This guest post was written by Kevin Kaiser of Military Homes,
specializing in getting military home buyers and sellers connected.

Why Your Leads Don’t Convert

Every real estate agent that has a website knows about SEO and driving traffic to your site. You know that a proper SEO campaign takes a lot of time and patience, but in the end, you’re rewarded with great rankings.

Now you’re getting hundreds of people to your site each day. Great news, but of those 250 people that visited your site today, only 15 filled out your form. And even sadder, none of them became a client.

What are you doing wrong? It’s hard to pinpoint the exact problem without knowing your site and your customers’ demographics.  But, luckily you do know that (and if you don’t you need to find out). So here are some tips that have worked for me and can work for you when it comes to optimizing your conversion rate.

The Follow-Up

The biggest problem I found was what happened when I filled out the form on our site. I did it as a test to see how my team responded, yet I sometimes didn’t get a call back the same day. And I would fill out the form at 8 a.m.

This is a big problem. If I’m a customer, I’ve already moved on to the next site and filled out their form and whoever calls me back first will have the best chance of getting my business. This is where I decided that I would try out a little experiment with our site.

The Experiment – It was set up so that we would track:

•  the length of time between when the potential client filled out the form and when we called them.
• whether they became a lead or not.

Once we did this for about a month, I had one of my programmers compile the data to determine when the delay in contacting leads turned them into dead leads. Do we need to call them right away? If not, how long can we wait?

What We Discovered – For our site, we found that if we called them within 4 minutes of filling out the lead form on our site they were 90% more likely to do business with us. That’s a great success rate is you ask me.

How to Get More People to Fill Out a Form

The next thing I decided to tackle was how to get more people to fill out our form. Our site now has a new design as were moving in a different direction than before, so you will have to visualize what I’m talking about.  But in the end you will have to do your own testing because our customers are not exactly the same.

Using Google Website Optimizer, which lets you do split testing on your website, I drew up a different layout and made our form appear in our right sidebar column on our homepage. This increased conversions from about the 2% we were getting from overall traffic to about 5%. A big increase in leads just by making sure that we had a form on the homepage in plain sight instead of links to a deeper page with the form.

I wasn’t content still and decided that more testing should be done. So I sent half our visitors to a new layout that had a form on the top left side of the homepage and half to the page with the form on the right sidebar. Our conversion was higher by about 6% with the form on the top right column.

Still curious if I could increase it any more, I decided to try split testing one page with a form in the top left area and one page with a call-to-action button on the top left area and a short form in the right sidebar.

We were able to increase our conversion even more, to about 6.75% with a call-to-action button on the top left area and a short form in the right sidebar. I told one of my buddies who runs this great surety bond website.  He implemented it and found that it works great for him. As of this date, he’s still using that layout if you want to see it.

Take Action Now

The major point you should take away from this is that you need to be testing your website and your business all the time. You can always make it better. The biggest excuse I hear from people about following my advice is that “I don’t have time”. Great, you must be really busy. But why not hire someone to do this stuff for you then? Often it’s because you don’t want to spend the money hiring someone else. 

But, if you make the right hire, and they are able to implement the suggestions I’ve laid out above, the number of clients that start coming in should more than make up for the amount you will pay someone. All you need to do is hire a high school or college kid that knows what they are talking about and you will be set. I know that’s how I got my start.