What Makes One Real Estate Website Better Than the Next?

If you look at enough real estate websites, you'll come to one obvious conclusion: Most of them are exactly alike.

There's very little difference in content on real estate websites. Most agents have the same "pillar pages" -- buying, selling, IDX listing pages, etc. Those pages will help an agent cover keywords like

• Home page/agent profile page: agent name/business name keywords, "CITY real estate agent" and so forth

• IDX listing pages: "homes for sale in CITY", "CITY real estate" and the like

• Buyer/Seller pages: "how to buy a home in CITY", "how to sell my home in CITY", and maybe "homebuying/home selling process" keywords depending on the page content

Most real estate agent websites look the same, too. If you cover up the logo in the upper left, you couldn't tell most real estate websites apart.

Sites like that, with the same content as every other site, have no chance to rank and get traffic for the millions of other ways buyers and sellers search -- i.e., all the questions they Google at different stages of the real estate journey. Like this:

• "do i need a real estate agent to sell my home"

• "CITY housing market"

• "is now a good time to buy a home in CITY"

• "how much money do i need to buy a house"

• "what is earnest money"

• "pros and cons of living in CITY"

• "cost of living in CITY"

• "moving to CITY"

• "what credit score do i need to buy a home"

• "what credit score do i need to get a mortgage"

• "is CITY a good place to retire"

• etc.

• etc.

• etc.

• etc.

So back to the question I asked in the title of this post...

What makes one real estate website better than the next?

I believe a great blog is the #1 thing that differentiates one agent's site from another.

To stand out from the crowd -- to make buyers and sellers happy, and to make Google happy -- you want a blog with lots of great articles answering those buyer/seller questions above.

There aren't many agents doing that kind of content at a high level and doing it consistently. So if you know what you're doing and can commit to the content, there's a huge opportunity to get more website leads.

By the way, that's pretty much the "system" that we're using on my wife's site, and what I'm trying to implement with my real estate clients. It's also what I teach in my real estate SEO course.