Not getting what you want out of your real estate website, here are five common things that we run across when working with clients. See if you suffer from any or all of our five real estate website mistakes.

1. You have the same website as every other Realtor.

Pullan, Advanced Access, and us at Seven Design Studios do a great job of providing cost effective template based websites to the vast majority of real estate professionals. But those who are wanting to take their website to the next level need to get a custom website design and write their own content for it on a regular basis. Google, Yahoo, MSN, and the other websites can only rank your website based on the words contained in your website. So if you and let say 10 other agents in your office or city have the same content how do they rank you higher then the other agents in the results pages? The answer is they don’t, you fall back to the back of the results but with less then 80% of searchers going beyond the first page and less then 2% going beyond the third page, if you are not in the top 30 results your traffic is not going to be more then a few visitors a day. So get a new website and start writing your own content. It is not as hard as you think.

2. Your website design/theme does not reflect your area.

We see this all of the time. How are you going to connect with website visitor if your website does not reflect your city. Here is an example of what we mean.

This is a website of an agent down the street from us. You would think Covina, CA is a nice beach community, but by my calculations we are at least an hour from the beach and more with traffic.

Connect with your city with photos of notable building, homes, parks, etc that are in your city. If you are not the greatest photography hire someone, partner with a college student, ask a friend, be creative and then give them credit on your website. Who knows you could have just met your next home buyer or seller.

3. Your website requires user registration.

Buyers and seller these days are looking for as much information as possible. According to the California Association of Realtors, buyers are looking online for up to 3 months before contacting an agent. Give them what they want free easy access to the MLS. Once they are on your website give them another reason to contact you. The best reason I have seen is the guys from 1000 Watt Consulting and their video “I am not a lead”

4. You try to be all things to all people.

We see this more in major metropolitan areas then others, but just because the MLS gives you access to 100 different cities does not mean that you are “Really” able to represent all of those cities. Our most successful clients concentrate on no more then 3 cities, most of then its one.

5. You not putting enough effort into your website.

The days of build it and they will come have long gone. The search engines and visitors love fresh content and your professional insight. In Covina, I literally have thousands of agents within 10 miles off our office. So use your website to tell me why I should use you for my next transaction. The amount of time you spend is not important, the fact that you have a dedicated time to work on content and marketing for your website is. If you don’t have a time schedule weekly to work on your website then schedule one today.