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Just some small admin stuff, but I moved the Site Optimization Series table of contents to a page. You’ll now be able to access those posts directly from the sidebar.

Alright. We’ve done the broad-stroke overview of website optimization. We’ve established some objectives. We took a side-road to learn a bit about picking something to measure on our website. Now it’s time to benchmark.

Why Benchmark?

The goal of a benchmark study is to figure out how your site is performing before you do anything at all. If done well, it should give you a good base from which to try and test different site changes (optimizations, hopefully). So you’re going to get two things from your benchmark study:

• A ruler by which to measure performance of your website (so you know if that big increase really is great or if it’s pretty typical)
• Some general insight into the patterns of use on your site (what pages are people going to often? what search terms are they using to find your site? Are they converting from search terms? How many visits to your site is typical? Whatever KPIs you are using).

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For most sites, the home page is by far the most visited. The visitor segments are the most broad here too: random search engine traffic, sometimes advertising ends up here (though I, personally, recommend against that), sometimes a link from someone’s blog ends up going to your home page. All of these wide, varied audiences need to be directed and channeled to the place that will help them get something done.

Too often, home pages end up getting fractured and fragmented due to a lack of focus. These tips should help you get focused.

Here’s a quick list of simple things you can do to make your real estate home page more effective. To be honest, several of these tips could work for any business site with a little tweaking.

1. Have one main headline that tells users what can be done on your site. Resist the urge to use the generic “Welcome to my homepage” stuff. People aren’t on your homepage to feel welcome, they are there to accomplish a task. You can’t make them feel welcome by saying “Welcome.” You can, however, make them feel welcome by making it easier for them to accomplish their task (like buy or sell a property).
2. Have a page title (the text at the very top of the browser) that relates to your headline and contains the search term you want most. This will help in two ways: it will help your search ranking and will improve the usability of your listing in the search engine result page.
3. Include a clear call-to-action. You probably have a desired outcome for people who come to your site. Know what that outcome is and make it easy for your site visitors do what you would like them to do.
4. Include a visual and direct link to the thing you want to sell most, like a featured property listing, a page with your listings on it, a page with listings that you like to represent, whatever it is that you do best. Some of your site visitors know exactly what they are looking for and will likely skip over your offer. But other visitors will appreciate your suggestion to get them started down the path to do business with you.

What are some other things you can do to make your home page better?

Readers of my “Site Optimization Series for Real Estate” may find some usefulness in my recent guest post for Nicole and Reggie over at MyTechOpinion.com.

It’s called “Three KPIs for Real Estate Websites.”

Last time we discussed the overview of a site optimization process, so I bet you’re ready to get rolling on improving your site. But before we can start implementing our process we need to chart a course. Let’s get started.

Determine the objective

For most real estate sites, the objective is to increase qualified leads (the people who are looking for the kind of property you like to sell or selling the kind of property you like to buy). Maybe there are other objectives as well. Think about this as you begin your process. Maybe sometime in the future your goals and objectives will change, that’s fine. The important thing is to know what your goals are so that you can track them.

Track your progress

Once your objectives are determined, it’s time to figure out what metrics you’re going to use to track your progress. The TLA (three letter acronym) used to describe the metrics that connect to your objective is KPI (key performance indicator). It’s very important to remember that every KPI is a metric but not every metric is a KPI. There are hundreds of reports a decent analytics package will produce for you. Not all of them relate to your objective. An excellent rundown of what makes a metric into a KPI can be found on Dennis Mortensen’s VisualRevenue blog:

7 KPI characteristics

1. a KPI echoes organizational goals
2. a KPI is decided by management
3. a KPI provides context
4. a KPI creates meaning on all organizational levels
5. a KPI is based on legitimate data
6. a KPI is easy to understand
7. a KPI leads to action!

I know it’s easy to let your eyes glaze over as you read that handy list. But resist the urge. Note a couple important items like #2: a KPI is decided by management. That means you. Your analyst (me) can make some good suggestions but ultimately you’ve got to decide that it’s relevant. If you don’t, then everyone will just be spinning their wheels. Take the time to understand why your analyst is suggesting a specific KPI and make it a conversation.

Another great one is #5: a KPI based on legitimate data. You need to understand your analytics package and establish your degree of confidence in it. You also need to understand what your analyst is doing with the numbers outside of the analytics package (yes, we’re making spreadsheets and trying to provide more context–Google Analytics has some pretty graphs, but we need more).

Number 7 is the most important of all: a KPI leads to action. If you can’t do anything with the data, if you can’t base a business decision on it, then it isn’t worth tracking. It may be interesting. Entertainment is interesting. Analysis needs to inform action.

For some examples of KPIs for real estate sites, check out my guest post over at MyTechOpinion.com: Three KPIs for Real Estate Websites.

Now what?

Take a deep breath. If you’ve come this far chances are good that you’ve done more than your competition: you know what you want to do and you know how you will measure your progress. And you are committed to making improvements to speed your progress. You’ve done the thinking and now it’s time for acting.

Next time we’re going to cover setting up a benchmark study (so we can see if any of our decisions and actions are helping or hurting).

I remember back in the earlier days of making websites how people could post a site and pretty much forget about it for a year or two. Some people can still do that, I suppose. But the businesses that rapidly review their market climate, attempt to gain insight into their customers needs and act on those insights will do better than those which do not.

Constantly redesigning a website can’t be cost-effective, can it? (more…)