How Do You Know When It’s Time to Rebuild Your Real Estate Website?
As a real estate agent, you need to have a marketing plan in place. Without one, you’ll have a difficult time both attracting clients and reminding previous clients about your business and services – and a big part of having a successful marketing plan is your website.
That’s because your website is one of the best, most effective, and most important marketing tools you have (especially if you’re focusing on inbound marketing), and for a lot of good reasons:
- It’s the main place you have direct and complete control over how you, your brand, and your business is presented.
- It’s an effective place to clearly outline how you’re different and why someone should choose to work with you over your competition.
- It’s the primary place you can review analytics to see where your traffic is coming from, what pages perform best, and a lot more – which helps you track ROI.
- It’s the best place to push all of your other marketing efforts, for the reasons above.
- It’s paramount in building an effective inbound marketing strategy.
- And a lot more…
In short, to have a successful marketing strategy, you have to have a strong website strategy. The two go hand-in-hand.
But since your marketing plan is never finished, eventually, your website is going to need to rebuilt, so how do you know when it’s the right time to rebuild it?
Your Website looks and Feels Dated
While it’s probably the main reason an agent would want to rebuild their website, rebuilding it because it looks old and feels dated makes sense, especially in an ultra-competitive marketing business like real estate.
It’s usually around the 5-8 year mark that a website starts to look and feel old and dated, but depending on how well it was built in the first place, it can even be sooner than that.
Your website is the where people go when they research you directly and when they discover you as part of your other marketing efforts, so if your website looks old and dated, so does the overall impression of your business – and that may cause someone to choose a different agent to work with as a result.
★ Want to see some of our latest real estate website work? Click right here to have a look at our portfolio.
Your Business Has Changed
Over the years, your real estate business is bound to change. If your current website represents where your business has been, not where it currently is or where you want it to go, then it’s probably time to rebuild it.
For example, if you’re an agent that initially focused on the condo market, and as a result, your website reflects that, but now you’re working more with families buying their first house, then a condo focused website will send the wrong message about you and what you do.
Your website is the main marketing place where you completely control how your business is presented, and if it doesn’t show that accurately, you won’t have an effective marketing plan that attracts the right people, for the right reasons.
★ Thinking about rebuilding your website? Have a look at these posts:
- How to Prepare a Real Estate Website Project Brief (To Make Your Own Website Project Successful)
- Best Practices When Rebuilding an SEO Successful Real Estate Website
- Measuring the Success of Your Digital Strategy Through Engagement
Your Digital Strategy is Dated
Much like technology is always changing, so is what it takes to have an effective digital strategy, meaning, what worked in the past might not be what works in the future. To see success, you have to continually review, refine, and udpate your digital strategy.
And that’s especially true right now as AI, AEO, and AI search results have disrupted how people find you, your business, and your website as part of your discovery strategy.
Even if you saw success with your website and digital strategy in the past, if you aren’t continually reinvesting in it, and planning for success in the age of AI search, your bound to be left behind by another agent that is.
★ Want to learn more about building a modern digital strategy focused on AI and AI search results? Have a look at these posts:
- Building a Successful SEO Strategy for AI Search Results
- Pivoting Your Website Content Strategy to See More Success in AI Search Results
- Building an Answers Engine Optimization (AEO) Strategy for AI
You’re Planning on Rebranding
If you’re planning on rebranding your real estate business, and then updating your logo and all of your marketing materials, nothing looks worse than just putting your new logo on an old website that doesn’t match the vision and aesthetic of your new brand direction.
As part of an effective marketing strategy, all of your marketing should be cohesive and carry the same look and feel, and if some of your marketing doesn’t match, or appears off brand, it looks inconsistent and appears unprofessional.
Your Website Doesn’t Perform the Way You Want it to
Agents have websites for a lot of different reasons. Some of them want to generate leads, some of them want a better online presence, and some of them just want to have a beautiful website that looks great.
Whatever the reason, if your website doesn’t meet the goals you set when you originally created it, a rebuild is a chance to review everything, clearly outline your goals, and work with a company that has experience building websites that do just that.
It’s also completely ok to have multiple goals, provided that you clearly express that to whoever is building it. The best way to outline this is to clearly outline the success of your website. For example, if the company that built your website called you a year after it launched, and asked how the website is performing, and you said “it’s doing great”, how would you define that?
Your Website Does Perform the Way You Want it to
Even if your website is performing well, if it’s been awhile since you rebuilt it, you may want to consider rebuilding it anyways as a way of future proofing your marketing efforts.
A rebuild of a good-performing website can often result in an even better performing website. Plus, the longer you go without rebuilding it, the more difficult it will be as it’s often a lot more difficult to rebuild a website that was built 10+ years ago, than it is to rebuild one that was built 5+ years ago.
Rebuild at The Right Time, for The Right Reasons
As a real estate agent with a modern digital marketing strategy in place, your website is one of the most important marketing tools you have. After all, you can’t have a modern and effective digital strategy without a modern and effective website.
Most real estate agents put off rebuilding their websites because it seems like a big project that will take a lot of time, effort, and planning, and while that’s true, that’s where hiring an experienced agency can help. At Artifakt, we have a well-established process, that we’ve been refining for 20+ years, that works towards handling all of the details for you. If you want to learn more about working with us, book a call with our team by clicking the link below.
