Last week I asked for real estate photographers around the world to submit their website for a review. In this video I review 11 real estate photographer websites, and we’re going to do that based around five criteria:
1. As a first time visitor to the site, is it clear that they do real estate photography? I’ve seen thousands of real estate photographer websites, and it’s amazing how many aren’t clear that they do real estate photography, or if they are it’s very, very brief.
2. Where are they? What cities or towns do they serve? This is another one that surprises me. Even in these 11, a few of them made it really difficult for me to find out where they are. When you’re such a local business that works in a very limited area, you want to make it really, really easy for a visitor to know if you can help them or not.
3. What’s the next step that they want the visitor to take, and is this clearly stated and easily found? When people arrive at your website you want to move people on to the next step, perhaps to contact you or book a photo shoot, and you need to make sure this is clearly visible and easily understood.
4. Will the website rank well in the search engines? As I say in this video, there’s no point creating the most beautiful, amazing real estate photography website the world has never seen. If you are a photographer on page 2 of a Google search, then very few people are finding you. If you’re on page 3, 4, or 7, then it’s almost not worth having a website at all because you will have so little organic traffic. The only option for you then is paid traffic, and that gets expensive.
5. Is the website responsive? Does it look good on a mobile device or tablet? A lot of your website visitors will not be using a desktop or laptop – rather, they’ll be using a tablet like an iPad, or a smartphone device. And if your website is not responsive, then it can look tiny and be too difficult to use on a small screen, and if that happens then your hard earned site visitors will be going elsewhere.
In reviewing these real estate photographer sites, most had something that needed changing, and some of them would benefit from a complete redesign of the site.
One thing I did find is that very few were ideally setup to rank well in a Google search. They were often lacking in content or keywords, with too much focus on the use of images and not enough written content to tell Google or the human reader more about the business and what they do.
If you would like to have a chat with me about your real estate photography business or website, send me a message and I’d be happy to sit down and have a one-to-one chat with you to see what you can do.
Now in my coaching program for real estate photographers I go through online marketing in much more detail, including the exact steps I used to move a real estate photographer from page 7 in a local Google search to having 2 spots on page 1 in six months. Have a chat with me if you would like to find out more!