I’m not sure what causes it, but realtor sites are usually terrible, and almost always have zero thought put into SEO. Which is surprising since I can’t hink of many categories that rely more on search.
People now use the web to search for real estate and realtors in astonishing numbers. Nobody travels downtown, walks into a realtor’s office, starts looking through his books, then climbs into his car to go visit a handful of houses.
What made me think about this was a recent redesign of a realtor’s site that my wife used to work for. She is a top realtor in her market. Sells a lot of houses, builders like her, clients like her, but her site is not as good as it could be. Move beyond the actual functionality of the site to the SEO aspects.
The homepage talks about the realtor, but few people will search for her by name. It would be better to have that information on an “about me” type of page.
The title tag starts with “Raleigh Real Estate” but then she never really targets that phrase.
Her money page, the listings, isn’t highlighted in any way on the homepage.
She has some pretty good features, but none of them are highlighted for the casual visitor.
If I type “Raleigh Real Estate” into Google, her site doesn’t appear on the first 5 pages of results. Actually, I can’t imagine anyone looking for a general term like “Raleigh Real Estate” would progress beyond the first page of results.
This is a common problem. In my experience, realtors will spend thousands and thousands on newspaper ads, but will skimp on their online effort because they don’t see any results from their online efforts – a classic catch-22.
First off, she doesn’t actually target Raleigh as her main area, yet has decided to make it the first word in all of her sites pages.
Just a small dose of basic search engine optimization could cure almost all of the problems. And for the most part, it’s a one time fix since their product doesn’t really change all that much.
Leave a Reply