Maintaining Your Real Estate Website – Is It a Mission Impossible?
It seems maintaining a real estate website is something akin to a “mission impossible” for so many agents and brokers. Having been an agent
myself, (before the advent of the Internet) I realize time is a premium. Heck, time was a premium way back when I was “in the business”, so there’s nothing new about that. With that thought in mind, the best way to resolve the issue of updating your website is all about making it a priority, scheduling a set time and being disciplined to following through on your commitment.
Suggestions for Maintaining Your Real Estate Website
- Determine how often you want to add new content and stick to your schedule. Just remember, be realistic with how much time you can invest in maintaining your own site
- Too often “dated” or “stale” market data reflects when you (or someone else) last added content to your site. This looks really bad to the potential site visitor who might consider using your site as an ongoing resource. Suggestion: Archive the information and keep the data “fresh”.
- Add time-sensitive comments or stats to show you are vigilant to keeping the content fresh
- Periodically check the links to be sure they function properly. Outside site URLs change from time to time, so make sure the links work.
- When a new phase of construction is added to a neighborhood, add the pertinent new information including updated images and outline new amenities to the neighborhood section of your website.
- Should exciting local news occur in your area, update your city information page to demonstrate your site is keeping abreast of current events
Resources to Maintain Your Website
I’m going to stop with my suggestions right here because I can already begin to hear the moans and groans from the peanut gallery. So if your struggling to figure out how to make all this happen and you don’t have an in-house administrative assistant, here are a few suggestions (ranging from low-cost to the professionals) to maintaining your website. They include:
- Hire a tech-savvy high school kid. You would be surprised how smart some of these “geeks” really are
- Hire an “intern” from a local business school or college to research information, write articles/content and upload images
- Hire a VA. VA stands for “virtual assistant“. There are many virtual assistants who are specifically trained to do nothing but web updates and perform edits. Some VA’s even know HTML and CSS for more elaborate updates
- Hire a real estate marketing firm ( like Dakno-gratuitous plug :0) to research, write original content, add new graphics and pro-actively submit press releases to online and offline channels, create profiles and add SEO-rich original content on Social Media Sites.
If you in fact frequently update your website, what system do you have in place to keep it current?
Helping you keep your website fresh,
Bobby
I think one of the easiest ways is to just create a basic schedule and goal. We set the goal of just adding a page a month initially and then got up to 4 pages a month. I figure it’s like the gym, start out with an easily attainable goal and then you can work your way up to higher standards 🙂
One of the constant complaints we have heard from agents and brokers is the issue of learning some weird programming language or use challenging software just to edit content or add a web page. To address this pain in the marketplace, our programmers developed the Dakno Agent Backdoor site editor and combined it with a lead management system. Our clients love it and find it to be soooo easy to manage and add new pages to their Dakno sites. It makes our client’s websites completely “Future Proof”!