This is a sponsored post.Lead generation sites are very popular with real estate and mortgage brokers. And with so many of these sites collecting leads there are naturally effective sites and ineffective sites.
Automated Homefinder seems to be a well designed lead generation site for Benchmark Realty of Boulder County, Colorado. It offers property listings for such keyphrases like, "Boulder Real Estate", "Colorado Real Estate" and "Denver Real Estate".
Upon the initial visit to its homepage, I find my eyes wandering all over the page, mainly because there's lots of text from the top of the page to the bottom. However, my eyes do tend to settle at the bullet points at the top of the page, which happen to describe the purpose of the site. On the other hand, my computer monitor has a large 19" screen; it's likely that smaller screens will display less text and won't present any problems.
The five bullet points on the homepage are very effective in summarizing the purpose of the site, and each bullet point offers few words for easier reading.
I also like the "Search Now" button immediately below the bullet points. I find myself wanting to click it. Now, I'm not in the market for buying a home, but I imagine if anyone is wanting property in Colorado, it'll do really well.
Clicking the "Search Now" button takes you through a series of fill-in-blank forms, typical of most lead generation sites.
Strong Points...
- Well designed homepage, drawing visitor's eyes to the start point of the lead generation form. Could be improved, however. See "Weak Points".
- The homepage is clean, with no clutter. A big problem with many sites is having too many features packed on the homepage, causing confusion with visitors on what the site is supposed to offer.
- The website seems to rank well on Google for the key phrase, "Colorado Real Estate", showing up on the first page of results (at #9).
Weak Points...
- While the homepage is well designed, I'd make it better by changing the text below the "Search Now" button to a blog. Because the nature of blogs is to present new content on regular basis, search engines tend to reindex them more frequently than static content. You don't have to publish a new article every day, you could just do it once a month. That's still enough to keep your website indexed more frequently, and it gives visitors a reason to keep coming back. It will also create lots of keyword rich pages of articles.
- While this website is a lead generation site, it tries to sell the concept of an e-mail notification service to its visitors. However it doesn't completely bring this point across. The second bullet point on the homepage says, "Regular updates of homes meeting your specific needs." It ought to make it more clear by saying, "Notification via e-mail of new homes matching your specifications."
- Instead of having a "Search Now" button on the homepage, replace it with the first step of the lead generation. That is, if you click the "Search Now" button, it takes you to a page displaying a map of Colorado, allowing visitors to specify their area of interest. You ought to just put this map on the homepage instead, with a call to action of, "Click on a City to get Started". It will eliminate one step, and perhaps increase your conversion rate.
- The text within the <Title> tags is too lengthy, and actually creates some confusion when displayed on Google's Search Results. See image below...
When a visitor runs a search for "Colorado Real Estate" on Google, this is what they will see. The listing makes it appear that Automated Homefinder specializes in Boulder and Fort Collins properties. Keep in mind that this listing currently appears at #9 in the results. At this position, people will spend about 1-2 seconds looking at this listing, and the cities of "Boulder and Fort Collins" will actually reduce the number of click throughs. I suggest changing the <Title> tag text to, "Colorado Real Estate with Statewide Listings".
I realize that the designers of Automated Homefinder will be worried that making this change will jeopardize their rankings for search phrases of "Boulder Colorado Real Estate" et al, but the fact is that Automated Homefinder doesn't rank well with these cities. It only ranks well with "Colorado Real Estate".
