Should I Use My Real Estate Broker's Free Website?

No. The free website that your brokerage provides isn't likely to help you get more leads and grow your business. Those sites are built to be little more than an online business card.

I spent the first 10 years of my marketing career as a website designer, and since I started to focus on real estate SEO, I've seen thousands of real estate websites. In almost every case, the agents who use their broker's free site are unable to compete against agents with a custom website that's built to attract leads.

Read on, and I'll explain why this is the case.

The Problem with Most Brokerage Websites

They're all the same. Your brokerage likely offers a single templated website, or maybe you can choose from one of 3-5 templates. Either way, your website is going to look exactly like many other agents in your office.

• The same pages.

• The same content.

• The same information architecture.

• The same design and structure.

Google's gonna look at your site, see that it's the same as 50 other agents' sites, and ignore all of them.

What That Looks Like in Real Life

Here's what I mean when I say these sites are all the same.

I'm going to use Windermere, a regional brokerage out here in the western U.S. I found one office that appears to have ~120 agents, many of whom are using the brokerage-provided website. (Important: I'm not trying to call out Windermere or make any agents look bad -- you know I wouldn't do that. Truth is, I could pick pretty much any big brokerage and use its agents/websites as an example.)

I looked at four agents' websites. Each one has a "Buying & Selling Tips" page. Here they are:

Hopefully, you can tell that each page is word-for-word the same as the next. The title tag on all four pages is the same: "Buying & Selling Tips." The content isn't great, but it's not awful.

The real problem is that it's all the same. How many other agents are using the brokerage-provided website and have this exact page on their site -- hundreds? Thousands? Google doesn't need or want that many copies of the same page in its index of web pages.

Speaking of Google...

Each of these four pages begins with the same sentence. Let's put that sentence in quotes and Google it.

As you can see, Google IS crawling and indexing these pages -- that exact sentence shows in the snippet below each search result link.

That's good, right? Well, it's fine until you get to the bottom of Page 3 and see this message:

So out of the thousands of websites with this "Buying & Selling Tips" page, Google's only willing to show me 25. The rest are missing because they're "very similar."

That's a visual explanation of what I mean when I say Google's gonna ignore these brokerage-provided sites because they're all the same.

Another Problem with Brokerage-Provided Websites

What happens when you leave that brokerage?

If you have a free website that you can customize, and maybe even add your own blog posts, I'd be surprised if there's a way to take all that with you. All your work is down the drain.

That's why it makes more sense to use a custom website with your own domain name from the beginning. It'll be different from other agents' sites, and it'll keep working for you no matter what brokerage you call home.

Bottom Line

Most real estate brokerages offer cookie-cutter websites that are little more than a digital business card. They have several limitations that'll keep you from ever getting a lot of website leads.

Sure, you might be able to "optimize" one of those sites to some degree, but I'm sure it's not to the extent that you'll need to compete in Google's search results and get traffic/leads.

You need a website that's more unique and powerful and allows you to

• establish your individual brand so you can stand out from the crowd

• put all your real estate and local expertise online in the form of high-quality content so buyers and sellers can find and begin to trust/value you

That's where real SEO success begins.

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