The Web Marketing Association has an annual competition in 96 industries to recognize what they believe are the best websites. In the real estate section, they list 7 criteria they look for:
- Design
- Ease of use
- Copywriting
- Interactivity
- Use of technology
- Innovation
- Content
All seven are subjective, which is fine: the organization giving the award gets to set the criteria. But looking at the winner last year, their award is doing a great disservice to any real estate agent who uses that site as their inspiration. Here is a link to the site.
Now I don’t know the people who built the site, and I don’t know those agents or their company. Nor do I have anything against them, or the award.
Personally, I think the site is fine but not spectacular in execution for what it is: a nice-looking website.
But there’s not one mention in seven criteria of results. My assumption is that most businesses want a website that is going to help them get results (i.e. generate visitors and turn them into leads). And here’s why this site is at a severe disadvantage.
It is invisible to search engines.
To you, me, and anyone else with a Flash plugin, this is what the site looks like to human eyes:
What does this site look like to Google? Here’s a visual of the actual page using a text-based browser:
It looks like nothing. Want proof?
One entry. Name. Rank. Serial Number.
A site exists. Beyond that? No information.
This site leaves money on the table. For my real estate site, according to Google Analytics, 73.4% of my 150-250 visitors per day come from search engines.
But the only way to find their site from Google is by its own name, “Elizabeth Lofts”, and if one goal of marketing is to get people who don’t already know your name to contact you, then this site had failed by that criteria.
And as of today, you won’t find it under “Pearl District” or “Pearl District Condominiums” (until the purgatory of page 5) so it wouldn’t have generated leads from people who express interest in that district.
Worse, this site has plenty of information on floor plans, but if you search as of today specifically for “Elizabeth Lofts floor plans” the site is nowhere to be found.
Why not?
The site was built completely using Flash, the industry standard for creating web animations. Search engines can’t read most Flash animations, and those that can be read won’t be indexed in a way that’s useful for your marketing. Flash has its uses, but if you build a completely Flash site, you’ve put yourself at a disadvantage for lead generation.
And the designers of the site should have explicitly mentioned this.
Contrast this total search engine invisibility with the strong Google profile of their top competitor, which ranks #1 for all of the terms I mentioned above — and incidentally, uses Flash correctly.
The irony of the award-winning site is that it might be nice-looking, but wouldn’t have generated the same results as its search engine optimized competitor. Yes, design is important for establishing credibility with visitors, but you need to get visitors to your site in the first place. With better goal setting and planning, they could have had both looks and search engine effectiveness.
And the award wouldn’t have been given to a site that is a perfect example of exactly what not do if you’re a real estate agent looking for results.
Dan Revel says:
This web site, made by Dynamic Page Solutions exceeds and surpasses all of the criteria that is posted on this blog.
It gets thousands of visitors per month and has turned out to be a great lead generator. From what I understand about the technology, they extensively use the long tail to drive traffic to the site.
If you have any questions about how well this works, please feel free to contact me.
Dan Revel
November 17, 2008 — 8:55 am
Ron Ares says:
For what it’s worth, the project in question sold out long before its completion in 2005. Long tail wasn’t exactly top-of-mind in the blazing hot real estate market at the time.
But why the Web Marketing Association would laud such an award on an orphaned site is beyond me.
November 17, 2008 — 9:45 am
Jeff L says:
One of the problems you’re exposing here is the disconnect between the business side and the technical one; this problem is generalized throughout our business.
In the past year I went a BI conference for technical professionals. The sessions were not geared toward acquiring usable data, but rather how to present: there were lots of great software tools with amazing acronyms that made the given product look pretty. At each session and each vendor I asked how their topic/product helped the business, and with only one exception was each answer something like: “It will improve the presentation and people will be excited by what they see and bring more users to it.” They could not conceive of carrying it through to “sales closed” or “analysis.”
Making something look “slick” should only be the icing on the cake not the main point. As business leaders we need to demand of our service providers 80%+ of the labor be dedicated to business-driving innovative functionality, and 20%- go toward the slick factor.
November 17, 2008 — 10:03 am
Todd says:
Seems everyone, the elizabethlofts site, this posts author, commenter, is stuck in 2004.
Stand alone web sites that connect to nothing, offer no utility to the end user are beyond worthless. End users don’t care what your page rank is, they don’t care if you met your conversion rate for the month.
If you currently maintain a walled garden that demands a sign up or fails to plug into services the user already has, you are just contributing to the misery.
November 17, 2008 — 10:07 am
Joel McDonald says:
I too am surprised at why this site received such an award, but for different reasons.
The home-page of a website is usually the least important page of the whole site when you consider that a properly SEO’d site will have internal pages ranking for long-tail phrases that consumers are looking for.
I checked out thier linking structure, assuming they had a solid deep-linking structure that would get their internal pages ranking and driving traffic, but their linking structure is almost non-existent.
I’m stumped.
November 17, 2008 — 10:10 am
Jim Kimmons says:
With 76% of my last 30 days’ visitors coming from the search engines for my personal real estate site, I am amazed at the award as well.
It’s a billboard site with no highway.
November 17, 2008 — 10:29 am
Downtown Vancouver Realtor Mike Stewart says:
I think they should add site visits as well as depth/length of visit to the criteria as well as goals. All of this is easily gotten from Analytics. This award is 5 years behind the times.
November 17, 2008 — 10:38 am
Steven Leung says:
Dan – Thanks for chiming in, happy to. Websites aren’t islands and developer websites are supported by external marketing budgets that drive traffic to a site, whether it be the paper, flyers, PPC, etc. And sometimes a product sells itself.
If a randomly selected real estate agent applied the techniques they gleaned from this site, they would be at a severe disadvantage to a larger, better funded competitor.
November 17, 2008 — 3:42 pm
Steven Leung says:
Ron – Thanks for the area expertise, when an association dedicated to web marketing give an award, it should have criteria that support the success of people who use it as an example.
November 17, 2008 — 3:51 pm
Steven Leung says:
> One of the problems you’re exposing here is the disconnect between the business side and the technical one
Jeff – Amen, BI tools are a great example for case studies that show their ROI.
Todd – Facebook is so 200BC because it’s the biggest walled garden built since the Great Wall of China.
November 17, 2008 — 3:56 pm
Mark Madsen says:
I guess it all depends on your purpose and the needs of the target audience you are trying to connect with.
We designed our mortgage blog for the purpose of reaching clients who are searching for niche topics in the search engines. Once they find us through the long tail, we’ve found that the actual content is less important than the first impression.
People looking at mortgage sites are searching for someone they can trust. People on real estate sites are looking for MLS or neighborhood info.
This has been my experience, but I’m just a student here.
November 17, 2008 — 4:07 pm
Steven Leung says:
Joel – As far as their site analysis goes, it sounds like we’re on the same page. I would add that there are ways to structure a Flash site better for deep-linking and indexing, and if they had a static version along side it that was accessible, it would have sufficed.
Speaking of accessibility, while most smaller sites aren’t concerned with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA-compliance), there’s no reason a modern site shouldn’t be accessible to the blind without any extra effort (i.e. with the same effort one would put into SEO).
> It’s a billboard site with no highway.
Jim – well summarized.
> This award is 5 years behind the times.
Mike – agreed.
November 17, 2008 — 4:11 pm
Anonymous says:
“Facebook is so 200BC because it’s the biggest walled garden built since the Great Wall of China”
Unless you’re inside the walls 🙂
Great analysis, Steven
November 17, 2008 — 4:24 pm
Steven Leung says:
> Once they find us through the long tail, we’ve found that the actual content is less important than the first impression
Mark – Good insight. Many times, the “once they find us” part is the most important part. About the second part, it depends on your customer personality style.
That’s really a whole different topic but some people like pithy, others like data, still others prefer to pick up the phone first. Your audience will self-select: folks on my real estate site tend to be more analytical, but you can shape the traffic.
If you have a best practice for your business, I’m sure there are hundreds of open ears on the site.
November 17, 2008 — 4:52 pm
Steven Leung says:
> Unless you’re inside the walls 🙂
Anonymous – Exactly! The poster was pointing out that walled gardens are just contributing to misery. Some gardens are worth the price of admission.
November 17, 2008 — 5:03 pm
Mark Madsen says:
Thanks, Steven.
I’m finding that mortgage blogging is a different beast compared to real estate. I have made several mistakes over the past couple of years learning the ropes. In regards to a “Best Practices” – my greatest value to the loan officers I network with is mainly letting them know what NOT to do. lol
Here is what I do know about mortgage blogging – be where the buyers are….
To keep with the topic of your article, they forgot to list “Relevance” as a criteria and its relation to search.
Maybe I’m crazy, but creating new business should be a function of a real estate site. You pretty much nailed that point in your post though.
November 17, 2008 — 5:20 pm
J Boyer Morristown NJ says:
Great post Steven. I know a REALTOR who for the longest time had a site similar to the example site, and over the course of several years he managed to get virtually no leads from the site. He put up a new site on the same domain recently and is all of the sudden generating as many leads per week as he was in a year with the old site.
November 18, 2008 — 3:38 pm
Steven Leung says:
J – thanks for chiming in with your example
November 18, 2008 — 9:19 pm
Russell Volk - Bucks County Realtor says:
It’s one thing to have a good looking site, but it’s totally another to have a site that produces. It’s really all about the numbers. If you average 5 lead per day and you have 100 visitors to your website per day, then your visitor-to-lead ratio is 1/20. If you want 10 leads per day, just work on increasing your traffic.
Great post.
November 20, 2008 — 11:15 am
Steven Leung says:
Russel – good points about the metrics, particularly lead conversion and visitor totals.
Some folks like to focus on the traffic first and then start to improve their conversion ratios once they start to see diminishing returns on their traffic improvement efforts.
November 20, 2008 — 6:56 pm
Sue says:
I agree with Russell, I think its important to first and foremost have a site that is useful, informative, up-to-date for your clients…and then it should produce…that is the goal. I’ve heard stories about the flash before…this is an ‘exposed’ problem as I don’t believe alot are aware.
Traffic vs. conversion…I guess if you focus on traffic than you just cherry pick…
November 23, 2008 — 9:01 pm
Budi Waluyo says:
Interesting discussion. The site was awarded maybe because the criteria emphasizes on the design aspect. Really, from the SEO overview it’s amazing how this site gets many traffic. However, apart from the search engine friendly factor as an architect-educated I love the site very much. It looks gothic-minded, so unique. I’ve never found site designed using line sketches format. It’s proper to be reference for the students.
January 16, 2009 — 6:16 pm
Jennifer K Giraldi says:
There are many sites in my market that do the same thing. It must be loopholes in Google or something. I wouldn’t think design aspect alone would get a #1 ranking. Great article!
January 17, 2009 — 6:15 am
Budi Waluyo says:
Hi Jennifer
Nice to know you. Why don’t you show me some. This is Indonesia, south east Asia. We have 250 million population but only 10% of them using internet. Thank you for the response.
January 18, 2009 — 1:16 am