Advice on estate agent website SEO next steps

[sophiecrosby97]

Hi everyone,

I have been working on the SEO for this website for a while now and have had a good amount of success increasing the traffic and rankings. However our main hurdle is improving conversions on the actual website - we want to encourage more people to book a valuation.

Does anybody have any suggestions on how we can improve this?

The website is www.richardkendall.co.uk

Thank you

[matt-14567]

Nicholas, do you recommend any particular heatmapping tool? We've used Crazy Egg for years and I have no complaints, but I've been tasked with evaluating other options.

Thanks for any insight you can provide...

[WebElaine]

As Nicholas mentioned, Google Analytics and heatmapping software will give you tons of ideas for things to test. If you have a little bit more budget available, you could also benefit from usability testing. Sites like UserTesting.com and TryMyUI.com send reviewers to your website. You set up a scenario and questions for them, and they try to solve the scenario.

You'll want to determine the major things that you want people to do on your website - and also the major things that people typically want to do on your site. Some will overlap and some won't. For example, you want visitors to book a valuation and rent through you. Visitors may primarily want to learn more about your company, or maybe most of them are just looking for properties, in which case your specific website may or may not help them find a property. I'm familiar with US rather than UK companies, but in my own searches, I want to see all of the MLS properties - not just those specific to a particular real estate agent. Try to get into your visitors' heads, and then set up your test. Often it only takes a handful of tests to give you some very good ideas of where things can be improved or common hangups. Sometimes it's as simple as changing the wording you are using. Other times maybe your site doesn't work on some common browser or is hard to use on a touchscreen. If you don't want to use a usability testing service, perhaps you could enlist some of your best clients. Go to wherever they use your website the most, have them use whatever device they prefer, have them in their natural setting, and then ask them to perform specific tasks. It can be very eye-opening to realize when people can't find something that's obvious to you.

Back to analytics, I find it helpful to dive into a couple of different spots to find problems and then fix them. One thing to look at is technology. Look at a significant amount of traffic - perhaps the last 6 months - and see if there are any particular web browsers, or screen resolutions, or devices, etc. where visitors have a super high bounce rate. That can indicate that your site isn't working as you expect. Also look by channel - maybe all the organic people are bouncing while campaign traffic is working amazingly well. If all the organic people are bailing, have you targeted keywords with the right intent?

Heatmap software like CrazyEgg can tell you how far people are scrolling on each page - perhaps your huge hero image needs to move aside and those 3 primary CTA buttons need to move up. On my laptop screen, the CTA text isn't even visible, it's below the fold. So again looking at analytics and seeing what resolution most visitors are coming in on can give you more clues on where you need to place your most important content.

I can't recommend A/B testing highly enough. You can run tests for free through Google Optimize, or there are lots of other platforms like VWO and Optimizely. All make it fairly simple to do things like move the property search section to the top of the homepage and see how many people search when it's up that high on the page.

[NickW816]

I would look for opportunities in Google Analytics or maybe even invest in some heat mapping software for the website (which usually isn't that expensive). Working on improving pages that have high bounce rate or low conversion rate first (as seen in Analytics is a great ongoing strategy.

In looking at the website, it may make sense to move your menu and logo to be above the slider images, and maybe have the property search fields above the fold as well, as these are what people will want to immediately interact with on your site.