Advanced Access Blog

One of the most overlooked aspects of real estate websites and online advertising is the landing page. Landing pages are a page on your site, targeted to a specific user or a specific aspect of your business. The goal of a landing page is usually one of three things; move a visitor to another page on your site, capture a lead, or provide a visitor with more specific information. Landing pages have many uses, but unless properly executed they aren’t going to land you that next real estate transaction.

Give A Good First Impression

Landing pages have to sell people on something, so its important to make sure that your page gives a good first impression. Think of your landing page as a sales person, they have to look professional and “put together”, be informative but to the point, and capture the visitor’s interest fairly quickly. Keep these things in mind when building a landing page.

Good landing pages should be visually appealing, be easy to follow, and clearly identify what it is you are trying to get a visitor to do or offer them. The key here is to keep it simple; while landing pages should look attractive they need not be too complex. More importantly, you want the page to sell them on what they are looking for. A car salesman isn’t going to try and sell someone a new pair of shoes when they come to the dealership, so be sure you are selling what they came there for. If you are advertising a featured listing on your home page, don’t link it to a page about all of your featured listings. They clicked the listing because they like that specific listing, so give them more information or a way to contact you for more information.

Know Your Audience

The approach you take to your landing pages will vary depending on who it is you are targeting.

Pay Per Click Landing Pages

If you use a pay per click landing page you will want to target the page to whatever ad keyword you are targeting. For instance if you were targeting Anaheim Real Estate, the specific ad the page to which you would direct your visitors would be a landing page only about Anaheim Real Estate, not every city you sell in. On that page you could display a specific listing from the area with a contact form for more information on the property. Additionally, you could link to a customized IDX search that allows users to search for properties online in Anaheim. Finally, you could give a brief synopsis of real estate in the area.

You will also want to make the pay per click landing page its own entity. Navigation to the rest of your site is not important here and can often be distracting. By targeting your visitors you should be able to give them everything they need or direct them to where they need to go directly from this page without your normal website navigation. Regardless of how you develop a pay per click landing page it’s important to make sure you keep it simple and your call to action is clear.

Property Listing Landing Pages

Property listing landing pages are another popular feature on real estate websites. Let’s say you are featuring a property on your home page. You may include information about the price, beds, baths, and city with the picture or slideshow on the home page, but people are going to want more information. By linking these properties to a listing landing page you can provide visitors with an attractive and informative page about that specific property that they are interested in. On that page you can provide additional details about the property, some additional images, and a lead generation form for those who may be interested in buying or simply want more information about the home. Again, it’s important to keep the page simple, easy to navigate, and attractive. Also, if you have multiple properties listed on the home page be sure to make your landing pages uniform in style and layout.

Social Media Landing Pages

A more recent development in landing pages is the creation of a social media landing page. The difference between a social media landing page and a sales oriented landing page is social media is about the conversation and not always about the conversion. In most cases people who are clicking on your link in a social media profile are looking for more information about you as a way to get to know you or decide if they want to interact with you. If you link to your real estate website or blog they aren’t going to find that information without having to dig for it.

Your social media landing page or other types of landing pages should give an introduction to who you are, where they can find more information about you and a better idea of what you do. Darren Rowse of Problogger developed a landing page for Twitter followers. In doing so he made sure to include the following things:

- A prominent personal picture – In Darren’s case he used the same picture he used for his Twitter avatar as a way to reinforce himself as a personality or brand.
- A story – This is just a brief description of who you are and what you do. Darren also includes a link to a page with a more detailed biography. This could simply be a link to your website’s about page, assuming you have developed original informative content about yourself on that page.
- Website links – As a realtor you can link to your real estate website, blog, and any other website you operate that you feel might benefit someone looking to better understand who you are and what you do.
- A call to follow or friend – Depending on how you develop this landing page you may want to call to have the person viewing it friend or follow you on the social network you developed the landing page for. If you are developing a global social media landing page you can call to them to add you on multiple networks. I have done this on my personal blog by simply offering for people to connect with me on various social networks.

As you can see the focus here, like with social media itself, is for people to get to know who you are and develop relationships.

The key to a successful landing page, regardless of the type or its purpose is to make sure you are targeting your page to the audience it is serving. If you give the visitor exactly what they are looking for they are more likely to be satisfied with what they find and in turn could land you your next real estate deal.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Search Engines, Social Media, Weekly Marketing Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.