When Your Real Estate Website Doesn't Produce Leads

When Your Real Estate Website Doesn't Produce Leads

by Brandon Cornett

"I have a real estate website that I paid a lot of money for, but it doesn't produce and leads for me." This seems to be the number-one concern among real estate agents these days -- a website that doesn't produce any viable leads. Or one that doesn't produce any leads at all. Sometimes the answer is obvious. Other times, it calls for some speculation.

Some websites have such obvious problems that you can spot them at a glance. Maybe there are no lead generation systems in place at all, or perhaps the website doesn't function properly.

But in other cases, it may seem that the website is set up well from a lead generation, but it still does not produce any real estate leads. This is a tougher scenario to evaluate. In this scenario, the lack of leads could simply be a reflection of the real estate market in general. After all, if there's not a lot of real estate activity in your area, you can't expect a steady stream of leads to pour through your website. We are seeing a lot of this right now across the country, and there's not much you can do about it but grin and bear it.

Have You Checked Your Web Stats?

One of the first things I do when "troubleshooting" a nonperforming website is to check the website stats for the last few months. Until you do this, you are operating blindly. Once you've reviewed your stats, you will have one of two scenarios:

* The website is not getting any traffic, and thus no leads.
* The website is getting a good amount of traffic, but no leads.

In the first scenario above, you have identified the cause of your lead generation problems. You don't have any traffic! If that's the case, you have no hope of producing real estate leads from the website. So you need to focus on building up your traffic levels through such things as search engine marketing, online PR, article marketing, networking, etc.

Now let's consider the second scenario. If your stats reveal a steady stream of web traffic each day, but the site is not producing any leads, then there is clearly something wrong from a lead generation standpoint. In this kind of scenario, I would troubleshoot the following things first:

Troubleshooting a Nonperforming Real Estate Website

Does the website offer any reason why people should contact the agent, or fill out the form, or whatever the conversion goal is? If not, this needs to be addressed first and foremost.

Are the conversion points easy to find, or is the real estate website in such a messy state that visitors can't find their way around? This is a usability issue, and one of the ways you can spot it is through high percentages of people who hit the home page only to leave right away (without clicking further into the website).

These are the things I would start with when troubleshooting a real estate website with good traffic levels but poor lead generation. Often, it's just a matter of cleaning things up and presenting something of value that people would want.