Free Online Tools To Help Your Estate Agent Website Get More Visitors

Did you know there are approximately 53,000 people working as estate agents and property auctioneers in the UK? This equates to a lot of competition when it comes to online supremacy.

More people than ever are browsing property online and estate agents need to be doing as much as they can to cement their online presence. This encompasses a functional, Google optimised and user friendly website, alongside a solid digital marketing strategy.

With this in mind, its not only online letting agents that need to be geared up online… It’s all agents!

There are a tonne of free online tools estate agents can utilise to improve their online presence. Each may have a different objective, whether it be helping you to fix your site speed, remove spam issues, attract more sellers/landlords or improve security.

Here are our top free online tools to help you get the most from your estate agent website

 

RENTROUND

We’re not quite free, but letting agents can get a 25% trial on our platform using code 25LEAD.

We’re an estate and letting agent comparison site that enables sellers & landlords to find their ideal agent.

On our comparison pages, we include a link to your site which sellers & landlords can click on to view more information.

After the trial, prices start from £74.99 a month. Click here to find out more about our landlord lead service

 

GOOGLE ANALYTICS & SEARCH CONSOLE

What do you do when your car breaks down? You take it to the garage. Google Analytics & Search Console follow the same mantra, they look to get under the bonnet of your website. This is important, as a whole number of issues could be causing your page rankings to slide.

For example, a high bounce rate (percentage of site visits that are single-page sessions) means Google will deem your page as not being a helpful result for its users, so will place your page even further down the rankings.

Both tools take a matter of seconds to diagnose any issues. It will also give you an accurate overview of the number of impressions your page receives, plus what search terms people are using to find you. From there, you can look to make any improvements and fix any errors that get flagged up.

As an estate agent, you may find that your site is getting visitors for a specific term. For example, your site may be getting visitors from Google who searched “Guaranteed Rent in Birmingham”.

This may trigger you to update the page to be more specific to this service and talk more about guaranteed rent and how much you know about Birmingham. This in turn will help you get more conversions.

These tools will also help you understand if your site traffic is coming from outside of Google.

You may have been talked about and linked to by another sites blog, generating you free traffic.

You can then work to optimise this and reach out to the site, to see how you can get more traffic from the site. Perhaps ask to insert graphics talking about your estate agency so your site is more prominent. Or, you could setup a referral fee – each time you get a visit (or a conversion) via their site traffic, you provide them with a kickback.

Not sure where to start? This is a helpful guide on how to setup the tools for your website. You may need some help from your IT guys to get some of the code on your site, but it’s shouldn’t take more than an hour.

 

 

Social Media

Social media guide have been done to death… so we’ll keep it short.

While it is possible to outsource your estate agent marketing, it can be done in-house for free too. The most common way to do this is in the form of social media marketing. Be sure to post relevant, engaging content across your feeds at least once a day.

Shorten your website URL using Bitly and paste this into your message. Bitly will give you a breakdown of how many link clicks you are getting, which can be extremely helpful to weed out any poor performing post styles. Keep to what your audience finds engaging, and if you’re not sure what this is, check your Facebook and Twitter analytics reports.

Tik Tok is growing and as a result, so are the opportunities – make sure you don’t overlook the platform as just for kids. Read our guide on how estate agents can get leads from Tik Tok for more details.

 

Email marketing

Humble email marketing can bring in amazing results for your estate agency. On average, email marketing generates a 3,800% ROI for businesses.

The right subject line and content that leads users straight to your website will allow you to tap into this failsafe form of estate agent digital marketing.

Email platforms like Mailjet or SendinBlue allow you to easily create funky email designs and send to thousands of recipients for free (within a certain limit).

But.. the hard part is getting a list of recipients.

If you buy a list off of marketing companies, it’ll cost you a lot and most likely the list has been bought by other agents too – meaning it’s a highly spammed list.

Unfortunately creating your own list also takes time & money. Generating traffic to your site and capturing seller & landlord personal details is no small task. But in the long term, hopefully you have a large list of interested sellers & landlords that are engaged in your content. This will not only help your conversion rate but through engagement, improve your estate agency’s SEO.

 

SERP CALCULATORS

Just like you can’t put a property on the market without knowing its value, you can’t work to increase your visitors if you don’t know where you currently stand. SERP (search engine result pages) checkers will tell all.

These checkers allow you to see what Google position your estate agency is on for certain keyterms.

For ones you already rank high for, you know where to then focus your attention to optimise those pages for conversion.

You’ll also see for what terms you are on page 2 or 3 on Google for. Attention on these pages, especially refining and adding to the content, will help you get these pages on page 1 and therefore help increase your conversions.

What’s My SERP gives you up to 10 free searches a day. It allows you to enter your URL and up to 5 keywords to see where you rank on Google.

The cheapest paid tool which offers a more comprehensive view would be Surfer SEO which is just $1 (79p) for 7 days of use. However, if your website is currently poorly performing, you’d easily recoup such a small spend on finding out the cause versus leaving things as they are.

GOOGLE TRENDS

Another free gift from Google is their Google Trends interface. Here, you can type in any keyword and see the interest for it over time. A good one here is to search for ‘estate agents’ in the UK. Not only will it tell you on a scale of 0-100 how popular this term is, but will also give you related search phrases that are crucial to property marketing.

If you use these phrases within your website, it will help get it more views, especially if it’s classed as a breakout term. Use the terms within your headings, body copy, blog post titles and image descriptions. Remember, the more clues you can give Google about the relevancy of your estate agent website, the better!

WORDPRESS BLOG

The clever use of related keywords leads us to our next point, which is to get yourself a WordPress blog. Quite simply, it’s one of the best tools to attract more visitors to your website, regardless of your niche.

Firstly, if you post regular content then it signifies to Google your website isn’t stale which its algorithm will be looking out for. With every blog post, if you format it correctly with plenty of H tags, relevant images not to mention keywords, it gives your website even more chances to be discovered by users. Blogs can also be shared on your own social media pages, and by other users which once again will bring more visitors to your estate agent website.

While most website generators allow you to create a blog, there’s something special about WordPress. Every aspect is designed to help you achieve the maximum number of views, and this includes all the add-ons available to boost your SEO. If you have the budget to include Yoast SEO, this is even better. But even if you use the free version, you can still implement plenty of tricks for free.

 

CALCULATOR BUILDERS

Humans are curious individuals, and so when visitors land on your website, it pays to be able to answer any queries they may have about the property process. Calculator builders give you the opportunity to do just that, and can boost your landlord leads simultaneously.

Nationwide & Zoopla’s house price calculators are probably 2 of the most popular hosted tools on the market.

It could be answering a question such as ‘what is the average property value in my area?’, or ‘average letting agent fees near me’. Some website builders may already have add-ons to allow you to do this. There are also free resources such as Calcolnic that allow you to build your own website calculator for free, and embed it into your website.

Place the calculator on a prominent page to gauge the most interest. Include a CTA of how the person can get the ball rolling so that you’ll generate actual leads, i.e ‘enter your email and phone number for a free quote’. If you also name the calculator something such as ‘free property valuation’ or another popular search term, this will work brilliantly for your SEO.

DOMAIN AUTHORITY CHECK

Moz is another excellent free tool every website owner should be using. Its domain analysis will give you a domain authority score and tell many how many ranking keywords you are using.

Interestingly, Moz will also tell you which pages on your website are the most important, in terms of their page authority. It will also give you the URL of the domains who link to your website, so you can get a real idea which pages are performing the best, and which sources are providing the most valuable links.

This tactic can be a real eye-opener, especially if you discover some of your more important pages are under performing. It gives you the chance to go back to the drawing board by redesigning your page, including more keywords, improving the user experience etc.

 

GOOGLE ADS KEYWORD PLAN

Google Ads is a PPC (pay per click) platform that allows you to display an ad at the top of a search result. Each time that ad is clicked and the user is taken to your website, you will pay a pre-agreed amount to Google.

Google Ads Keyword Plan offers free forecasting tools to allow you to maximise your reach when you do pay for a campaign.B

But, even if you’re not paying for ads, the Keyword Planner tool is an extremely helpful feature.

The keyword planner shows you in your region, how many time different key terms are searched for.

If you know what people are searching for in your area on Google, it’ll help you know what terms your website should be targeting. There is no point blogging about things landlords or sellers aren’t bothered about.

To put this into context, you may find out that landlords in your area aren’t searching for guaranteed rent, but more so the key term “rent my house to a housing association”.

Renting to a housing association usually interests landlords as the rent is stable and guaranteed to a certain extent.

Knowing this, you can create articles and data all about housing associations. Hopefully overtime you get site visitors via this term and then target these people to consider your guaranteed rent service instead.

This is just one example of how understanding what people are searching for impacts what your site content should be to maximise conversions.

This can both save you money in the long run, and help you achieve more website visitors without having to spend any more money on a guessing game.

PPC is competitive and without the right know-how, your budget can easily be eaten up without seeing any leads. Google Ads Keyword Plan can help you generate keyword ideas, which when used correctly will boost the success of your campaign, whether paid or when trying to get more organic traffic.

Check out our guide on how to setup Google Ads for your estate agency if paid ads is something you are considering (or just join Rentround instead and we’ll get you leads)

SOCIAL MEDIA PLUGINS 

Most website builders give plenty of opportunities to integrate your social media channels to your website. This includes displaying clickable icons in your header design, that will take users straight to your social media pages.

Or, you can also display your feeds down the sides of your pages too. Don’t forget your blog section either, which should have a social sharing element below each post.

 

TO SUM UP

The above is a snapshot of some of the best free tools on the internet that you can use today to boost your estate agent website visitor number count. From ensuring your website is user friendly, to using more relevant keywords – the good news is that drawing more attention to your website isn’t always about using paid tools.

Ultimately, the more visitors you can bring to your property website, the more property seller leads and landlord leads you will receive. Every visitor counts, especially as each person is a potential lead either as a buyer, landlord or a tenant if you’re a letting agent.