Types of Websites
Use the 2% Realty Network!
While you have many options to develop your own website, look no further than 2% Realty to provide you with a professional, brand consistent website. Contact head office to request your site today. Our Websites:
- Include MLS data from DDF automatically
- Create custom landing pages for each listing automatically
- Create AMP optimized listings automatically
- Include SSL encryption
- Support custom sub-domains.
Realtor Site Tools
Websites like Ubertor, Real Estate Webmasters, Realty Ninja, and more are all popular website platforms that real estate agents are using. Like most things, there are pros and cons to using these "pre-built" website platforms.
- Pros: it's an easy way to have a valid website often with real estate listings automatically uploaded for you.
- Cons: these websites can often be a challenge to completely customize to your liking.
Wordpress
Wordpress is a more customizable option that you can do yourself or hire someone else to do for you. With this option, you'd have to look at having an IDX or DDF plugin (the system that will allow you to show MLS listings on your site) created by an external company unless you can figure that out on your own. With Wordpress, it is nice to have full control over your own site but it just might be a bit of a challenge getting there which means you might be a little more limited in your options if you don't hire someone externally to help you.
HTML / Custom Built
Hiring a web designer to create a completely new website on your behalf is the best way to go. This way, you have full creative control, your website will be completely unique, and it will best represent who you are as an agent. Of course, the con to this is that it will likely be the most expensive option, but in the end, is well worth it.
The CREA Direct Data Feed (DDF)
The Canadian Real Estate Association provides a Nation-wide (Canada), listings data service, called DDF (Direct Data Feed). This is a standardized set of listings data updated daily from all the participating Real Estate Boards across Canada. It is important to note that DDF, is not the same as IDX (Internet Data eXchange) format for listings, which is used by Realtor.ca, commonly referred to as the MLS.
When you login to your regional board Matrix or Keystone system to enter listings data, it is formatted to IDX. Your local board then publishes updated listings data to CREA on a daily basis, but only if your local board participates in the DDF program. Your office Broker must first opt-in to the DDF listings pool before your listings will show up in the DDF Feed. If your board participates in DDF, and your Broker has opted in, then your listings will automatically publish to both the MLS (Realtor.ca), and the DDF.
The 2% Network, has a customized display of listings, that is based on the DDF system.
The 2% listings display system offers unique benefits that no other listings websites currently offer:
AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) code - this initiative is backed by Google, and provides a code framework that greatly speeds up the display of content on mobile devices. The 2% listings system automatically converts DDF listings to use AMP markup code, which makes our listings search pages the fastest way to search and view listings on a mobile device.
By associating a core listings domain with all websites in our network, we build the overall keyword search relevance in Google.
SEO Considerations for Ranking
Creating An Effective SEO Strategy
- Understand SEO takes time and patience.
- Be unique.
- Learn how to do keyword research.
- Incorporate "long-tail keywords" in text.
- Write strong headlines, meta descriptions, and title-tags.
- Link to internal and external pages.
- Optimize your site for mobile and make sure load times are fast.
Rome wasn't built in a day and neither was a solid SEO strategy. Keep working at it and if you're creating great content and following these guidelines, you should start to see an improvement in your rankings.
You Domain Name - You Have Options.
Imagine a realtor named Jennifer Smith, and we’re going to help Jennifer consider her options when it comes to putting a website together, when it comes to choosing her domain name.
Top Level Domains (“TLD’s” or “gTLD’s”)
The default assumption is that if she needs a website, Jennifer also will need a domain name. This is somewhat true, and the initial assumption is that she will need to purchase a custom .com domain name. But there’s more to domain name selection than generic .com
When the internet was new, “.com” became synonymous with the Internet, and the Word Wide Web (www) “.com” became the most popular generic domain name extension, leaving the .org and .net in the dust. These extensions are not meaningless, however they are generic enough that they might as well be. These worked fine before there were billions web pages on the internet - we ran out of words in the english language long ago to help differentiate one .com from another - but that doesn’t mean people haven’t combined words into long, hard to remember combinations for their domain names.
So today Jennifer would likely be forced to consider a domain name like jennifersmithhomeswinnipeg.com or jennysellshouseswpg.com… and sure, these are somewhat legible to humans (although they are hard to remember and type in). But worse, they are close to meaningless to Google. Google doesn’t split out those words into the separate words humans can read - it literally will only match the word “jennysellshouseswpg”... which of course is not… a word that anyone would search for, or use in their daily written messaging.
- Location specific extensions, .ca for Canada specifically, help a little bit. They tell Google that you’re in Canada. It’s a start, but unless you’re operating nation-wide, .ca is only marginally better than .com
- Long and complex combinations of .com (www.longandcomplexwords.com) - should be avoided. They are hard to remember, and Google doesn’t know what they mean.
- .Com, .Net, .Org - these are generic extensions and don’t help describe what the site is about.
- .Ca is generic, but at least Canadian. They help Google know your site is in Canada. This is good for national brands, not so good for individual realtors.
Sub-domains.
Sub-domains are the words that are put in front of the top-level domain. For example www.3percentrealty.ca - the “www” is the generic sub-domain. However, the www, can be replaced with anything, and we commonly do this to help differentiate each website, and still have them be related to 3percentrealy.ca - for example calgary.3percentrealty.ca is a suddomain that tells google the website is a Calgary specific page, and listings.3percentrealty.ca tells google that is a website that is all about listings. So, sub-domains can be used to add key-words, and help with differentiation, while still being associated with a larger top level domain.
This would be true for Jennifer Smith as well - if Jennifer uses the 2% Network for her site, https://jennifer.smith.3percentrealty.ca is her custom sub-domain by default, and likely will be more effective than any .com domain that would be available today.
The sub-domains, don’t need to be your name - they can be any reasonable keyword(s)
Reasonable: https://j.smith.winnipeg.3percentrealty.ca
Not Reasonable: https://jenny.smith.sells.your.house.winnipeg.3percentrealty.ca
- Note that actually will work, and Google will read it quite clearly. But it looks silly to human readers.
Custom Top Level Domain Extensions
To really get on your Domain name game, consider the future of the Internet. As the web grows from billions of pages… to trillions, search engines like Google (yes, there are others) are going to need more flexible ways to categorize information. The answer? Key word specific top-level domain extensions. If the entire internet of the early 2000’s could be built around a generic .com extension - imagine when every word in the english language, can be an extension. While not every word is available today, new ones are becoming available all the time.
Consider the just a few of the following extensions that are available that could be relevant to realtors:
- .house
- .villa
- .property
Here’s a GoDaddy resource page for all the new keyword TLD’s (they call them “generic top level domains”... but they are not as generic as the original .com)
https://ca.godaddy.com/tlds/gtld.aspx
These extensions, are powerful keywords to Google. ".house" tells Google that “it’s about houses”. This is much less generic, while still providing a broad context for anything that could be related to “house”.
Consider then that a combination of sub-domains, and a relevant .house domain, could be quite powerful - both memorable and meaningful to Google, and people.
Jennifer Smith decides to buy the domain willsellyour.house.
She then uses a sub-domain, for example: https://jenn.smith.willsellyour.house, and https://i.willsellyour.house (remember you can create as many sub-domains as you like for your primary domain)
Combined with many other factors, a carefully considered combination of top-level domains and sub-domains, will help your content be understood on the web. There’s a lot of room to get creative with custom sub-domains and specific top level extensions.
Private Top Level Domain Extensions.
Large organizations are investing in the custom top level domain extensions as well. For example, CREA has registered the following two extensions:
- .realtor
- .realestate
As a registered member of CREA or NAR, you can be eligible to use the .realtor domain. Note that because they are private, .realtor or .realestate cannot be registered through registrars like GoDaddy.
Find out more here https://www.get.realtor/r/signup
Each Property Needs a Landing Page
Every single real estate listing you're trying to sell needs to have its own landing page. When property buyers are looking to purchase a home, they're going to want to read more details about the listing before even considering going to look at it, so therefore, creating a landing page for a listing = higher conversion rates for you.
When creating your property landing pages, make sure to incorporate the following:
- A strong call to action.
- The page remains focused on the single property.
- Be clear and concise.
- List your contact info in a visible area.
The following link provides exceptional detail on how to use your landing pages effectively:
https://unbounce.com/landing-page-articles/home/
If you choose to use the 2% Network to host your website, every property automatically has a detailed landing page. Use the unique link for each listing to promote it on your social media pages!
AMP Optimization
AMP or the AMP Initiative, stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, and is supported by Google. The initiative has many goals, including making pages load really fast on mobile devices. This is very important when it comes to real estate listings - people want to look up the listing details on the go.The 2% Realty listings pages, are the only place you can get AMP optimized listings pages, automatically.
SSL Encryption
In 2017, Google started giving rank preference to websites that used an SSL certificate. While there is often little technical reason for this, the fact that Google prefers SSL... means you need SSL. This is the “https://” that goes in front of “secure” websites. In addition to purchasing a custom domain name, you also can purchase your own SSL certificate to encrypt that domain, for an average cost of about $199/year. But just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
Many hosting options will include SSL as part of your hosting costs, and the 2% Realty network is no exception.
You should only purchase your own SSL certificate if:
- You are a web developer and want to host your own web applications under your domain
- You are hosting with a generic or small provider, and they don’t include SSL as part of their hosting.
- You have too much money and like to spend it on really obscure geeky stuff.