What’s more important: making your website search engine friendly or user-friendly?

Search engines rank your site…

But users must be able to find what they’ve come for… Does one trump the other? In short, the answer is a resounding NO!

Sadly, most builders’ websites do neither well.

I’m going to borrow an example from the current advertising world to try and make an analogy:

Best Buy has a new product line. And the company spent big bucks promoting it during the Winter Olympics. The product line: their Blue Label laptops. If you haven’t seen it, it’s basically Best Buy’s attempt (and it could really prove a winner) to respond directly to customer feedback. Based on customer surveys that asked computer users what features they’d most like to see in a laptop, Best Buy gathered all those wish lists and bundled the most popular features among them into this new line of laptops.

It may be a tall order, but Best Buy is betting that these user-designed laptops can’t lose in their market.

Back to my analogy…essentially this new line of “blue label” laptops is designed to be Best Buy’s most user-friendly machines. But underneath all this user-friendliness a machine also has to perform, and herein lies the relationship between search engine friendliness and usability.

Your website needs to be fine-tuned for search engines (site architecture, sophisticated but clean html, optimized graphics, meta tags, title tags, appropriate keyword density) but you have untold opportunity to work magic with users — as if this were a big blank canvas.

Maybe that’s too hard to believe?

Remember, one aspect of user-friendliness is ensuring that a site visitor finds what he or she expects to find after landing on your site. Do we know what that is?

It’s a good bet that a potential home buyer is looking for all or some of the following information:

• checking out your credentials
• wants to see your models
• want to learn about the surrounding community where your are homes are located

In addition to these bullet points, I have news for you: “what they’ve come for” may not be as easy to pin down as you might imagine.

From the moment one site visitor types a search query into Google, Bing or Yahoo! to the moment he or she clicks through to your site—they have expectations. They have expectations when they start shopping for a new home, in fact! They’ve already seen visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads. For many people the idea of a “home” is intoxicating and can take our emotions and even our senses to very powerful places.

I suggest you consider these intangibles as much as you consider laying out all the technical specs of a house.

Listen to what BMW has to say:

“What you make people feel is just as important as what you make. At BMW we don’t just make cars, we make joy.”

If you can pull this off with your website while having it rank well in the search engines, then you will be among a very small percentage of builders.

I remember my first new home buying experience. It was an all day event in the car with my Realtor. We drove around from one new community to the next walking through one model after another and as you know, each community can easily have anywhere between 3 and 10 models depending on the size of the community. It was exhausting. Not to mention the fact that by the end of the day, I had seen so many models that I had forgotten which one I liked the best.

If you’re a home builder then you know that those days are gone. It’s safe to say that less than 20% of buyers still practice this home buying model. The rest of them are busy looking at their future new home on the Internet. In fact, they’re assessing the quality of your entire company by what they see in your “online model” or showroom.
Long before they actually take the time to get in the car and drive out to any community, they’ve spent hours (sometimes days,weeks & months) on builder websites like yours and have already made most, if not all of their conclusions. So, how much emphasis and or importance do you place on your website? As a website designer I spend a great deal of time during my workday on builder sites and I have made some observations. Some good, some….well, bad.

I’d like to offer some suggestions based on some of the best consumer friendly sites that I’ve seen.
Here’s goes! The absolutes in no specific order.

~ User Friendly
Nothing is more distracting than arriving at a builder website and getting lost or not even knowing where to even start.

~ Easily Navigated
Your website is not just a sales tool but a map that leads your potential buyers to your front door. Where do you want them to go?
Are your links leading them there? How far does the buyer need to go before finding your homes?

~ Not busy or confusing.
The more “stuff” you have on your site, the greater the chances you have of losing people. Banner ads are helpful to the pocketbook and Realtors are an integral part of your business but you are not selling either. Your content should be relevant and always directing traffic to what you are selling, homes. Busy and convoluted is not easy on the eye.
A great example of simplicity in design and navigation is Quadrant Homes in Seattle.
* It’s simple and very clear as to what they want the buyer to do and where they want the buyer to go. They even have their site available in other languages. Great move!

~ Rich in information
When I’m researching a product online as a consumer, what I’m looking for is information. The Internet is a real time environment and I want my information in real time. Traversing through pages and pages of content before I finally find what I’m looking for is not how I like to spend my time shopping.

~ Relevant Information
Contrary to the old method of marketing, leaving something to the imagination WILL NOT get people in their cars to come see you. The more information you can offer them the better your chances of selling them. The absolute basics include:
~ Floor plans that include the square footage.
~ Hi resolution images of your available models. People love pictures, don’t leave them out!
~ A community address or directions to the community! Believe it or not, many sites do not have this basic information. It’s hard enough sometimes to be found online let alone finding you without an address or a map.
~ Bedrooms, bathrooms….how many?
~ Pricing. I realize that for some builders (especially custom to semi-custom), pricing can change and requires some discussion based on needs but using the old “call for pricing” in an attempt to gain personal contact can be frustrating. Always include some basic pricing like “from the high, low or mid $$’s”

Contact us!
This should be the most prevalent and recognizable link on your website. You would be surprised to see how hard it is to find this link on some websites. If it’s not easy to contact you from your website then all your website is is a fancy brochure. Take a look at Landon Homes. Right from the get go they have access for personal interaction in 2 different locations. They are a call to action and you can’t afford to not have it.
Information on your website is just the beginning. The ultimate goal is for the buyer to want to contact you. If your content inspires them, you must provide an easy avenue for them to contact you.

~ Online Registration Card
There are two frames of thought in our industry on this topic. Some feel that it’s too intrusive and only provide a phone number. Others would rather not provide a phone number and only have a form to fill out that gets sent to the builder sales team.

I say it’s vital to have both. Vital because there are also two types of consumers, some who prefer to call and some who prefer not to call. You must capture both!

I also believe that it’s important to have a registration card on your site because people are very non-committal online for fear of spam and unwanted contact. The form can act as a filter. If a buyer takes the time to offer their personal information, they are most likely not just a browser. The odds are higher that they’re truly interested.

~ How did you hear about us?
Other than the buyers name and contact information, this is probably the most valuable information that you can gather on your contact form. In today’s marketing environment, there are a vast number of options and you need to be able to determine which is serving your interests in the greatest way.

This question should require a mandatory response and you should list in that drop down every venue in which you spend your marketing dollars and a few in which you don’t. By and large, you will most likely discover that the majority of your leads will come from the Internet.
So that is my 2 cents regarding builder websites.
I would love your feedback!