Site Design for SEO & Conversions
-
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.
-
Thank you for your feedback.
-
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.
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What kind of home page need to be, to show good results of SEO?
Hello, i have couple questions about new home page building. I want to start build new home page to replace old one. At this moment my home page is obsolete and shows low conversion. My costumers often have negative thoughts about existing one. My knowledges in coding is weak, where should i pay more attention to design, to section placement, to pictures and video gallery? Can hosting positively or negatively affect to SEO results? How to make the new website load faster? Here's my website's example. http://www.skydas.lv http://www.m-lux.lv http://www.sosdienests.lv Thank you very much, waiting for replay.
Conversion Rate Optimization | | Felter0 -
IE & Edge issues with site relaunch - advice appreciated
Hi, I've been involved in a major ecommerce site relaunch, redesign and backend and have been involved in several successful ones before. On the whole things have gone great. Of course there are some minor bugs to fix, rendering issues etc but my real concern is a significant decline in conversion rate BUT only for IE and Edge users. All other major browsers conv rate has increased. Trawling through analytics and the site itself in those browsers there is no obvious sticking points e.g bounce rate has improved on all browser inc IE & Edge, no particular point in the funnel is suffering more than others, no particular page or landing page is doing much worse than others etc. it just seems like all the kpi's (except bounce) are down a little on the 2 microsoft browsers, which has a significant impact. One of the things that changed on relaunch is that we moved to https and im wondering if that might be causing an issue with IE / Edge security or privacy settings or that functionality on the site that relies on cookies is being affected, though in testing we haven't come across anything. I'd appreciate any advice or insight. Thanks, Andy
Conversion Rate Optimization | | AndyMacLean0 -
Is anyone aware of stats stating how many people abandon pages the deeper they get in a site?
For example, let's say someone enters via a landing page, and instead of having a form there is a button to a form. What percentage of people will click the button and fill out the form vs if the form was right there on the page? Basically, I am trying to figure out what percentage of users do websites lose for every click a user makes on the site.
Conversion Rate Optimization | | Firestarter-SEO0 -
Have My SEO Cake & Eat It - Mix Viral Content & Business Content?
Hello, I optimize for a fashion, eCommerce site which has catalogue pages and product pages. http://www.zando.co.za/ We're currently working on a large "blog" which tons of great content designed to attract readers, links and tons of long tail traffic. We'll be doing how-to videos, celeb interviews, top-tens, etc. etc. We'll even have a UGC community section eventually. Really great. Now, I want to use the links generated by this section to rank for generics like this: For example: I want to rank for "Lingerie" and I have this page set up as the target: http://www.zando.co.za/women/clothing/lingerie/ I create some amazing content that generates lots of links containing the word "lingerie" . That awesome content lives in:(hypothetical URL:) http://www.zando.co.za/fashion/magazine/how-lingerie-has-changed-over-50-years/ I want to (and this is where you come in 😉 get people linking to my catalogue page (http://www.zando.co.za/women/clothing/lingerie/) where they can find a banner or something alluding to that piece of link bait (the /fashion/magazine/ url). Perhaps similar to the Wordpress style <read more="">page break on posts?</read> Reason is, I want my "Money-Page" to get the links with "Lingerie" in it. Problem is, it'll be another click to the thing they want to find. Also, say I decide a few months later that I want to do another piece, like "lingerie in films" and do the same. My 'banner' idea would get very crowded or, it would mean that I bump the 50-years piece, which then makes for bad UX for readers clicking through looking for the old piece. Or perhaps this can all be solved with good design? Here's a WBF talking about mixing content: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/mixing-viral-content-with-business-content-whiteboard-friday Does anyone have an example of someone doing this well? PS. Was also thinking that on my "archive'' url, in between the content, I'll query for the top products that, that piece speaks to and make it possible for people to add to cart as they're reading the link bait content that is relevant to the product. Cheers Paul.
Conversion Rate Optimization | | RocketZando0 -
Suggestions for Conversion Rate Optimization low cost companies?
Does anyone have a list of suggestions for lower cost companies to do conversions. I am a new business and just wanted my "Cart" check out with maybe some suggestions for improvement and a little testing to see if it is done correctly. Thank you, Boo
Conversion Rate Optimization | | Boodreaux0 -
SEO For Personalized Content Pages
Hi, We are building a site that has content that personalizes based each visitor. This is being done to serve the most relevant content for conversion purposes and NOT for SEO purposes. So, there are many diferent versions of each page based on the visitor's location, device, browser, keyword-used, traffic source, etc. Obviously, we don't want this to appear like cloaking (it is genuine content personalization) and wondered how Google would view this? What is the safeguard for protecting the website from potential penalties? Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance.
Conversion Rate Optimization | | Clickthroo0 -
Reviews not shown on google search & seller rating extensions (adwords)
Hello, we have 2 questions, regarding reviews from rating websites. 1. Reviews on google Search We have several reviews for our website www.theprintspace.co.uk from various rating sites (e.g. qype, yelp, remotegoat, etc.). When searching for theprintspace on google, only some reviews and only some rating website are shown, most are not. For qype, for instance, we have 8 reviews, but google only indicates that we have 3. The yelp reviews (and many others) are not shown at all. According to google, it takes a maximum of 2 months for the correct number of reviews to be shown on google, but the reviews have been online for over 2 months now. Is there any way this problem can be solved, so google shows the correct number of reviews? 2. Seller rating extensions on google adwords We would like the reviews to be displayed in our google adwords as a seller rating extension. These will include the merchant star rating for advertisers that are highly rated on Google Product Search. We are setting up a google merchant account to do so. Google says: "Ratings are based on the user reviews collected by Google Product Search, which aggregates reviews from a broad base of sources across the web, including Reseller Ratings, Bizrate, ReviewCentre.com and Viewpoints." Do you know if the following rating website are in google's "base of sources" and will thus be recognised and used in google adwords as rating extensions? Yelp Qype Scoot Remotegoat viewlondon tipped Or does google only source from big e-commerce rating websites? How do we get the ratings into our adwords? Thank you for your help!
Conversion Rate Optimization | | Waplington0 -
Re-designed website... how to increase organic traffic?
We re-developed our website (adboards(dot)com) around 6 months ago. This has in turn led to a downturn in sales/visits. We have managed to get visits/sales increasing steadily but not to the level of the previous site. Even though we believe the new site is (seems) much more friendly both for SEO and potential customers. We currently run a PPC campaign which seems to bring in steady sales, the problem seems to be our organic traffic and getting our keywords ranked higher. We have tried various methods for increasing our organic traffic including:- Keyword Analysis for our landing pages Backlinking: From various directories and industry related sites Googlebase submission Blog relating to industry news & products Any advise on which area we should be focusing on or any obvious errors you can see on the site would be greatly appreciated.
Conversion Rate Optimization | | bwfc770