They didn’t call it Mobilegeddon for nothing
It’s been almost 12 months since Google made it official that they were going to prioritise mobile websites built on a responsive methodology for their Google Search results and you can see it in the results themselves – Mobile Friendly (if your reading the search results on your mobile phone that is).
Does it really matter? Absolutely! It matters because more and more searches are performed on a mobile phone or tablet and Google’s constant goal is to provide you with fantastic websites based on the keywords you use for your search. If Google takes you to a website on your mobile that you can hardly read because it’s too small, what will your opinion be of Google?
Mobile and Social
Let’s take that one step further. If you are searching for something from your mobile phone and you click on that website to learn more about what a company does the chances that you’ll want to call the company or get directions to them are higher when you do it from a mobile phone, right? That’s why it is a good idea to have a call now button on your website – so prospective customers can call you right there an then!
The reason we mention it in this post for real estate agent websites is that this makes it important to choose an underlying technology that is strong, reliable and capable but that also has a huge programmer base and the support of thousands of developers and millions of companies that use it – and that technology is WordPress.
This blog post from Google should act as a good indicator of the importance mobile is for their development team and the future of searching for things on the Internet.
What about site builders like Wix?
I was speaking with someone recently who discovered an online website builder that enables anybody to build their own website using a tool called Wix, and after exploring the solution I liked the way it worked and how easy it was to create and modify a website. When I did a bit of research however I discovered that the websites created on this platform are not responsive. Here’s the information I read on the Wix website. Does it mean you can’t build an effective website using Wix? No, but when you use a platform like WordPress that has professional content management features, capabilities for multiple users with different access profiles, thousands of developers and millions of businesses using it (sigh) it’s hard to go past.
Connecting with Social and the future
The social revolution has been and gone and is now part of every day Internet life so getting onto that bandwagon is very important. Even though some of the smartest investors, programs and business people don’t currently make money in social media (like Facebook, Twitter etc) these platforms are worth billions of dollars because they have a massive user base and VERY detailed information about every user. Connecting your content marketing to social media should be the first step in a social media strategy but exploring the advertising possibilities may blow your mind.
The technology leaders are currently exploring the capabilities of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality path so it will be very interesting to see how this applies to the real estate industry.
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