I was with a new client this morning and we were going through the review process of his website. He has a real estate website focusing on some very specific golf resorts.
The website is packed with really great information, videos and images, but his lead generation is very poor. Only 2% of visitors submit their details for further information about the resort.
Some people may consider 2% to be brilliant but I work with websites that are achieving a 12% conversion of traffic to leads.
So we sat down this morning and I pulled his website apart. I don't think he was too happy as I didn't really have anything good to say apart from "the content is good".
The main failing of the website, from my experience, is down to usability. They've concentrated too much on SEO and neglected probably the most important factor...the visitor!
On entering the website you are presented with a huge number of choices in what looks like a very cluttered website. It's all good stuff but as a new visitor you really don't have a clue where to begin. It's the reason that some of the pages on the site have a bounce rate of over 70%, which is terrible.
Is your website visitor friendly?
Work on the assumption that less is more. Give a visitor a direct path through your website. Don't confuse him/her and don't give too many options. At the end of the day your goal is to grab the details of every visitor to your site that you can. Make it simple.
Also, a great way to direct visitors is by featuring your recommended properties. Make them stand out, even on the home page, and get people interested in a selection of your best properties. This works really well, and is how we achieve a 12% conversion on one of the sites I manage.
Get a friend to look at your website, hopefully someone who's never looked at it before and sit behind them as they navigate your site. You'll learn so much about your website by doing this.
Don't just make your site search engine friendly, if you can't convert traffic to leads then there's little point in having a website.
What's your conversion of traffic to leads? Anyone doing better than 12%??
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