Aloha Tony did a survey in recent post that asked, “What percentage of your closings come from the web leads on your personal site? “.  I was amazed to see the high percentage of net savvy Geek Estate agents in the 0 -25% range. I would assume that most of the people that took the survey focus a large amount of time working on and energy driving traffic to their sites. I tried to come up with a list of the various reasons why the conversion rates (closings) were so low and possible ways to increase them.

1. They focus more of their time on other ways of generating business.
This is great if you are able to have a more diversified approach mean while still converting a decent amount of business from your website. Some of the other ways of generating business (prospecting expired listings, FSBO’s, past clients and COI) are still highly effective if done consistently. If you are spending time doing any of these methods you may want to find a way to get them to start using your website as a tool. This could help convert more of those prospects.

2. They don’t have search engine traffic.
Possible Solutions: A. Educate yourself on SEO and either do it your self or hire someone to do it for you (focus on the low hanging fruit first). B. Think about doing some CPC campaigns, but only if your site is easy to use and set up to convert leads into business. C. Always promote your site through Craigslist ads, Facebook, Twitter and any other promotional stuff your are doing.

3. Their websites are too busy (noisy).
Possible Solutions: Try cleaning up your pages and not having so many widgets and clutter. You worked hard to get the user their for a reason (don’t distract them). Keep the page focused and clean. Make the property search the main focus not a hyper link to a search that is hard to locate.

4. Their sites are not easy to use.
Solutions: Make sure your IDX search is easy to use and gets the user into search results quickly.  If the user has to work at it, you are definitely going to lose a high percentage.  If you use a required registration make sure the user can see & knows what they are going get before you ask them to sign up.

5. Their follow up is weak.
Solutions: Follow up on email requests from the site ASAP. If you are not your competitors are 😉 If you require registration you should be calling them ASAP and asking them if there is anything you can do to help them. Most people really appreciate this and it will keep them using your site if it works well!

I am always looking for ways to get my conversions rates higher and new ways of generating business. Currently my team is generating about 90 – 95% of our closings from my personal site, which is well into the triple digits. We probably should be focusing a little more energy on other things as well to get a little more balanced. I would love to hear what you are doing to increase your business from your website and how others can increase their closings.