For a real estate website, is a different mobile site warranted vs a responsive site?
-
I researched the major real estate websites: Zillow, Trulia, Remax, Keller Williams, Century 21, etc. They all have a separate mobile site and not a responsive one. The client wants it to be easy to search for properties from a smartphone. Is it possible to get a responsive version of a real estate website on a smartphone?
-
Hey Melissa,
Many large websites choose to create separate mobile sites rather than using responsive design because they don't want to change the main version of the site (often because they've built a mobile website team that doesn't have any say in the activities of the primary website team). Don't use that fact to shy away from responsive design.
I generally recommend responsive. There are very few things that responsive designs can't do. Namely, you can't have different content on your mobile site than you do on your desktop site. Do you want your mobile site to be a mini version of your desktop site? Then you can probably make it responsive. You can definitely create a responsively designed site that allows you to search for properties easily.
Hope this helps!
Kristina
-
He means, yes, it's possible to create a responsive site.
-
Hi Melissa,
I'm assuming you are designing a mobile-friendly version of your client's real estate website. If that's the case, it would certainly be preferable to go for a responsive design. The main reason for this is SEO. Responsive designs maintain the same URL, which keeps your "SEO juice" regardless of whether visitors are viewing your website on mobile phones or on computers.
Mobile versions of websites are created before the concept of responsive web design was fully established, and it is my guess that other real estate websites developed mobile sites long before responsive versions are mainstream. As such, it would be a good idea to develop a responsive design for your client now, to differentiate his website from others in the same niche.
Moreover, responsive design caters to all screen sizes within one CSS version, while mobile versions can only cater to one screen size. Given the variety of screen sizes throughout new and old smartphones/tablets, it would be unimaginable to create mobile versions to suit all of them.
That being said, there are considerations to be made as mentioned by Bede. You would need to ensure the backend of your client's site is suitable for easy & quick loading on mobile phones and tablets. Otherwise, a responsive design wouldn't help at all.
-
Are the property listings part of your client's site, or are they hosted elsewhere? Many realtors send visitors to a separate third-party website that is then branded for the realtor.
If the listings are hosted on your client's site, then yes, it's possible to use responsive design. A responsive site is just a site that is set up to display content in different ways (e.g. different format, and potentially showing and hiding certain parts) based on things like screen width or resolution.
Whether a responsive site or a mobile version is the best solution depends on your business goals and how visitors are likely to use the site. You'll need to consider things like common site activities (beyond just searching for listings), how page-load time is likely to impact those activities, and what features you need for mobile vs. desktop.
As far as I'm aware, Google's "Recommended configuration" is still responsive, and it's a personal preference when I'm developing a site, but you also need to think about the implications for users.
-
Kevin, Do you mean 'yes, it's possible to create a responsive mobile site' or do you mean 'yes, it should be a separate mobile site'?
-
Yes, it's dictated in the css (and how the individual pages are coded). Look up fluid-grid concept.
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
-
Internally linked pages from different subdomain must be well optimised?
Hi all, We have guide/help pages from different subdomain (help.website.com). And we have linked these from 3rd hierarchy level pages of our website (website.com/folder1/topic2). But help.website sumdomain & pages are not well optimised. So, I am not sure linking these subdomain pages from our website pages hurts our rankings? Thanks,
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Is it Bad to Break Up A Site into Multiple Sites?
I have a big cluttered website with endless pages. It's a non-profit that has content for patients, researchers, therapists, etc.. Would it be a bad idea to turn this cluttered site into 3 or more completely different sites, each focused on their specific demographic? Or should I just figure out how to organize the one site better? Thanks for your help!!!
Web Design | | bosleypalmer0 -
What causes rankings to drop while moving a site.
Hi, we recently moved a PHP based site from one web developer to another (switched hosting providers as well). Amidst the move our rankings drastically dropped and our citation and trust flow were literally cut in half as per Majestic SEO. What could have caused this sudden drop?
Web Design | | Syed_Raza0 -
Mobile website strategy
Hello all! This question is about mobile websites. Any suggestions are welcomed. The facts: We have recently built a mobile website for our business using the separate mobile urls (parallel mobile website on a m. sub-domain). We are in the service industry and while our customers are most of the time on the go, it is important for them to find the price and order the service as fast and easy as possible. The redirect from desktop to mobile happens when customers are accessing the website with a mobile devices and it's done automatically. The mobile version does not have any content and serves only as a search and order function. The SEO has been made for the desktop website only and we are ranking really well for all competitive keywords in our niche. We want to keep the mobile website simple and clean so we are not planning to add any content on it.The questions: Since we are not planning to have much content on the mobile website, do we need to do any SEO for it? If yes, why? What are the benefits? Should we add content on the mobile website and why? Is there any down-side from an SEO perspective due to the fact that the website redirects to the mobile version? How are the inbound links going to behave in this case? Do we need to link these two websites although there is no risk about duplicate content? (links, canonical tags, sitemaps) Will the mobile website take advantage of the link building made for the desktop version? Should we allow the mobile website to be indexed having the fact that this is just a search & book tool? (at the moment it is blocked via robots.txt) Thanks for reading, looking forward to your answers.
Web Design | | echo10 -
Having a new website build, what happens to my SEO work?
Hi, We are in the process of having a new website developed by a web agency. New domain, new business name etc... What is the best process to transfer from old domain to the new one? What happens to all my ranked URLs? What can re-directs do to help me? Will I loose all my link juice on highly ranked keyword domains? I ranked 1st for a brand now, wil lthis go? Any advice, help or hints would be great. Thanks Will
Web Design | | YNWA0 -
Moving Existing Website to CMS
I had zero experience with design, seo, etc..prior to joining seomoz last year, but have been tweaking my site to get better ranking and leads. I'm at the point now where I have to move my existing 8 year old static html website (lifeinsuranceadvisors.com) to a CMS system but am concerned about the impact this will have on my rankings, and money I currently make from my site selling the leads i generate. I generate leads for life insurance industry, have 150+/- existing pages, and it takes me forever to add new pages, make changes, not to mention the look is worn. What is the best way to make this move? Secondly, what SEO friendly CMS systems do you recommend? Thanks Mike Horbal Thank you all for the quick response and great info...I'm going to put my wishlist together before i make a move..thanks again.
Web Design | | mjhorbal1 -
How to serve a Mobile & Full Site using one URL?
Hello, Does anyone know of any resources or tutorials that outline how to serve a smartphone-formatted website using the same URL as the full site? I know that one solution is using media-queries to serve a seperate CSS stylesheet, but you still have the full HTML source code. In other words, I might want to serve a smartphone & desktop user different content, but under one URL. WP Touch (Wordpress Plugin) is a perfect example of what I mean, but how is it technically achieved? It serves two different sets of HTML for smartphone & full, but using one URL http://www.bravenewcode.com/store/plugins/wptouch-pro/
Web Design | | petecampbell-bmi0 -
Setup of three major retail sites.. need advice.
I recently have taken a new position responsible for three large national retail sites which are all owned by one parent organization. Through a series of acquisitions, these three major brands have been brought under one umbrella and a brand consolidation is likely not to happen within the next 2-4 years. I have a number of questions I’m hoping to get some feedback on, but first a little more background is necessary. A year ago (before my time) the three sites were over-hauled, but were designed to use one common custom CMS and all of the navigation and nearly all the content is the same (with some exceptions, such as tags, url, etc.). All of the brands have identical products and services; however, each one services a different demographic in the US. The design was intended for ease of management, but is terrible for seo. Additionally, without the geographic reference, they all compete for the same keywords. They have now begun a very large ecommerce project utilizing an ATG platform. The initial direction is to use one platform for all three brands, but keep them on separate domains and with the use of basic switching, replace nominal content such as logos and references of the brands for each of the domains. I’m concerned with this approach and would like to hear your feedback.. When optimizing a page for one keyword set, are they likely to be filtered due to dup content? The argument that management has is that all three current sites rank very well for one keyword on all three sites. They feel it won’t be an issue due to this. One option, that is currently still available, is to tri-band one ecommerce site, but it would have to be on an entirely new domain. The other three domains are very well established and are PR6s. Management, and even I, is afraid to abandon these other domains, but having a single domain would allow us to have unique content and really leverage all efforts to one domain. Thoughts? Any knowledge or thoughts what kind of impact having three domains on one ATG platform will be? Thanks much! John If you feel it will help, please message me and I can share the urls... Also, how would you handle a company blog in this case?
Web Design | | kavaliauskas0
