All Real Estate Websites Are Not Created Equal Essentials Lacking

The real estate website market follows the tenet “you get what you pay for” only in that you will get a website for a fixed price. What many real estate agents undervalue is the vital need for search engine optimization (SEO) of their website, unless they are planning on an expensive Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing campaign. PPC has a legitimate place in Internet marketing, but investing in a real estate website that uses SEO techniques to elevate your website’s search ranking moves your website into the “upper class”, the websites that are naturally surface at the top of search engines results. This is the class of websites that brings the biggest return on investment to the real estate agent or broker.

Recently we checked a website designer that was honest in selling a real estate website for under $2000. For that amount, real estate agents are clearly told their website will have 5 pages, no email contact form and any SEO work would be extra. After visiting one of their customers’ site to view the basic package I was surprised to see someone had bought the package without paying extra for the SEO, probably thinking that a good looking website was all that was necessary for a successful Internet presence.

On the surface the website looked very nice and professional with a real estate logo and product pictures. However, looking under the surface at the underlying code seen by the search engines, there was zero SEO – no meta tags, no “alt” tags – alternate text that is attached to any pictures, and minimal keyword-rich content. Essentially the customer has what we refer to as a “business card” site. Anyone receiving your business card will visit your website, but it will probably never rank higher than page 457 or 754 on a Google search.

At IMCD, SEO is always an integral part of your real estate website package. IMC knows the real worth in your website is its lead generating capacity – which mainly comes from visibility on the search engines and good marketing positioning in the content. Without visibility your real estate website’s ROI perishes. We invest in staying abreast of changes in Google’s search techniques and tracking how well our clients are doing in the search engines. Our clients have found that, although IMC makes no search engine ranking guarantees, our experienced approach to real estate website design and SEO has brought them a very high return on their website investment.