That's right... Your website sucks! Well maybe YOURS doesn't but if I were talking to a room of 100 real estate agents, that statement would be true of 90 of them at least.
"Why does my website suck?" you ask... Well if your website is provided by your large, national brokerage as "value" of hanging your license with them... it probably sucks. The reason being; every other agent in your office... wait no.... every other agent in the country that checked the box saying "Yes please provide me with a company website" has the EXACT same site and content on their site. The ONLY difference between your site and a thousand other agent's sites is your photo and name is different than theirs.
"But it has a blog on it and I know from listening to Bob Stewart's awesome webinars on ActiveRain a blog is the bees knees for getting new clients" you say to me... Well if you checked the box in your paperwork that said "Yes please syndicate the corporate blog on my website" you now have the exact same content on your site that those thousand other agents have on their site. I have shown this to countless agents during seminars by copying a couple of random lines of text from their site and pasting it in the Google search bar between quotes and seen pages and pages of exact duplicates returned. It is an eye opening experience for most of them because they weren't aware that that was actually the case.
"But I have an IDX search on my site, and Bob Stewart says that is important, so my site obviously doesn't suck" you protest... Well are you sure it works? I recently built a site for an agent in Coeur d'Alene, ID who works with one of the largest Brokerages in the country. He was migrating from the Brokerage provided website to a custom site. While I was integrating his "brokerage provided IDX" I noticed that when you searched for homes in Coeur d'Alene, ID... NOTHING returned. His IDX was telling users that there were no homes, businesses or land for sale at all in the PRIMARY city that the MLS organization is based in. HOLY CRAP!!!!! SERIOUSLY?????
As I researched this issue and located more agents using the same IDX provider (by the way this provider is one of the big 5 IDX solution providers in the country), I noticed that they all had the same problem. I called the IDX provider and found out that the problem had occurred on their last "global" update... which was over 4 months prior... Are you %@ing kidding me? And nobody knew about it???? It took them 2 weeks to issue a new update and solve the problem. so for pretty much half of a year, a large percentage of agents in the only Realtor organization of any size in northern Idaho showed that there were no... nada... zip... zilch... zero properties for sale in the largest city in their market.
So all of these agents had so little combined traffic that nobody noticed the problem for months. If people were using your website I think you would have gotten a call or an email regarding the lack of homes for sale.
"Can I unsuck my website?" you wonder. Yes of course. Take a look at your site and do a little research. Use your site as if you were a potential client. Does everything function? Are any of the links broker (do they all go somewhere)? Check it periodically, maybe monthly at the very least.
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