Erion Shehaj over at Agent Genius has nailed the promise and problems of single property websites — and he offers a solution. In helping clients with these websites, I’ve discovered what Erion has: it’s all whiz and no bang.
You do all the right things with a single property website:
- you create an artisanal, custom site
- you pay for ads on Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com
- you syndicate across the Internet
- you auto-post to classifieds, including craigslist
But you don’t get the expected traffic. Your stats tell the same story they told Erion. Your click traffic … more like a trickle. A click trickle.
I still like the single property website concept. It gives a 360 degree view of the property – photos, video, information, tools. Here’s the thing: it’s just not working.
So, how to get more traffic to the site? Erion suggests:
- host your own Word Press site
- share all listings in that neighborhood
- make the front page a slideshow of large photos and nothing else
- include school information
- SEO every page to optimize long tail visits
- switch the front page to the neighborhood page once it sells
This is a smart strategy: an SEO optimized property site that drives traffic to your website long after the property is sold. It gives prospective buyers what they want: to browse multiple properties in their target neighborhood, in a single place. It gives you what you want: to attract more visitors to your main site.
I recommend tweaking a few things:
- Write a brief neighborhood description to the home page slideshow, once the house has sold. A slideshow and nothing else, as Erion suggests, will do you no favors with Google. Photos are not search engine friendly at all. The home page will need some text content.
- Add a twitter feed to the site with updates about that house. It gives prospective buyers what they want: updates on the house, its neighborhood, open houses, offers, tours, etc. It gives search engines what they want: fresh content.
What results is Erion getting with his single property website? Each month, thousands of visitors are coming to his main website, Houston Real Estate, by searching for a property address on Google, Bing and Yahoo. Those visitors spend twice as much time on the site than the rest.
This approach takes consistent, applied effort. If you want cheap and simple, you know where to go. But if you’re up for a challenge, I think you’ll find the rewards of a WP-based single property website are worth it.
