Users decide in just 15 seconds whether they want to remain on your website. In an effort to try and influence the users decision you need to assure them that your property website is going to prove useful, and that you’re a company they want to work with. This is especially important in the estate agency world where trust is a huge factor, especially seeing as you’ll potentially be involved in one of the user’s biggest life events.
Below we’ve described four methods you can use to improve this trust and retain the user’s attention.
Remove Anonymity
When people view your website they don’t know who they’re dealing with. To overcome this there are a few things we can do to make their experience a little more personal.
Try adding a ‘Meet The Team’ page that has names, pictures, contact details and biographies of your staff members. This breaks down communication barriers and allows users to see you as real people in a real company. Not just a collection of faceless robots managing the site.
If you maintain a blog on your WordPress site (which you should) be sure to display the name of the author, and maybe a snippet of text about the author at the end of each post. Adding a live chat feature, and various staff photos across the website can also help.
Show Previous Business Relationships
There’s no better way to prove that you’re right for the job than by displaying the experiences of your previous customers.
Testimonials are a great way of showcasing feedback that you’ve received about the services you offer, giving reassurance to potential new customers. You should add a page to your website dedicated to showing customer testimonials, as well as scattering testimonials across the site. If you check various pages on our own website you’ll notice we break up the content with a quote from a past client.
Using an external site where people submit reviews and testimonials is also a great idea as this is seen as being independent from your website. Most third party review websites offer widgets that you can embed into a page.
Indicate That You’re Active
A blog that hasn’t been updated in six months, or a Twitter account that hasn’t been used in weeks is bad news. These should be tools that are attracting users to your website, not putting them off because you seem dormant.
It’s important if you have a blog on your website that you display the date that blog posts were added and, more importantly, keep it up to date. If you display social media feeds people can see when you last posted so be sure to remain active where possible.
Demonstrate your care about your users data
If you have any kind of enquiry form on our website be sure to emphasise to the user that the data they’re submitting is safe with you. One of the best things to do in this situation is to setup an SSL certificate and ensure your website is running over HTTPS.
Adding an SSL certificate comes with many other benefits (we explained 4 of them previously) so is a worthy addition to your property website.
