Site Design for SEO & Conversions

[bronxpad]

This is a Real Estate Website focusing on a local market.

• What would you change about this site for SEO Purposes?
• What would you change for Conversion Purposes?
• What would you change for Visual Appeal and User Experience?

Thank you all for your help on this one.

http://www.bronxpad.com

[RyanKent]

Hi Joel,

I will offer some candid feedback.

The site you are presenting is not a serious candidate for the questions you presented. The site is a very basic HTML site which was either very quickly thrown together or uses a basic template. To meet any of your mentioned goals, you need to begin with a solid website architecture. In a perfect world, you would have a team of developers build your site from scratch. The time and expense of doing such is often too costly (see http://www.fourseasons.com/ which was built for only $18 million). Therefore using a platform such as WordPress or Joomla for your site is a great solution.

Once you have your website built, it is time to work on your most important asset, your content. Presently the site's content is loaded with keyword repetition and thin content. I do not mean to offend you, but do you believe any of the information offered on the site is helpful to prospective buyers?

There are many quality real estate sites. Take some time browsing sites of your peers. Doing such will offer you an idea of how far off the current site is from a quality site which offers visual appeal, a positive user experience, solid conversion rate and SEO performance.

[stevefidelity]

Do a search for 'real estate wordpress themes' and you're off to the races.

Quick points

The Remax logo is an incredibly recognized brand that will help build trust - _use it! Above the scroll! _

Phone number, top left corner. Make it easy for people to contact you.

Images... Pictures of houses... Pictures of happy, smiling families... Anything... You need images above the scroll. All you see is text. That's not very inviting.

[bronxpad]

Thank you for your input. The site is new and since I am on a limited budget I am working on it myself. I wish I had the four seasons budget, lol.

My Moto is "When without resources, be resourceful"

I'm a Realtor that picked up a book on web design and went to work on it.  You should have seen the first iteration of the site. You would have had a great laugh.  The site definitely has a long way to go but that is why I am asking for feedback. I appreciate your candidness.

So based on your recommendations I shouldn't use HTML and CSS? I'm using Dreamweaver as my HTML Editor. The content I am currently rewriting because I do see it needs work.

What would be a good website architecture?

If I do change over to word press as my platform how would that impact my rankings?

Again Thank you for your advice. That is what I like about this community, the willingness to help.

[RyanKent]

Using HTML / CSS is just fine, but you lack the training, tools, experience and team to build the site to a high quality standard.

Can someone who picks up a book on real estate and passes the test properly compete with a realtor who has years of experience? and a team of support? and all the proper real estate tools? No. The same is true for web design.

SEO is entirely about competition. You want to rank as #1 for terms such as "Bronx Real Estate" and so do literally hundreds if not thousands of other realtors. It is an all-out battle for supremacy. Even if you had a fantastically designed website and awesome content, it is still a challenge because the field is so competitive. The top 5 results for "Bronx Real Estate" are trulia.com, realtor.com, homes.com, an REmax site, and realestate.yahoo.com.

I don't wish to discourage you, but I also do not wish you to perform an exercise in futility. The reality is you need to make it to the 1st page of search results to see any meaningful traffic. You can develop a basic WP or Joomla site with an IDX/RETS feed for under $5k and then add more features to it as you can afford it.

A final thought. I spent most of my life as a do-it-yourselfer. I mowed my own lawn, fixed anything which broke, filed my own taxes, etc. The thought of paying others to do these tasks was unthinkable. Then it hit me. If I simply focus on being an expert at one thing and do it better then most others, I can afford to hire other experts to perform all the other tasks. I would encourage you to spend your time focusing on real estate until you can afford to hire a quality web developer who can create your SEO-friendly site. Just my two cents.

[bronxpad]

Thanks, What do you think about the RE/MAX Site that you mentioned that is on page 1 for Bronx Real Estate? Is that site built well?

[RyanKent]

I would say it is a huge improvement over your current site, but no it is definitely not designed well. There are numerous major issues. From a coding perspective there are almost 200 html errors http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bronxresults.com%2Fhome%2Fdefault.aspx&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

Also the content is spammy such as the footer at the bottom. There are multiple broken images on the home page.

This site would benefit greatly from a rebuild or developer focus.

[bronxpad]

Thank you for your feedback.