Real estate marketing has to adapt with the times, but it also helps to maintain some of the tried-and-true methods as well. For example, it’s practically a given that the modern real estate professional should build a strong online presence, but she may also benefit from traditional postcard mailings in some markets.
Another example is the real estate website. The modern real estate professional’s website should be quick to load and mobile-friendly; however, it should also contain certain evergreen content to help it establish your authority as an expert in the local market. The first part of that statement is easy enough to accomplish with the latest plug-and-play template platforms like Squarespace and Wix. The second part, however–building out a website stocked with relevant content–can present more of a challenge. Luckily, however, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel.
With that in mind, let’s look at a few classic components of real estate websites that can still be highly effective today.
The Homepage
This might sound like a given, but no real estate website (or any other type of website, for that matter) can exist without a homepage! An effective estate website homepage does the following:
- Establish your personal brand.
- Establish your geographical areas of expertise, narrowed down to specific neighborhoods and communities if applicable.
- Establish other areas of expertise, such as working with buyers or sellers (or both); residential or commercial real estate; traditional transactions or foreclosures; etc.
A few things to avoid with the real estate homepage are:
Avoid Over-cluttering: When real estate websites gained popularity in the mid-2000s, many real estate professionals built their own sites using template platforms like Advanced Access. They would then try to include everything on the homepage. And to make sure the website visitors took it all in, the would-be web designers resorted to italicizing, underlining, bold-facing, highlighting, increasing the font size, and adorning with flashing gifs the various segments. Instead, keep it simple. Look at websites like Apple.com and Nike.com for inspiration.
Avoid Specializing in Everything: Another homepage mistake to avoid is over-specialization. We’ll take a real estate agent in San Diego, for example. Don’t claim to “specialize” in neighborhoods in North County, South County, East County, and the beaches unless you want to give the impression that you spend all day in your car. Mid-2000s real estate websites often claimed expertise in Encinitas, Rancho Bernardo, La Jolla, Del Mar, Pacific Beach, Mission Beach, Point Loma, Rancho San Diego, Mount Helix, Downtown San Diego, and Chula Vista. If you’re not familiar with the area, take a look at a map. You’ll see that claiming these 11 areas of “specialty” on your homepage isn’t going to help your SEO efforts, and it honestly isn’t going to make you look like a specialist at all.
A more realistic geographical specialty for a San Diego real estate agent would be the metro areas: North Park, South Park, University Heights, Hillcrest, Golden Hill, and Downtown. These communities are all clustered together in the Balboa Park area and make much more sense to be an agent’s areas of expertise.
Buyer/Seller Tips Pages
An effective real estate website should also include pages with real estate tips for buyers and sellers. But they weren’t always helpful. In the old days, most template real estate websites came preloaded with identical buyer/seller tips pages, which weren’t at all helpful because it was the exact same content as hundreds (or thousands) of your competitors’ websites.
But with a little creativity and ingenuity, the buyer/seller tips pages can provide content that will help with search engine rankings and prospective clients. One example of the latter is the argument for staging a home. Some home sellers may balk at the expense and potential inconvenience of hiring a professional home stager. However, if you’ve already included an article on your seller tips page, your prospective seller may have seen that you advocate this and prepared themselves for the eventuality.
Testimonials Page
The testimonials page may have fallen out of vogue in the field of real estate websites, but don’t underestimate its power–provided you have a healthy backlog of glowing client testimonials.
Here’s an option of an innovative way to use those testimonials: Create case studies (as individual blog posts or on a single page) instead of building a traditional testimonials page. Write up blurbs about each of your closed transactions, whether you represented the buyer, seller, or both. Include property photos and use geographic keywords (e.g., “This ocean-view La Jolla home sold for $4.2 million in less than a month. Here’s how we did it.”). A testimonial can be sprinkled throughout a case study like quotes in a news story, adding credibility and human interest.