The most significant barrier we come across when talking to property managers about starting or optimizing their website is their mental mindset. It sounds intimidating and out of reach for most property managers that lack technical skills when you start talking about SEO, meta tags and other technical jargon.
Merely starting a site in 2018 isn’t enough to get your property management website traffic. The internet is a hostile environment, if you want to increase your bookings, optimizing your website is crucial.
Luckily, in 2018 (mostly thanks to Google) you can find numerous simple tasks you can do to improve your site and stay ahead of the competition.
If you haven’t already, check out our previous post sharing tips on supercharging your property management website
Make Connecting Easy
Obviously, you already have your contact details on your website, but how easy is it for someone to find those details? How many clicks does it take? Do they have to do a specific action?
It should be as easy as possible to find your contact details on your website. We suggest adding your contact details in the header and footer, on every page.
To put this in perspective, say someone is on your website and reading a blog post. They want to get in contact after reading your enticing content; they scroll to the bottom of your post. There’re no contact details in the footer, and they can’t even find a “Contact us” page. They lose interest and forget what they were even looking for in the first place. Now replay that exact situation but with contact details that are up to date, easy to find, in the headings and footers, and a clean, simple contact us page.
Before the user can begin looking for a contact page, they can see your phone, email and address and the bottom of the page. Have as many contact options on your page as possible: work number, mobile number, email, skype, etc. the more platforms you allow for traffic to communicate with you the more results you will get.
Still not sure where to start? Look at Achieve3000’s contact page
Guide your visitors
You can’t expect your visitors to do what you want without telling them exactly what to do.
You need to have a few calls to action or a CTA. A CTA is a prompt that tells the visitor to do a specific task. Such as “Sign up” or “book now” and is typically in a button or hyperlink form.
For example, if you want guests to schedule calls with you to add a “Schedule a call” button in appropriate places around your website, don’t go crazy and flood your site with them, be strategic and only add them when necessary.
Your property management company will only engage with visitors and generate leads if you provide visitors with clear instructions on what you want them to do.
Image optimization
Images are one of the greatest sellers for a property management company, so it makes sense to optimize all your web pages with high-quality images that show off your properties.
Simply put, image optimization is when you reduce the file size of your website’s images as much as you can without compromising quality. This is so your pages can load quickly and not begin to lag. It also links in with SEO. Getting your images to rank on Google and other search engines is hugely beneficial for any business.
To make things easy, SnapInspect recommends using a free, high-quality image sourcing site such as Unsplash to give your website a professional feel and look. However, by using high-quality oversized images on your site, you can kill load speed, especially for mobile devices.
Save the image as something that’s descriptive and reflects what it shows. Make it as easy as possible for search engines to locate them. E.g., instead of uploading a photo that is of a rental property in New York with the file name IMG_456.JPEG, you would save and upload it as New-York-rental-property.JPEG
Image optimization is easy but requires a magnitude of steps to properly be implemented on a website. Click here to find out additional methods of image optimization
Mobile optimization
Smartphone users are forecasted to grow to 2.5 billion in 2019, so it’s no surprise that Google ranks websites that are optimized for mobile devices highly. Optimizing your website to be mobile friendly is one of the most important elements of SEO.
To test this, visit your website on a smart-phone. If your website isn’t optimized for mobiles the pages won’t load, certain things will be skewed or disappear completely. This means that your web page isn’t compatible with mobiles.
Google is big on enhancing the user experience, is a site has a bad user experience for all mobile users they will never rank you highly on the SERP.
There are plenty of ready to use designs that are already optimized for all mobiles available online. A mobile responsive design is when your website is displayed on a mobile device it automatically adjusts its layout, sizing and portions to cater to smartphone devices. This makes life a lot easier as you don’t have to configure two websites, you have one that is responsive to both web and mobile traffic.
Tip: You need to check your site on as many devices as possible. What looks good on the iPhone could look terrible on a Samsung. An easy way to test this is to go down to your local electronics store and search your site on each display device. Feel free to leave your website displaying on the phone for a touch of free marketing.
