk about that in a second. But, what you want to do is: you want to show people that there’s a lot of information here. You can get to it easily, because that keeps them on the site and keeps them using the site, as a resource, as a database of information.
So, you want to get these categories of information up to the top. So, people can go in and jump in and see this. Now, let’s talk about clean up a little bit. There’s a lot of duplicate information here — Eastman highlights, Eastman ownership fees, Eastman real estate. It’s hard to read, and it Eastman, Eastman, Eastman. We know we’re Eastman. This is an Eastman real estate blog.
Let’s make it easy for people to figure out what it is. Just change the names to highlights and ownership fees and Eastman real estate. That seems a little broad. But, maybe it’s land for sale, condos for sale, houses for sale. Those are probably three very good categories. I’m not sure if you’ll need general real estate information. Home financing, that’s a good one. Home sales statistics, that’s a great one.
Maybe that’s an area home values related and uncategorized. Jordan pointed out you have maybe almost 30 articles that are uncategorized. So, I’d get those articles categorized.
On the tag front, we have…Try to limit your text to 20. See if you can do it. You’ve got too many texts going on here. It’s impossible to get through. You really need to think about a tag, as a top-level category, so that they’re several articles in a tag line.
Golf is a great tag. You can have several articles under golf. Grantham, New Hampshire. This is, maybe, the town of Grantham. That’s a good one. Home values, you’ve kind of covered that in a category already. You probably don’t need that. Maybe just a category called lake. Not lakefront and lake but just lake. Anything having to do with the lake. Lakefront land is important. Maybe it should be lakefront land.
Sunapee, that’s a good one. So, that’s a little off target. Newbury, that’s a good one, but it looks like you have Newbury/Newbury, NH. That might be a duplicate. New Hampshire home sales. I’m just trying to help here. Post and bean, That’s not a bad category. I like that tag. That’s a good one. Springfield. Then, Springfield NH. That’s a duplication here. You should clean that up. NH, New Hampshire views. How about Eastman views? That might be a better tag, but anyway…Here’s waterfront. So, you have lakefront and waterfront. These are duplicate tags, unless you’re talking about waterfront outside of Eastman.
But it’s still lakefront. So, then, Wilmot. Wilmot, NH. This looks like a duplicate tag as well. Let’s see if you can cut these tag in half. You really want to make it easy for people to cruise through. If your covering organization through your sort of table of contents here, with your categories, don’t duplicate it in your tags. Use tags for sort of more unique things like golf and financing and lakefront views and just sort of interesting, difficult to categorize tags.
OK. That’s so I covered that, and I think that covers it, Jeff. So, let me know if you want to talk more about the suggestions in the video.
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