How can a $5000 real estate website cost less than a website created with a $500 template? Two areas to examine: overall website costs and income derived from real estate website marketing. The overall website costs include the initial design investment plus the ongoing maintenance and the pay-per-click advertising expense.

Database driven template websites can keep the initial investment in the website design low, but generally create a “business card” site. This is a website that, without any pay-per-click advertising, draws its traffic from people seeing the address on a business card or printed advertisement. The low cost website template solutions are often database sites, that is, their content is dynamically created when visitors come to the site. These websites are much faster to create, but they are not as search engine friendly - their content is largely unseen by the search engine’s indexing spiders.

Custom and semi-custom static HTML real estate website designs are usually in the $3000 to $12,000 range. That investment covers a larger amount of market-specific content, better and ongoing search engine optimization and monitoring, and better graphics and market appeal. The graphics are an asset to retain your home buying or selling website visitors. More critical is the content and search engine optimization. These lead to “organic” ranking on search engines. Organic ranking means your real estate website shows up high in the search engine findings based on the keyword content of your site.

Real estate websites that do not have keyword rich content or are not search engine optimized have to rely on pay per click advertising to get visibility on the first page of the search engine results. Pay per click advertising can have a place in an Internet marketing campaign, especially in high profile markets. Often pay per click keyword marketing campaigns can start at $500 a month and escalate to $4000 to $7000 a month. How can it cost that much? Pay per click advertising costs can give you an idea of what it is worth to have visibility on Google’s or Yahoo’s first page.

Custom real estate website designs call for a larger investment upfront, but over the long run, a fresh content rich custom website organically ranking on Google will hold your Internet marketing advertising budget costs down. Time is always on the side of the custom website. With unique “static” content (that is visible to search engines) and growing traffic pattern, usually within 6 to 12 months of launch the website starts climbing on the search engine ranking.

In short, the custom real estate website is a less expensive long term cost, easier ongoing maintenance and updates, and its age only increases its search engine visibility.