What's Your Real Estate Website Plan for Next Year?

Website age is one component of Google SEO placement, but what about old real estate website content? No matter how much work, time and money you put into your website when you built it, letting it age doesn't make it better like fine wine.

Coming to the end of a calendar year, usually when real estate business slows down, is a great time to take a trip through your website to see what you can do to update content, improve navigation, and in general improve the value of the site through a new revised real estate website plan.

Feature #1: Real Estate Website Design

Let's not get carried away here with colors and images, as it's the content that will deliver leads and people to the closing table. However, a website that's been around for a few years can become stale, especially when you're doing a good job of getting repeat visitors. Freshening up the site a bit isn't a bad idea every year or so.

Tip #1: Simple is Good

Sometimes just grabbing a different set of colors for background and other site features can be enough. This can even be related to seasonality. During the holidays, maybe some bright reds or a holiday theme, as well as images and backgrounds related to the seasons.

Feature #2: Website Navigation

This is easy to overlook, as we tend to think of all of our real estate website content as belonging in "baskets," like content for buyers, sellers, first-time buyers, etc. However, if you've been successful at adding new content over time, whether pages or blog posts, you may find that you need to change or add to your navigation options for better visitor ability to find what they want.

Tip #2: Think Dropdowns

Often we set up our top navigation with the tried and true "For Buyers, For Sellers, etc." buttons. Then we stuff article after article and blog post after blog post into these large buckets over time. Before long it becomes a pain for your visitors to scroll through titles to find what they seek. Creating dropdown menu buttons to break up the content logically will add value to your site.

Feature #3: Evergreen Content

Evergreen content is called that because it is content that is always green, always relevant and pertinent over time, rarely in need of change. However, sometimes even an evergreen can use some trimming or fertilization. Read your content to see if it still applies to the current market or to see if there are outdated references you can fix.

Tip #3: Balance SEO with Changes

Over time, your content will gain some SEO recognition for certain phrases and references. You don't want to change content that is still relevant unless necessary. You can add to it or add update statements like "Since this was written..." Or, "Recent changes to these local real estate rules include..."

Feature #4: Don't Forget Lead Generation

Once you've updated your content, look hard at your various calls to action and lead generation tools and offerings. What can you do to add some punch to your free reports, ebook, or other offerings to improve your lead generation?

Tip #4: Updated Stats and Reports Deliver Business

Actually, waiting to do this annually is probably costing you some business. Every quarter, you should be creating new local market sold property statistics reports, absorption rate reports and any other statistics that can be updated. You can compile them into annual larger reports, but you'll get repeat visitors for those quarterlies. After their first report order, you can place them on an email list and deliver their reports to them automatically.

Tip #5: Tell the World

If you've made improvements to your site design, content and other features, why not send an email out to your lists to tell them about it? Make it an event annually anticipated by your prospects and past customers.

To view the original article, visit the WebsiteBox blog.