Ever visit a website with a specific goal in mind (like buying something), only to leave the site in frustration? If so, you've witnessed how usability can affect a website's ROI -- for better or for worse.

The same is true in real estate marketing. A website that lacks usability will lose potential clients. This applies to franchise sites as well as the personal marketing websites of individual agents. It doesn't matter how much traffic your website gets. If it's hard to use, it will turn people away.

Usability Defined
In online marketing terms, usability is the degree to which visitors can maneuver through a website to achieve their goals. Websites with high usability keep more first-time visitors, earn more repeat visitors, and enjoy a higher ROI -- whether measured by sales, phone calls, downloads or subscriptions.

Usability thrives on simplicity and leads to profitability. So let's look at some ways you can increase the simplicity, usability and profitability of your website.

Determine Your Objective
Start by determining the primary and secondary objectives of your website. Knowing this will help make the site more usable. If you know what you want visitors to do, you can focus your energy on making that task as simple as possible.

Get specific here. Don't say, "I want my site to support my real estate marketing program." That's too vague. How do you want it to support your marketing? By generating phone calls and emails? Then that's your website's primary goal -- to generate phone calls and emails from visitors / prospective clients.

Promote the Primary Objective -- Demote Everything Else
Take a look at your home page. How many items do you have competing for the reader's attention? If the answer is "a half-dozen or more," you have not promoted your primary objective. Instead, you have a handful of objectives competing for attention.

Avoid putting all of your goals onto one page. Segregate them onto separate sections of the site. For instance, maybe the goal of one page is to evoke calls from buyer's about your listings. While the goal of another page is to motivate buyers into signing up for a first-time home-buyer's seminar.

But keep it to one primary goal per page. Your main objective should be the most prominent thing on the page. Everything else on that page should play a supporting, background role.

Use Familiar Structure and Other Web Conventions
Logo in the upper-left corner. Navigation down the left side or across the top. Dark font on a light background. Web users expect certain things to be in certain places, so you should accommodate this assumption. Trying to be unique by putting things where they don't belong is an amateur tactic best avoided.

Having structure similar to the structure of other websites doesnt mean youre unoriginal. It means you respect your readers enough to give them familiar road signs. Differentiate yourself with superior content, not with unique (obscure) navigation.

Use Clear, Concise Language
Reading is hard on a computer screen. So don't make people read any more than they have to. For example, instead of saying, "Use the link below to email me with any questions or comments you might have" simply say, "Questions or comments? Email me."

Conclusion
Websites have become a key part of real estate marketing. But simply having a website is not enough. You must have a website that visitors can actually use. Remove the obstacles between your prospects and the actions you want them to take, and they'll be more inclined to take those actions.