This foundation video is the start point for a series of videos we will be producing, which explore the structure of a good estate agency website. Before we dive into sub topics, including site structures for SEO, one more click, location content, video on agent sites, and more, we need to have a solid understanding of the basic skeleton of the site first. So, brew yourself a cuppa and settle in…
This second video looks again at the site map, but now solely through the lens of how search traffic typically enters an agent website.
It also examines the opportunities you have to optimise your site, to build traffic flowing into it. Whether that be through clean URLs, links to high value pages, ancilliary pages like branches and staff, or the all important content pages.
This video is the perfect precursor to our series of articles on SEO.
Encouraging “One more click” within your site
Leading on from the SEO overview, this video dives deeper into one core SEO concept: generating longer page journeys within your site by encouraging “one more click“.
But it’s not just about SEO… By thinking intelligently about how you can ease the flow around your search results pages, you can vastly increase dwell time. And by introducing nuggets of content linking other pages, you can increase your average session length and pages/visit. More time on the site = more properties viewed = more registrations. And it also deepens your brand impact on your visitors.
We all know that content is king, helping attract visitors into our site and improving our SEO. So it’s great to see ever more agents investing in writing good local area content.
However, that can easily be wasted effort if those local area guides are only accessible via your site navigation. Honestly… your audience doesn’t really care enough about your site enough to bother reading top down. Instead, we believe you should go the last mile and spread content snippets onto your main work-horse pages where the bulk of your traffic flows. Plus, you’ll want routes back into relevant local properties, running right alongside your area guides. Here’s how to ensure your content investment isn’t just the web equivalent of “screaming into the wind”…
An increasing number of agents are starting to invest in great agency video content too.
This video looks at all the various types of video content that we see agents starting to produce, and suggests a series of ideas for where you can hang it within your site so that it gets discovered and works hard for you.
That might be at agency level, branch level, on individual staff, within content, or, clearly, on individual properties.
Once you’ve seen the site map in overview, you might want to drop into the first of our detailed, page by page videos. This one takes a deeper look at the “work-horse” that is the property details page.
We examine the main elements that we think should always be present for a property. We look at ways to group the types of actions or navigation around the property. We examine ways to increase conversion to leads / registrations from the page. And we look at the side content, so that the property details pages can do their bit to generate “one more click” by helping recirculate traffic around the site.
Integrating Draw-a-Map “properly” into your website
Many agents are now adding draw-a-map into their sites. However there are vastly different qualities of implementation of drawing technology out there.
This video examines the two crucial elements we think make draw-a-map sing properly:
(1) Making the usability of the core drawing experience pleasant, not painful, so it moves from gimmick feature, to useful tool.
(2) Integrating it right into the core search experience of you site, so that it gets found, rather than languishing as a wasted investment hidden in a side annexe.