For my upcoming “most Internet-advertised” listing, I — naturally — want a website for the property. There are lots of opinions out there about the efficacy of single-property websites (see, for instance, what Mary McKnight, Greg Swann, and Joel Burslem have said).
Here’s my take: they provide
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Great property marketing — If done well, a website provides a convenient place to get out your marketing message. The property I reviewed yesterday, for instance, has its own web site — www.655-14thAvenue.com — which is very easy to remember.
- Terrible SEO — No matter how well done, a single property web site is not going to have good SEO since it’ll be competing with sites like Movoto and Trulia for searches like, “Menlo Park Fair Oaks real estate” and “Homes in Fair Oaks neighborhood” and “655 14th Ave Menlo Park.” Remember: Real estate professionals and experienced home buyers and sellers may well know where the local MLS site is, but many people go to the same place they always do to get information: Google or Yahoo.
As an example, consider the property I reviewed yesterday. A search on Google for 655 14th Ave Menlo Park lists
- Movoto.com
- ListingProducer.com (the company hosting www.655-14thAvenue.com, but clicking on the link gives you all recently created ListingProducer sites, and the property in question quickly gets buried)
- My write-up from yesterday
The actual web site itself is nowhere to be found!
So how do you combine the marketing cachet of a single-property web site with the SEO benefits of an established blog?
Matt Dunlap from Realivent recommended purchasing an appropriately-named domain, and then redirecting that domain to a subdomain under an existing well-established site, and that’s what I’ll be doing for this project. PropertyAddress.com will be redirected to 3OceansRealestate.com/PropertyAddress.
I’m looking forward to building this site, using some of Matt’s expertise, widgets and plugins.
Stay tuned!
Update: Matt gives more of his thoughts on his blog.
Tags: Industry, Movoto, Online advertising, Real estate, Realivent, Trulia
