Does Your Property Management Website Make the Grade? Find Out Here.

Have you ever considered giving your property management website a grade? Just like you did in school, ask yourself: Does my website earn an "A" for "excellent" or an "F" for "failure?"

It can be challenging to take an honest look at your website. However, you might not realize you're losing traffic and potential customers because your website annoys users!

If your website isn't generating traffic and providing leads for your property management business, it's time to conduct an audit and grade your site. Your website is no longer merely a place for visitors to learn the basics of what you do and how to reach you. Today's websites are the inbound marketing voice for property management businesses. 

Geekly Media creates sophisticated property management websites for our marketing clients as part of the many services we offer to help businesses grow. This gives us a unique perspective on what's hot — and what's not — in the industry and what can help get more traffic to your online front door.

So, read on to learn if your website needs an upgrade!

How Is Your Website's Content?

How is the content on your website? Is there any content on your website beyond your company's name and contact info?

You might have heard this before (if not, we'll say it here anyway): Content is king. We only say it because it's true and absolutely necessary for Google and search engines to connect potential customers to your website and services.

For property management websites, marketing, and any communication with prospects and customers, what you say and how you say it makes all the difference.

However, there's more to content than written words. Your website should have engaging content in a variety of formats:

• Informative and SEO-optimized blogs

• Details about your business

• Engaging videos

• Links to social media

• Free offers

• Icons and elements that help to tell your story

Engaging new leads is not only about 'how' they find you. Robust and interesting content that aligns with a content marketing strategy and goals helps keep visitors interested in your property management business!

Optimize SEO Content for Readability

Now, we aren't saying your pages should be walls of text. Long walls of text are boring, and property owners aren't going to bother to read them. They'll find a site that is more visually appealing.

Search engines don't like walls of text either. To prioritize your content (or rank it higher), website content needs to follow online readability best practices.

Just like content for your property management blog, website pages should use headings appropriately, bullets, images, and short, easy-to-digest paragraphs. 

Add Some Social Proof

Finally, be sure your homepage "pops" with some social proof.

Reviews and video testimonials are powerful tools that build consumer trust. To incorporate them into your website (and raise your site's grade), show testimonial videos and written reviews on multiple high-traffic pages to make them easy to see.

You can automate this process so that only high reviews display on your site to net you more qualified leads.

If you're missing any of these content elements, you might need to give your website a "C" for "complacency." However, if visitors aren't staying to read, watch, and ultimately share your content, knock your site down to a "D" for "deficient."

Don't worry, though! Your site doesn't have to stick with a low grade. There are ways to improve it!

Evaluate Your Website's Structure

Today's websites look vastly different than sites of five or ten years ago. 

User-friendly website structure evolves over time. While we will sing the content song of our content marketing people all day long, it's not enough to have 'only' excellent content on your website and expect it to deliver the leads you need.

Visitors need to find your website easily and navigate without issue to see more content and engage with your CTAs (calls to action). Accomplishing this has a lot to do with your site's structure.

Make Sure It's Current

A lot of testing goes into strategic website structures. Today, most websites have a wide, open feel. That's in contrast to sites from a few years ago that relied on a series of columns and headers with a lot of navigation.

However, as user patterns change, so does how we layout websites to keep them engaged.

Often, simpler is better: you want visitors to find answers to their problems and quickly find out how to engage with you as their solution. Other benefits of a sleek, clean design are reduced loading times — a great benefit for SEO and user experience.

Check Your Navigation

Be sure to pay attention to your navigation as well; keep it streamlined and efficient.

Remember, every page does not need to be in the navigation menu. However, when setting your top navigation, keep a few things in mind, including:

• Put yourself in the shoes of a property owner: what information are they looking for?

• Can you find it within a few seconds, or do you have to try and find it by clicking through many pages?

• Ensure your highest-value pages are found by the path of least resistance.

If your website is easy to navigate, makes good use of your content, and keeps visitors coming back for more, give your site an "A" for an "awesome" structure!

Review Your Website's SEO (Often)

Do your SEO efforts help make your website (and, therefore, your business) visible to the right people? If not, it's time to optimize.

Your website's SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is critical to helping people find you. You can have a brilliant website — but if no one can find it, it's useless. 

When people type keywords (such as McKinney property management) into a search engine, you want your website to be the first to appear at the top of the results page. These are the fruits of excellent SEO.  

Strategic SEO practices help drive more quality traffic to your website. Try this to see if you're applying the right keywords and strategies to your site and content:

• Search for property management in your area and see if your website is near the top.

• If you're not on the first or second results page, your website earns a "B" or below for "broken" SEO. 

Remember: SEO is never a one-and-done application for your website. You can conduct detailed keyword research and have all the right keywords and search phrases today, then in a month, algorithms and user behavior change everything — and it's time to optimize again.

Reviewing your site and blog content for SEO "pass or "fail" grades should be a routine task. It should include keywords and other crucial SEO elements, like working links, page formatting, meta descriptions, alt text, and more.

Analyze Your Website's Responsiveness

Too many websites are still hard to use on a cell phone — even in 2023. The iPhone was first released in 2007, so with more than a decade to get it right, property management website owners are obligated to have a responsive site — or lose traffic.

Your website's responsiveness across all devices is a critical component of success. When building or updating your website, keep in mind how it needs to look and function — no matter what platform a visitor uses.

How do you test if your site is responsive? Grab the corner of your browser window and change the size. Do the elements of the page move around to look the best, no matter the size? If not, your site is not responsive.

This lack of functionality forces users to scroll more to see everything. It becomes a missed opportunity to showcase your company, as more people are using mobile devices to conduct local searches than desktop searches.

Responsive design allows your website to operate seamlessly across all web browsers, laptops, desktops, and mobile devices. So, if your website looks great on a Macbook browser but loses all functionality on an iPhone, give it a "D" for "defective."

Really Look At Your Property Management Website Design

When was the last time you really looked at the design of your website? If not, look at it now.

If your graphics look like something you'd see on a late-night commercial, it's time to update. Just as fashion changes throughout the years, some elements of good web design are timeless and classic. Think little black dress versus JNCO jeans from the 90s, and you'll quickly see what we mean.

What Is Your Site Selling?

Your property management website is a sales tool. If it looks like a sales brochure from 2010, your website probably needs a facelift because it's not selling property management services owners really need or want.

However, you don't have to redesign an entire website to improve the design significantly. Updating your header and footer globally and the home page can be a good start toward making an old site new again.

Plus, if you build your website on an easy-to-use platform like the HubSpot CMS, making changes to your website is something anyone can do! There's no need to fuss with complicated systems.

Just use drag-and-drop modules and simple WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors. No developer or support tickets are needed for most changes.

Verify Your Website's Security

Your website is a tool to get leads, which requires the collection of personal information. However, if you don't have web security such as SSL, your website could become the source of leaked information about your owners and tenants — not something you want to risk. 

Savvy web users look for the "s" in "https" and won't send personal information through forms on an unsecured website. This could cost you leads at worst — or cause wariness on the part of leads at best.

Hosting your property management website on a platform like HubSpot comes with a free SSL certificate, so you can rest assured that your forms and data transmission are protected.

Review Your Website's Reporting

Data-driven improvements will help you continually optimize your website. It's why all HubSpot websites come with built-in, easy-to-use reporting.

As you make changes to your site, you want to measure whether they are improving your site or frustrating users—and the only way to know is by recording data.

Here are a couple of reporting tips to keep in mind:

• Your website should be connected to tools like Google Analytics and Search Console, but you should also be tracking things like CTA clicks and page views, average view time, and bounce rate.

• You'll want to group pages by type to see the overall performance of blog posts or landing pages compared to the rest of your website.

This is just one reason we chose to make websites on the HubSpot CMS: these features come standard and are so simple that anyone can make sense of them!

Be Tough On Your Property Management Website for More Traffic

Your website is one of the most important tools in your marketing tool bag! Don't go easy on yourself when it comes to grading it.

However, if you're struggling with an honest look at your property management website or don't know how your site's grade stacks up to others in your "class," Geekly Media can help. 

We are experts in content audits and creating or upgrading property management websites. We also have property management industry experience, which gives us a significant advantage when helping property managers set up websites and create content to generate more leads.

When your website brings in the right kind of traffic, your business grows. Schedule a discovery call with our team to learn more about how we can help!