There are a lot of reasons to keep your website updated, no matter what type of business you are running. When it comes to real estate, this becomes especially important because your website plays a major role in capturing leads, marketing your brand, helping potential clients search for homes, and helping people find local housing market information. Not to mention that it helps with search engine optimization (or SEO) which is crucial to keep your website from getting buried among the competition.
Here’s why updating your real estate website is so useful for agents and brokers:
Say a potential customer is looking for a source of particular information, and they land on your website. If the information or the appearance of the website is outdated, they most likely won’t stick around or revisit. Here is a compilation of some great reasons, based on some great lists from www.theedesign.com and www.seositecheckup.com, as to why it’s important to keep putting new content on your site.
Increased website traffic = more new clients
First and foremost, keeping your website content up to date gets you more traffic. If your customers are looking to your website for information and are getting what they are looking for, it builds trust between you and them.
Increased credibility
It also helps with domain authority which is how credible your website is in that particular field of information. Staying up to date in the real estate world shows that you know what you are talking about.
Better search engine ranking
New content also means more frequent indexing from search engines. If you are updating your site regularly, search engines will be looking at your site more often which can lead to higher rankings based on the content you provide.
More keywords = better SEO
More content also means more keywords. If you are consistently adding content to your webpage, you will automatically have more opportunity to optimize your site for search engines.
Updated, relevant info source for current and potential clients
Possibly the most straightforward of all these reasons is that you can keep your audience informed and updated on relevant information. It is important to convince your audience that, out of all the other websites regarding your field, you are the one they want to keep up with. Regularly updating your site will lead to potential customers becoming loyal customers and also will result in appreciation from already loyal customers.
Surprisingly enough, most real estate professionals are lacking in the “useful information” department when it comes to their website. So what falls under the useful information category? Here is a helpful list, based on one from www.realtormag.realtor.org, to help you come up with topics to include on your website:
- Information about the neighborhood you work in
- Local market statistics
- Events around town
- Subdivisions of specific neighborhood
- General real estate news
- DIY home projects
- Financing information
Visual appeal
Make sure your website looks like it was last updated in 2017, not 2003! It doesn’t have to be over-the-top trendy, but make it modern. Brand it according to the image you want to create. A great web developer and branding expert may be able to help you out with that, if you’re struggling. It is also great to include a mixture of text, photos, and videos within your site to keep readers interested and to prevent your page from looking boring.
The key takeaway: basically, if your website is up to date and looks fresh for people visiting your site, your credibility as a realtor is automatically increased. Along with that, your potential for more clients increases!