How Easy Is Your Website to Navigate?

In The Click Power System, I provide a roadmap to a successful sales and marketing strategy. It’s built on five building blocks for success, the first of which being your website. Your website includes things like your content, your design, and also your navigation. Navigation refers to the degree of ease that visitors click through your website. Navigation links should always be prominently displayed, clearly labeled, and easy to use.

Limit your primary navigation to no more than six to seven buttons and your secondary navigation to no more than three buttons. Your navigation should funnel each visitor through your website on a strategic path toward an online sale, registration, live chat, phone call, and/or offline visit.

When a potential home buyer visits your website, he/she wants to know three things in one click or less:

1. What style and size homes do you build?
2. Where do you build?
3. How much are the homes and are any available now?

If you bury this information on sub-pages below less important information, buyers will leave your website immediately. If you have multiple neighborhoods, a quick search on the homepage in the form of a map and/or drop-down menus is a great way to funnel buyers quickly to important information. Once the home shopper is satisfied that you build homes at a price and location of interest, the next step is to learn more about your company.

Navigation Checklist:

• Does your website use simple, user-friendly navigation? Is the navigation easy to use on a mobile device or tablet?
• Does your website allow home buyers to find a neighborhood, floor plan, available home, photo gallery, or home site in one click or less from the homepage?
• Does your website provide multiple search paths on each page to important information?
• Does your website provide strategic links in the copy to important information?
• Does your website provide navigation appropriate for your target audience?
• Does your website provide primary and secondary navigation?
• Does your website provide search refinement? Do you use maps, drop-down menus, or advanced searches?

Today’s post contains information found in Click Power, Meredith’s book written specifically for the new home building and residential real estate industry. It’s a comprehensive, digital marketing how-to guide for home builders. Meredith steps you through the sometimes overwhelming maze of web marketing and shows you how to optimize your potential online. Order it online at Amazon.com.

Categorised in: Home Builder Marketing & Sales, Marketing Mondays