Estate Agent Web Design: A Case Study

In a new series of blog posts, we'll be blogging about some of our recent success stories.

About Findahomeonline

Find a Home are an Internet Estate Agent with a difference. As the internet plays a large part of how most buyers look for a property nowadays, Find a home offers a solution to capitalise on this fact whilst saving clients in most cases £1000's on estate agency fees. Trading solely in the virtual world from a central office but boasting national coverage of homes for sale and to let offers numerous bonuses above what a high street estate agent can offer.

What We Did

We initially provided on a Website MOT on their existing site & identified many areas of concern. We then proceeded with a new web design with a focus on converting visitors into customers. We advised on a range of areas to focus upon going forward, including SEO & content topics for their blog. Tom at Findahome has even had some of his blog content published on Rightmove.co.uk, as a bit of a testiment to his blog skills. Additionally, we integrated Findahome's third party estate software, seamlessly into the new website. As a result, Findahomeonline now enjoy much higher search engine visibility and improved conversions.

As well as bespoke web design & development, we provided a full range printing & graphic design services

A Word from the client:

Sharron Williams from find a home says "We first came across AMI in the Spring of 2010. We originally contacted them for stationery and flyer printing but we were disappointed with our new website from a specialist estate agent web company and we asked them to take a look. We were horrified to find that we had paid nearly three times more for something quite substandard. Ami worked with us and our current website provider to try to find a solution but as our suppliers were very hard to deal with and the project was becoming more and more delayed as a result we decided to take the loss and opt for a new site to be built by AMI.

AMI were overly accommodating and guided us through the whole process, making suggestions for marketing and visuals that has created something truly special that we are very proud of. Since the website has gone live we have had a terrific response resulting in many successful sales and lets. Web stats that AMI provides proves that we have more footfall to our website than we ever would on the high street. It's especially satisfying when customers comment on how much they like it. We have recommended AMI Creative to friends and business associates and will continue to do so. AMI Creative are a friendly team, when we call them, we are made to feel important and valued as clients. Nothing is too much trouble! We look forward to our business growing with AMI as our marketing partner as they have us forever!"

What a wonderful charity we have just donated to!

Pay to send special needs and underprivileged local children to the circus. Organised by Circus Starr which is a not for profit organisation

Their "all human" Circus Show. is a real treat for children of OUR area. Partnering with the Donna Louise Trust they are giving the experience of a lifetime to children from local schools such as Peter Pan Playgroup and Aynsley Special School to mention just a few.

We have paid for 4 children for only £35, if you are feeling generous visit the site to make a childs day and give yourself a midweek happy feeling ...

Hurry though the show is on Monday!

Blogging has become huge in the past few years, with more people overall reading blogs & more importantly, more people basing purchasing decisions based on blog content. Every company that sells a products or service should have some form of blog, that is updated regularly.

There a multitude of benefits to blogging, here are some of the main points:

• Fresh content: keeping your clients updated of latest news and products for example can lead to direct sales. Search engines love fresh, relevant content.
• Devlop authority: being authoritative in an idustry is extrememly important for online businesses   customers are more likely to purchase what you offer, as being authoritative within your niche builds confidence. The latter will come from writing about your opinions on a such or simply writing relevant articles.
• Appear more approachable: by posting your opinions on various subjects within your niche you become instantly more accessible and apprachable. This is a big concern for potential customers who are to deal with you mainly offline.
• Brand Awareness: the more your company or business name is mentioned the better, giving potential customers more reason to remember it.
• Business Differentiation: a blog will give you a chance to demonstrate why the services and products you offer are superior to those of your competition. Such posts can really set you apart from your competition.
• Educational Marketing: show who the products and services you offer can help solve practical customer problems.

How Blogs help with SEO

Let me begin by stressing you should never blog purely for search engines – a blog made purely for search engine optimisation benefit can have a negative effect & is easy to spot.

Blog are inherently easy to publish to & so make posting content to your website hassle free. In turn, fresh, keyword rich & relevant content is favoured by search engines & gets indexed very quickly. Additionally, if your content is high quality & offers value to other people you are much more likely to get links from other sites, directly to your blog post. When people start to link to your blog posts your link popularity will increase massively over time (remember, the people most likely to link to you are within a simialr niche to yourself – Goolge in particular places higher value on links from similar sites). Ultimately, all this will improve your positioning within the search engines & will only help your business.

Remember that every blog post you add is included in search engines & so is searchable by everyone. Relevant blogs that have high quality content attract a lot of passing traffic from people casually searching on things relating to your niche. Essentially, these are potential customers (targetted marketing) who end up on your website.

Additionally, always host your blog on your website to get the SEO benefit E.g. www.yourcompany.com/blog as oppossed to offsite like blogspot.com. By keeping all the content on your company domain all the reputation and authority will remain with your domain.

As expected, traditional methods such as fresh, unique, keyword rich content with many quality backlinks rank the best – basically all the methods any SEO company would employ to rank well in bigger search engines suchg as Google and Yahoo. Basically, quality content is the "bread and butter" of search engines, so you can't go too wrong adding this regularly.

In a nutshell, these are the main quoted differences between Bing and other search engines:

• Compared to Google, Bing places much less weight on backlinks.
• Compared to Google, Bing places an increased weight on the volume of content (or number of words) on the page. A figure of more than 300-400 words has been quoted as an indicator.
• Bing places an increased weight on the title tags of websites linking to you, as opposed to simply the anchor text.
• Bing places more weight on websites that link out (yes out!) to quality websites, especially where the title tags of both pages are similar.
• Domain name age: Bing places much more weight the age of your domain name, so the older your domain name, the more trust Bing places on your website.

One important thing to note is the fact that Bing is still a relatively new search engine. If you are having trouble ranking for a particular keyword for which you have many quality, trusted backlinks (maybe even with related link anchor text) then check if the sites providing the backlinks are actually indexed by Bing. Currently, not all trusted websites are indexed by Bing.

It was conclused that people are putting an increased weighting on the actual web design and aesthetics of the page (apart from the usual things such as loading time, quality of services offered and content etc.).

If your customers believe a website looks good, then this feeling will be applied other areas of your website such as content, headlines and services. In general, people content to use websites that have made that all important first impression - don't make this initial impression and your potential customer could be lost forever.

The web design is extremely important and if not done well, can cause people to close your page and look elsewhere. Without thinking I sometimes close a webpage because it's badly designed. the latter is magnifyed on ecommerce websites, where a bad design can create a less reputable impression and loose a site potential sales, it puts off your potential customers! I have even seen none design minded people close badly designed sites simply because they 'don't like it'.

Getting the web design to portray a good reputable and aesthetically pleasing image is of high importance and should not ben taken lightly.

Read more about our creative web design.

One technique is to search for the product you're planning to sell. This has multiple benefits. You'll not only get a very good idea of your potential competition, but you can also see the phrases and terms are beneficial to your business - this can be considered as very basic keyword research. You can get a good idea exactly what people want within your niche. You could even use the free Google Adwords keyword tool to determine how popular various terms and phrases are.

Once you have a list of good keywords, start to search for keyword rich domains. You'll find the majority are taken, but occassionaly you'll domains no longer in use that you can purchase froma third party. While this may be expensive initially, but definately shouldn't be dismissed. Keyword rich domains can go a long way towards higher ranking and ultimately more website traffic. Your domain should be both short and catchy, to improve memorability.

Your brand name and keywords should be effectively integrated into your company website design and SEo campaign. There are very specific things do's and dont's when it's come down to online promotional - all of which AMI Creative can advise on. Through experience, we know what techniques are effective and most beneficial to your business.

Another popular way business promote their brand is through the use of promotional gifts. Promotional gifts act as a low cost, high volume promotional method for your business - ranging from flyers and posters to stationary. The medium you choose will largely depend upon your business niche. Whichever medium you choose they promote your brand name less expensively than other types of promotion such as radio. Good quality promotional gifts have an added benefit - they continue to promote and sell your brand longer after they have been handed out.

AMI Creative can offer advice on all aspects of company branding and search engine optimisation - simply contact us today for a quote. We can provide the full range of company branding services that your business needs to create an effective online presence.

Your website should always project your business image perfectly. If your current site doesn't project your business image, it isn't marketing your business effectively.

Even worse, your potential customers may not even be reaching your website due to poor search engine optimisation.

Freshen up your website today - let AMI Creative evaluate and improve your existing website today!

Find out more about AMI Creative's new video production and editing services today!

Do you know the goals of your website? Is your site working to achieve these goals? Do you know exactly how many of your visitors are enquiring about a service as a result of your website or is there anything that could improve your website performance?

If you're unsure about the answer to any of these questions, then our leading website audit service is for you!

So, how do we do this? The answer lies in analysing specific metrics (or measures over a period of time) of your website. We'll look at a variety of metrics, ranging from basic metrics (that provide a limited amount of information) to more involved meterics, that can tell us a lot more.

Read more about our website auditing services.

Search engines such as Google scan your website's content and determine exactly how valuable your site is. Correct use of such keywords and phrases will make your site more relevant to search engines. More relevant sites have a better chance of appearing in Google's organic results and a better chance of attracting more potential customers. Content is a major part of any new website or search engine optimization (SEO) campaign.

Companies often focus on the visual aspects of their site, or how well it works and ignore content. Relevant content is why people visit your website and should be concentrated upon during the initial development of the site - not as an afterthought.

Another mistake people make is posting a list of keywords at the bottom of a website. While this may have worked 5 years ago, search engines are aware of such tricks. They are now able to detect use of something called "natural language". Simply put, this means if your keywords have been used within your main page.

During any web design project, the design should be made to fit the content, not the other way around!

Well written, informative and fresh content will not only attract more website, but also repeat visits.