How Using a Templated Real Estate Website Hurts your Business

by Brett Miller

If your Real Estate website isn’t generating you leads, you need to ask yourself what’s wrong. If you’re using your real estate company’s templated site, that may be the cause of the problem. Search the Internet yourself to find out which realtors are ranked at the top in different cities. You won’t find a franchise’s local office at the top of most search results. More often than not, the No. 1 site is a lead aggragator site that collects names and email addresses and then sells the leads to individual Realtors® at a premium. Now, scroll down the page until you get to the first actual agent web site. How many of them are using a templated company site? My guess is not many.

Internet home searchers have become a tech-savvy group. They’ve seen every type of real estate website imaginable. When they hit a site that’s obviously built on a company template, they know it right away. Internet searchers have seen enough templated real estate websites to know that such sites don’t offer the personal attention they’re looking for in a real estate agent. Every one looking almost exactly the same, with the same canned “about me” text, the same everything except maybe the one little thumbnail picture and your personal contact info.

When everythingthing is exactly the same on every agent page from a templated company site exept what I’ve heard called “the interchangeable body part” of your head shot, nobody is special and it will dillute any good ranking you could have among the multitudes using the same template giving it zero value. Simply stated: If your site is templated with templated copy that is exactly the same as a lot of other sites with only the contact information being different, you will all be given lesser value for being duplicates.

Many times, the only properties visitors are likely to find on a templated site are the firm’s own listings. That doesn’t help your business; Internet buyers want an complete MLS search with all homes for sale from all brokers.

What will you do that none of your competitors can or will do? It is necessary to answer all of these questions in your website and make them ask for more.

In a search engine world dominated by Google, one principal has become clear: Content Is King. The search engines regularly crawl through every website to see if there have been any changes since the last time they visited. If your site has added content since the last visit, you will be noticed as someone who has not let your site go dormant and seem abandoned.

This principal of search engines ignoring duplicated websites is especially true for affiliate websites where you are given a specific ID number to track your traffic, but with everything else exactly the same, no one ever has a chance of being found by potential clients that you have not personally directed to your site.

Regularly updated content that is rich with keywords relevant to what your site is about is important for showing the search engines that you are an important source of timely information which they rate as very important. When your website is constantly updated, prospective clients know that it’s not just a templated site. They will see that you are putting an effort into putting your best web-face forward, which is the key to marketing and sales strategies in real estate today.

The majority of today’s homebuyers begin their searches on the Internet. If a real estate website is hard to navigate, or if visitors don’t find an MLS search tool within the first few seconds of hitting a site, they’ll leave as fast as they came. It must be click-click-click easy because you only have a few seconds to make a good first impression.

Your real estate website has to be a place that visitors want to come back to. A place where they know they can find information to help them achieve their goals. A place where you can build strong relationships with prospects and clients.

The best way to create such a place is with a personalized real estate website that puts a human face on your business through the very human act of communication. To offer anything less will just reinforce the notion that humans aren’t important to the process of buying or selling a home. And then we all lose.

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Brett Miller is the founder of HoopJumper.com and has created the best real estate websites in the industry. Brett has helped hundreds of real estate professionals make the most of their Internet presence. In addition to integrating the best MLS tools that buyers love, Brett has also integrated full Top Producer functionality into his clients' sites to work automatically and seamlessly saving them administrative time and expense. If you’re a Real Estate Agent and you want your Real Estate website to work for you, go to www.HoopJumper.com and www.GreatRealEstateAgentWebsites.com

How Using a Templated Real Estate Website Hurts your Business | Great Real Estate Agent Web Sites | HoopJumper