Ryan Gervais

By Ryan Gervais

The first thing almost every new REALTOR® is told when they get in the business is to get a website. New agents usually ask their broker or fellow agents where to go to fulfill this seemingly important task, and they usually choose an out-of-the-box template solution. These cookie-cutter solutions do offer the convenience of getting up and running fast, but does it separate your from your competition?

Industry insiders often throw around words such as search engine optimization, Google Analytics, bounce rates, and social media integration as a way to measure how effective your website is. I challenge everyone who is reading this to think about all of those things, but add the most important one of all: Lead Conversion.

Your website should be a place to convert visitors to clients. If you do not know how many visitors it takes to convert a visitor into a prospect or how many prospects you need to convert to a transaction, then what is the point of focusing on all the buzz words above? If you are just using your website as an infomercial for yourself, and not to directly engage visitors and give them many options to become a client, you are wasting a valuable opportunity to pick up another client.

REALTORS® should be benchmarking our websites with other conversion-friendly industries to learn best-practices when building a website that is meant for conversion. Users respond differently to colors, buttons, text links, pictures, white space, and generally need to be told what to do in many different ways if you want them to do something like give up their personal information.

My goal is to get every reader of my posts one new transaction this year by sharing some best practices on lead conversion and answering website related questions over a series of articles.

Ryan Gervais is a sales representative in Sarnia, Ontario with RE/MAX Sarnia. Connect with Ryan on Facebook: www.facebook.com/SarniaRealEstate LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/pub/ryan-gervais/a/222/3b or on the Web at www.sarnialistings.com.