Using WordPress for Real Estate Websites

Control Your Real Estate Website, Blog, Listings, and more within WordPress!

You’ve probably heard the term “WordPress” repeatedly over the last few years, with increasing frequency as of late. Why? Because not only can you use WP to blog, you can also control your real estate website, add listings (property photos, videos, pdf’s), launch email drip campaigns and more. Way, way, way more. For instance, WP can automatically display your listings on popular social networks such as FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, as well as popular real estate sites like Trulia, Zillow, etc. Furthermore, in most areas, you can have MLS listings automatically listed on your site, broken down by city, zip code, price, etc.

And we haven’t even got to the best parts: WP is not only free and persistently powerful, it’s super duper search engine friendly to boot. Meaning: Your WordPress real estate website has a solid chance of ranking high on Google, Yahoo!, and MSN for competitive keyword searches, conceivably and consistently above your local competitors.

Now, WP (out-out-of the-box) doesn’t come with all of the real estate fixings mentioned above, but with the right add-ons (aka “plugins”), tweaks, skill sets and of course, imagination, it can become a real estate marketing masterpiece.

If you’re very web savvy, for example you’re comfortable with adding databases, editing XHTML/CSS, modifying PHP, creating an effective SEO plan, etc., chances are you can pull this off yourself. If you’re like most though, that’s complete alien talk. A cheaper and quicker solution is to go with a WordPress hosting company as many of them offer the infamous  “1-Click WordPress Install.”  Then you just need to choose and install a  real estate theme, add some desired plugins, then start adding and optimizing your content. That’s where the fun begins.

You’ll most likely look to some real estate plugin though, but I currently discourage this because I’m finding that most real estate plugins aren’t that search engine friendly (but with the right hacking it’s possible). More importantly, what if the plugin creator decides to close shop and/or discontinue their program? Sadly, this is quite common. Now you have to change to another real estate plugin, and most likely, your site will drop in search engine rankings. Substantially. Why? Because, in most cases with these real estate plugins you’ll have to change the structure of your site a bit, and incidentally, this often means changing most of your urls/links, too. Why is that so bad? Because it’s almost certain you’ll lose Google Page Rank (and other incoming link benefits) for those particular property and city pages. Which, in a nutshell, can make your site plummet from page 1 of Google to page 5. This can kill your real estate sales over night, indefinitely!

There’s more to it than briefly discussed here, but for the sake of keeping this topic on point, I’ll probably elaborate on Google Page Rank and other linking factors in subsequent articles.

Here’s the good news: WordPress already has most of the power to operate as an all encompassing and thriving real estate site. You just need some simple plugins and coding to bring out part of that power. In the event one of these add-ons goes awry or out of production, chances are, you can still use it for quite awhile, or at the worst, change it out to something just as elementary without having to update your urls/links or site structure, and consequently again, negatively affect your search rankings.

I’m probably going to catch some flack from real estate plugin developers for the some of the aforementioned statements, but I’ve tested most of them out thoroughly and always found them to lack in both the search engine friendly sector and user-friendliness factors. These are both unquestionably extremely important elements in creating a successful site. I will say this though, most of these real estate plugins are very powerful, rich with features and promise. Some are very well written, too.