Is your website getting the exposure it deserves?
Every estate agent today has to have an online presence of some sort or another, whether that be their own website or space on RightMove, it’s simply and vitally important to have some place for buyers to view properties. As well as the obvious costs incurred with using the portals the majority of agents spend many hundreds, and in a lot of cases thousands of pounds getting a bespoke website created to showcase their stock list.
So, why is it that so many estate agents complain that their website doesn’t get the hits that it should be getting?
The answer is simple. In this day and age there are numerous portals that can be used, the drawback is that each one of them will use their own URL’s to display the property details. It is therefore highly unlikely that you could beat any of the portals at Google’s algorhythm game.
When a potential buyer has seen their dream home, they will probably go home and type the road name, plus if you are really lucky the name on the board that’s been planted in the front garden into Google. Now it doesn’t matter whether you are the only agent with a property on that road, 90% of the time RightMove will be the first few options for people to click, closely followed by the other portals, then finally you, and if you are really, really lucky you’ll be on page 1.
Consequently, what this has actually done is divert any traffic that should have found its way to your website over to the portals, but that’s fine, don’t worry, because most of your business comes through the portals anyway.
Don’t get me wrong this is not a problem if it sells the property, the problem only arises when the property the buyer was interested in is SSTC, or has been taken of the market for whatever reason, the buyer will inevitably be diverted away from that agent altogether (remember they saw YOUR board) to ‘view similar properties’ from all of the agents in that area, surely this needs to be addressed as it will have a similar effect when you are looking for valuations and instructions.
So, now when you wonder why your ROI for your website is not quite as you expected you’ll have a good idea why.
We know that the industry itself has created this monster, but the question is this, is it too late to do anything about it?
Do you think that the industry could use a “Loyal Portal” one that sent all of it’s visitors to the agents websites?
Food for thought maybe, I’d welcome your comments and thoughts.
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