Are you wondering how important a website is for your property management business? In 2022 (and looking ahead to 2023), creating and maintaining a successful website isn't an added luxury — it's an essential business component. Moreover, if designed and run effectively, your website becomes an incredibly lucrative digital asset.
Property management company websites are a hub for numerous opportunities, from being discovered on Google, your booking system, somewhere new clients list with you, and a place to establish authority through content creation.
However, creating a website that brings traffic and converts that traffic into customers requires significant time, knowledge, and effort, which is challenging alongside running your business. So, what can you do? Hire a virtual assistant!
Before diving into how you can outsource running an excellent website as one of the best virtual property management jobs for your business, let's discover some vital aspects of your property management website.
As a property manager, attracting new property owners and tenants is already tricky, but doing this successfully is next to impossible without an excellent website.
You might be wondering:
How will you attract two audiences (owners and tenants) from Google and online searches?
How will you turn prospects into clients?
How will you compete with other property managers in your market?
While there are critical fundamentals making up any website, maximizing your site potential requires much more than a standard 5-page site. For example, your website needs well-designed, conversion-optimized web pages, SEO implementation, helpful credibility-building content, and a seamless booking system. Underneath those elements is a basic structure making up your website.
So what are these essentials? When finding a property management virtual assistant for website development, make sure they understand the basics.
When websites rocketed during the dot-com boom, creating them was reserved for highly skilled programmers. Fast forward to today, and anyone with basic computer and SEO knowledge can create a simple website thanks to tools like HubSpot, WordPress, and Wix. However, turning a website from a "basic" to an "incredible" business asset is different.
Three major components make up a website: Your domain name (which is the name of your site), your hosting (which keeps it on the internet), and your CMS (which is where you'll control your site). This could be your WordPress dashboard or Shopify, for example.
From your CMS, you or your property management virtual assistants have control over everything on your website, including:
Pages
Posts
Global header and footer navigation
Those are the foundations or skeleton of your site, which can then be broken into:
Web copy
Images
Video embeds
Call to action buttons
Interactive components
For your property management site, you will need SEO-optimized pages and posts to bring traffic, then conversion-optimized pages to turn traffic into clients. These are the essential ingredients for a great website and set the foundations for digital marketing.
Next, besides content and site structure, quality website development requires a few technical aspects for success.
You've likely heard of HTTP or HTTPS on most websites you visit. HTTP, or Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, is an application layer protocol that transmits hypermedia documents. In non-tech language, HTTP is the communication between the browser and the server.
Essentially, HTTP is what allows your website to communicate with the internet.
Website code is the structure of a website. If your CMS, domain, and hosting are the muscles of your site, the code is the skeleton.
Code gives your website its form, design, and interactive elements. While your property management VA doesn't necessarily need to know coding or programming now with easy-to-use CMSs, some basic knowledge will allow them to understand how your website works more efficiently.
There are three types of website code: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. HTML is the most basic and structures the main body of your website in plain text—for example, the text, headings, paragraphs, images, and links on a page. On the other hand, CSS covers your site's style, from fonts and colors to how it looks on the page. Finally, JavaScript, the more advanced aspect, handles interactive elements, such as your booking system.
The front end is what a user sees when using your site. At the same time, the back end is the part you or an experienced virtual assistant will control and run your site from. For example, this is editing the code itself or from a CMS, like your HubSpot dashboard.
Cyber security is a crucial aspect of any website, with numerous bots and hackers looking to extract information from your website, so you need to take it seriously. If you have nothing to prevent them, it's incredibly easy for them to get into your site. However, there are ways to avoid such issues.
Basic website security begins with an SSL certificate. This is a secure version of HTTP (HTTPS), which displays in your URL as a lock icon. You can obtain an SSL certificate from your hosting provider, which is essential if you use forms, handle tenant or owner information, and take rental payments online.
No matter how competent you are in creating websites and writing blog posts, what if things go wrong? What if there are issues with complex back-end code, or you're struggling to rank pages on Google? Or worse still, you get hacked?
Thankfully, you can find a virtual assistant with the right skills to alleviate any website-related issues, meaning you have support with anything at any time. A great VA can help you run your site's blog, update pages, optimize for Google, and help with any technical issues–to keep your website and online presence running smoothly.
While you can create, design, and run a basic website using intuitive CMS, creating a site optimized for Google, designed perfectly for conversions, complete with copy that resonates with your audience, and runs smoothly 24/7 takes considerable time and effort.
If you want to maximize your website's potential and ensure a well-run stress-free experience, find a property management virtual assistant through VPM Solutions. We're more than a property management temp agency!
Use our platform with thousands of potential virtual remote workers who could become long-term team members for your property management business. VPM Solutions makes it easy to post jobs for virtual assistance services, contract with, and pay VAs. In addition, when building remote teams with multiple virtual assistants, our Company Accounts feature makes it easier to manage teams!
Download our free "Real Estate Virtual Assistant Hiring Kit" to get started!