Debunking the Myth that Single Property Websites Don’t Generate Traffic
Author: Ryan Ward | April 14, 2008
About a month ago, I was reading a post that Greg Swann wrote over on Bloodhound about out-marketing the competition. I suppose it was more of a series of posts and this one dealt with single property websites. Greg has a writing style that I particularly enjoy and I found myself motivated to make use of what I had read by incorporating some of what he was talking about in that post and a few that followed into part of my own personal marketing plan. In doing some quick research I ran across a post that Mary wrote over on RSS Pieces. Although I believe her intent was to warn agents about nefarious companies, I wholeheartedly disagree with almost everything she said and I can back it up with proof as evidenced in my own experience and search results from Google that clearly indicate just how incorrect she was. I wanted to set the record straight for anyone out there contemplating using single property websites as part of their very real and effective marketing plan for listings that may have also read the article Mary wrote.
Above is a screenshot of one of my custom sites and a link to it if you want to see it. I am going to be offering these available for free to download to anyone who wants them in the next couple of weeks complete with a list of the necessary plugins. I’ll also offer them in a few different colors.
So now let’s get to what she said and why I think what she said was bad advice. I urge you look at the results for yourself to see. Let’s start with some background information.
Single Property Websites Can Rank Quickly and For More Than Just the Property Address
Got it? Let’s have a look at where this site ranks in Google for the entire subdivision, not just the home’s address. How about homes in Haynes Landing (That’s the name of the neighborhood)? That would be #1 and #2. How about homes for sale in Haynes Landing? that would be #5 and #6. Same goes for a few additional terms. I don’t think anyone who might read this will have any doubt from here forward that single property websites can and do rank well as they are intended and for important terms.
The truth is that it is only a very few terms that will take a long time to rank for. Like “real estate”. Another fallacy is that you need new and fresh content. From the looks of this example, you can see that there is little to no content on the homepage. Yet somehow Google is still smart enough to know that it is a relevant result for these search terms. Keep in mind that this website has been up for only a couple of weeks.
So How Do you Get Yours to Rank Like That?
It’s not that difficult really. You will just need a little creativity. Instead of buying the property address for the domain name, buy something more useful - maybe with the neighborhood in the name. This way you can reuse it over and over to sell other homes in the same neighborhood. In between listings, you can change it to indicate how it helped you sell the listing and maybe use it to get and sell more listings in the neighborhood
So you have a good domain name now. Go market the home online. Do you have an Active Rain account? Do you post about your listings there? Be sure to add a link back to your single property website when you post about it online. Do you have your own blog? Do something like I have done on my Atlanta real estate blog - check the sidebar where I have added my single property sites. This gives them more links. More links –> better rank.
And don’t worry about bleeding your pagerank or get caught up in SEO tunnelvision. You are building these for business, not for search engines and that is exactly the type of behavior that you will be rewarded for in the search engines. So you have some links pointing to it and you have a good domain name. From there you can easily do replicate exactly what I have done with this site.
If you set one of these templates up one time, you can duplicate the process over and over again relatively quickly for the potential return on your time and investment of resources. Remember, there is more here than just the single property website. You can and should think bigger. Think neighborhood, but, don’t think too much bigger or you will be competing against bigger, older and stronger sites. Know the largest niche and fill it with one home that is scaleable and can be used over and over for other properties. For the price of hosting and a about 3 hours to set up the first one, you could be well on your way to owning the neighborhood.
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