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Portals don’t win you instructions: build your own brand!

Your website is where you control your brand

When we ask agents about their online marketing, they nearly all tell us which portals they use. Then they’ll often stop. If pressed, they sometimes talk about their email newsletters, their social media strategy, their pay-per-click ads or their website.

Any potential vendor or landlord will pore over your website, to learn about you and your business, before instructing you. So why is there such a focus on portals, rather than on an agency’s own website?

We think there are several reasons:

  • Portals are the biggest cost item in an estate agent’s online marketing, and that cost is growing fast
  • Portals perform well in Google search results, so they’re very visible
  • Portals are a strong part of the property search process and generate plenty of leads, and it’s important for vendors that you use them

However, portals don’t really help a potential new vendor find you, and they do not build your brand online with potential customers. It is on your website that you can really show off your brand, your business, your experience and your staff. In fact, when looking for an estate agency in their area, people don’t usually start with a portal: most start their search for an agent on Google.

Google increasingly favours estate agents in search results, as it understands that people are looking to be connected with real businesses with real offices. This is great news for agents if you have a good website, and one that portrays your brand in an effective way. It’s also only great news if Google knows about it: if your website can’t be found, you can’t attract those new vendors and landlords.

Homeflow can help you achieve this. In recent years Google’s algorithm has shifted to heavily favour a basket of what they term “quality” metrics in place of the old school measures like upstream link count, meta tags and the like.  Quality is a broad topic, that encompasses the content, usage patterns, serving speed and technical architecture of your website code.

We specialise in online marketing for estate agents, providing beautifulpowerful websites and ensuring they have the relevant approach on “quality” in order to help you get found on search engines ahead of your competitors. We help connect you with new business online.

We also have a great product – available to all agencies, not just those with Homeflow websites – Homeflow Boomerang.

The Boomerang automatically responds to leads from the portals, day and night, encouraging applicants to go directly to YOUR website – not the portal.

Find out how the Boomerang drives high value traffic to your site, measurably improving your SEO results.

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