The Top 10 Real Estate Websites…what they know that you don’t

What do the top 10 real estate websites know that you don’t?

In this blog post, I’m going to break down the biggest real estate websites into bite-sized marketing take-aways for agents. We’ll start by looking at how much traffic each of these top 10 real estate websites gets. And end by examining how they get those results.

For a real estate website that works as hard as you do, get a leadsite. Start getting real traffic, and drive your business forward.

At the end of each section, I’ll wrap things up by giving you a take away to improve your real estate website.

Remember that:

Steel Sharpens Steel

Like we talked about in our post on ‘The Best Presidential Candidate Websites’, you need to study GREAT websites to generate more leads from your own website. So today, we’ll be looking at the top 10 real estate websites. And they are:

1. Zillow
2. Trulia
3. KW
4. Realtor
5. Redfin
6. Coldwell
7. Homes.com
8. REMAX
9. Movot
10. Craigslist

Let’s get into it…

Traffic Secrets

How many visitors do these sites get?

When it comes to the top 10 real estate websites, they actually get dramatically different amounts of traffic. I’ve gone ahead and charted the data from these websites as provided by Similar Web.

Here is how the visitors to these websites stack up:

As you can see, Zillow has a huge lead on nearly everyone else. Zillow is getting nearly 164 million visits per month. We’ll break down exactly how they are getting this amount of traffic below.

But for now, just look at the differences between these top 10 real estate websites in terms of traffic.

It’ll help you understand how different things you do on your site improve or decrease the amount of traffic you end up getting.

The data:

• Zillow: 164,100,000
• Trulia: 63,200,000
• KW: 3,000,000
• Realtor: 56,200,000
• Redfin: 23,700,000
• Coldwell: 1,500,000
• Homes.com: 16,900,000
• REMAX: 5,800,000
• Movoto: 6,800,000

Key Take Away

Sources Of Traffic

Where do these people come from? And how we can reverse engineer the results?

The first thing we can learn from these massive real estate websites is where they get their traffic.

Let’s look at two different scenarios from our 120,000 visitors a month at Easy Agent Pro:

Traffic from social for a newer post

Traffic from Google for an older post

Do you see how the Google traffic escalates with time? And the social media traffic dies away with time?

This is a key difference in the rewards for certain types of marketing. If you focus on Google traffic, your website increases in value over time. If you focus on social media, the time you’ve spent decreases in value over time.

Now, let’s look at where most of these websites get their traffic from:

What you see here is that the majority of the traffic to these websites is not from social media or advertising…

They get their traffic from showing up in search results. And that’s really not a shock. Look at these results:

Dallas Real Estate

San Diego Real Estate

Orlando Real Estate

As you can see, Google rankings are the key to success for most of these big websites. They rely on this traffic source to maintain their advantage.

But how do they do this?

The next three points will show you how blogs, Google and Facebook play into getting this amount of traffic.

But it’s sufficient to say that you need to focus on Google and SEO to create a site that feeds you leads in the future.

Key Take Away

Social media gets you an initial traffic boost. But Google traffic sustains your site well into the future.

Do Blogs Matter?

How often do these sites publish blogs? 

The first thing we learned from these websites is that they tend to focus on Google as a traffic source. And Google loves fresh content on websites.

It’s quite telling that all of these sites publish at least 2 blog posts per week on their sites. The bigger sites even publish more than 10 posts per week.

Here is an analysis of the number of blogs published per week:

As you can see, there is a very strong correlation between these sites publishing content and them getting traffic. The blogs act as a constant update to the website. And get a little bit of traffic from social media.

Additionally, blog posts are an excellent way to get traffic from Google keywords not related to looking at homes. For example, look at this keyword “first time home buyers guide”:

The Top Real Estate Websites realize that it’s the blogs that provide the initial inertia for their Google rankings. The thing is most agents will look at this and then despair. They’ll think, “I can’t blog that much!”  And that’s fine if you can’t. You can actually purchase real estate blogs to supplement whatever you can do yourself.

Alternatively, with Leadsites, you get access to two blogs weekly you can use to drive traffic to your site.

Key Take Away

Blogging once per week is almost a requirement to get significant traffic from Google.

Google’s Still King

Here’s why…

What we saw above is that most of the Top 10 real estate websites get their traffic from Google.

And you may think:

“How can I compete with them in Google?”

There is actually a really easy way to compete with these big websites in Google. It’s called Keyword Stacking.

Here’s how it works:

When it comes to keyword stacking, you have to create a bunch of pages for super small keywords first. These can be areas like new home builder communities, or small neighborhood names. You typically can target things like condos or other words that haven’t quite made their way into the mainstream.

These words are easy to get on the first page of Google.

Next, you want to work your way up the ladder.

Wondering what these pages should look like? Check out our InstaFarm pages…

Key Take Away

You need to target small keywords first. And then stack them on top of each other to compete with these top 10 real estate website. Done correctly, you can start to outrank some of these big sites within 6-12 months.

Ignore Facebook?

Let’s look at the Facebook pages of these major websites…

The thing with Facebook pages is that there is terrible engagement there these days. Yes, you need a Facebook page. But it’s there mostly for your advertising budget.

These websites use Facebook as an advertising tool primarily. You can see the 16 ads Zillow is running right here.

They don’t depend on their audience to engage with them in order for their business to succeed. They rely on Google to send traffic to their website.

If you focus on Google first and social media traffic second, you should see an exponential line of traffic growth start to appear on your real estate website.

Hopefully this analysis of the top 10 real estate websites has been helpful for you. And you’ve taken something away from it for your own website.

If you’re ready for a website that works as hard as you do – check out LeadSites. With a LeadSite, you can start putting your ideas into action and watch your business grow.

Want More Ideas About Real Estate Websites? Check Out These Articles:

• Best Realtor Websites
• Best Lead Generating Real Estate Websites
• Why Most Real Estate Websites Fail
• How to Get Your First 10000 Real Estate Website Visitors

• Author
• Recent Posts

Follow Me

Tyler Zey

Hey! I'm Tyler with Easy Agent Pro! We provide top notch marketing content for realtors... And we do it for FREE! I get excited about sharing tactics and strategies that can be implemented TODAY.

Follow Me

Latest posts by Tyler Zey (see all)

• The Top 10 Real Estate Websites…what they know that you don’t - January 29, 2018
• 53 Ways To Generate Real Estate Leads with 1 Secret That Will Blow Your Mind! - January 29, 2018
• 200 Real Estate Marketing Ideas- It’s Time To Dominate - January 29, 2018