I have just reviewed over 50 websites marketing their commercial real estate services in Portland, Maine and here are major trends that I’m seeing:
- Most reputable commercial real estate agencies have optimized their website for mobile. If your website is not responsive on mobile phones and tablets, then you’re ignoring 50% of your website traffic. If you do not act now, you will be considered outdated and your business perception will be severely hurt.
- WordPress is the technical platform of choice for commercial real estate agency websites. Our best rated website www.dunham-group.com is built on WordPress CMS and out of 50 commercial real estate websites analyzed, 20% of them are using WordPress. Other 80% uses variety of different platforms and some of them are largely outdated.
- Mentions of a brand or website in news and print publications continues to have an impact on search engine rankings. Believe or not, Google scans and processes important offline content. Therefore some business websites that do not have very good search engine optimization still rank fairly well on search engines. However, it’s a lot better for businesses to increase quantity and quality of structured business citations on the web in order to increase or solidify their local search engine rankings.
- Commercial real estate agencies have a marketing edge over those that try to serve both residential and commercial customers. Our top 5 websites only market commercial real estate services. While it’s possible to offer both residential and commercial services, the clarity of value proposition is being lost and it’s harder to find information on those websites. We expect that the best commercial real estate services will continue to be provided by businesses that only specialize in commercial real estate.
- National websites such as LoopNet lead in conversion rate optimization. These large websites figured out how to use their online presence in a strategic way and are constantly improving using conversion rate optimization. On the other hand most commercial real estate agencies don’t have the internal resources and/or knowledge how to use their online presence in a strategic way. However, now is the great time to start with conversion rate optimization because it has already proved itself in other verticals and very few commercial real estate agencies are using it to grow their business.
If you have questions about conversion rate optimization or something else, here are several ideas that you may consider doing now:
- Request a free Internet marketing strategy review for your real estate agency.
- Learn about our Internet marketing service for real estate agencies.
- Get to know OGO Sense during a free Q&A webinar for real estate.
- See what we do for other OGO Sense clients.
- Send us a question!