Number of real estate websites

The vast majority of successful real estate agents only have 1 website. 19 out of our 24 most successful real estate websites are the ONLY site for that agent/broker/team. Of the other five, four had two sites, one had three websites, and none of those additional sites were in our most successful sites list.

This one didn’t surprise me. Years ago, SEOs (those that practice search engine optimization) would recommend you have multiple micro-sites that would all feed into a single site. Some marketing agencies will still try to tell agents they need dozens of sites, but if you hear that you should run, and our data confirms what Google says.

As far back as 2010, when microsites and blog networks started to become a more popular SEO tactic, Google posted on the Google Webmaster Blog that site owners wanting to create multiple sites should ensure each site had unique, quality content.

While you’re free to run as many sites as you want, keep in mind that users prefer to see unique and compelling content. It is a good idea to give each site its own content, personality and function. This is true of any website, regardless of whether it’s a single-page hobby-site or part of a large portfolio.

We suggest not spreading out your efforts too broadly, though. It can be difficult to maintain multiple sites while keeping the content fresh and engaging. It’s better to have one or a few good sites than a multitude of shallow, low value-add sites.

More recently, Google’s John Mueller (Webmaster Trends Analyst – basically their public-facing expert on what it takes to rank well), discussed how Google views the idea of microsites versus the one standalone site method.

The question in the hangout was about content silos, which Mueller interpreted as being about the practice of creating many microsites instead of a larger more comprehensive one for SEO purposes.

John’s response:

I’m not particularly sure what you mean with content silos. I assume this is something like creating niche sites or something general… generally like that where you create small websites that are focused on one specific topic.

From my point of view, that’s usually something we recommend against, just because it’s a lot easier for you to maintain things on one website, where things are kind of interconnected on one website. And it’s a lot easier for you to kind of build up that almost like brand awareness, I guess, with regards to your one website, compared to having like, all of these other different individual websites that are kind of connected to your main website but not really on your main website.

So for the most part, I’d recommend trying to focus on like a smaller number of websites and keeping everything together and kind of tying everything together in a reasonable way so that when users find your content, they can easily kind of move along that path to actually converting into whatever you want them to do, if you want them to buy something or sign up for something. Kind of make that as easy as possible so that when they go back to your content, they know what to find and what to do.

Focus your efforts on a single website. There are lots of ways to create individual landing pages, interest categories, and segment useful content within a single site. In the end, you’ll find it much more useful for the growth of your business to rank a single site than to rank even one site if you have multiple ones.