Discovery
Todd approached us in 2019 to discuss his website, which he had encountered several shortcomings for 5+ years. Initially, he thought his site just need the time to be noticed, since the cost of running his site was close to $200 per month, plus the initial design fee, the provider must be doing something with that money. After 5 something years, he realized his site wasn’t doing anything for him. He received almost no visitors and has never gotten a call from his website. Zero. None. He found us and gave these guidelines for his new site:
As usual, we conducted a thorough examination of his existing website to figure out what went wrong. As expected, sites like this (general real estate agent’s site) were built 100% with a duplicating template. There is nothing wrong with using a template, the problem is that nothing was changed. So his site is exactly the same as many other sites besides his name and Bio, everything else was copy-and-paste. SEO wise, nothing was set up. At this point he realized more than he wanted to, so a changeover was immediate.
Consultation
A realtor’s website shall be very straightforward. It involves genuine content, a modern clean layout, SEO-focused design, and integration of MLS listing protocol. To be quite frank, the entire website needs to be SEO specific. That means no duplicating contents, or as less as possible. We made the following recommendations for the new website:
Solution
Since one of the requests from Todd was to reduce initial costs, we went with the modified template route to save on the development time. We also moved the hosting to our server so he did not have to deal with a hosting provider. Everything is more streamlined.
The site contents were carefully arranged in a way that search engines would not mistake his site with some other sites. Every real estate agent fetches listing information from the board’s server, so everyone has the exact same info. We were able to implement the codes to avoid duplicating content. This is a big one for SEO value.
We dropped his “newsletter” service which was offered by his last provider – it did nothing but incur a cost. The newsletter was posted without any SEO strategy so it means nothing to the search engines. Since Todd did not want to engage in a blog himself, we decided to use his listings as posts for social media. With our SEO plans, these posts are not generating valuable SEO traffic, pointing the source back to his website.
After a few months of going live with his new site, we tracked a very substantial increase in visitor traffic. This traffic is all organic, meaning it wasn’t gained by paying for ads or pay-per-click services. Todd is now getting phone calls and emails from leads generated from the website that he never had with another provider.
The monthly cost for the website was decreased, and our SEO plans are designed to be flexible so that he does not need to always have the higher plan running. The website is able to maintain constant traffic with minimal costs.
The web development time was 3 weeks including drafts and revisions. SEO plan is ongoing with seasonal changes.
Major Takeaway
We have actually built several real estate agent websites over the years, and we have seen the same patterns over and over about what really didn’t work for our clients. Here is some food for thought: