Real Estate Web Design

Real Estate Company Penalized by Google

I read the articles today in regard to our competitors getting penalized and this has made me sit down and think about the business, what a company can provide, what a client expects, and what is the true value proposition of the overall business.

Over the past 3 years, we have built a business based on the concept of providing our clients with a solid platform in which they themselves could grow their online business from either the knowledge they learned from us through our consulting program or through other means like the various real estate fourms or real estate social networks currently online.

The ongoing challenge throughout this process has been finding a platform which was scalable (read search engine friendly CMS system) or a manual process which was cost effective enough to compete against every web designer and developer on the planet. This was a problem because to create a strong solid platform for agents to use to grow their business is not cheap. Our packages cost on average $5000 for a 20 page website.

The crux of the issue is that when the potential client is being told that it will cost that much to build from us and the guy down the street will do it for $1,000 what do you think the non educated agent will do…….build the cheap site or maybe buy a templated site thinking that they will upgrade in the future. They don’t realize the mistake they are making until it is too late. At the time of the decision however it makes sense when you think about it from the realtors point of view. 

However, If you are successful because of your track record or sales skills and sign on a client, conventional wisdom dictates that even an educated client wants instant results from the money they are investing. The reality is that isn’t going to happen from an organic point of view. 

So where is this leading. Well, I don’t know Morgan but know that people either like him of hate him.  What I can’t necessarily blame him for is trying to give clients instant results for the money they are paying him.  If I was a client, I would want results and from what I know, he charges far more then we do. As a result,  he needed to be agressive in his optimization strategy. I am not making a case for him, but am trying to understand what happened and how if may or may not affect our business moving forward.

We stopped doing any link pages over a year ago for two reasons.

• It did not make economic sense from a business perspective
• It created an undo risk for clients who spent the money.

By making this decision, it definately affected our ability to bring on new clients as we could not be as agressive in our belief to generate results for the clients, but it also soilidified our standing with our existing clients because it gave them the confidence that we would always operate in a manner which was in their best interests.

So how is this recent decision by Google going to affect our business. Well, as I have always said, until the consumer better understands the product they are purchasing and the search engines perfect their process, there will always be companies pushing the edge of the envelope. In the meantime, our job as a company is to continue to figure out a way to provide the best possible service at a competitive price.

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