What Should Be on a Real Estate Agent's Website?

Five pages carry a real estate agent's website. A home page that says who you are and which towns you cover. A page for each town you farm. An about page that sounds like a person wrote it. A page that explains what happens after somebody calls you. And contact information that takes one tap on a phone. That is the list. Most of the agent sites I open in Wallingford and Meriden have a listings search bolted on before any of those five exist, and that order is backwards.

Your home page gets about eight seconds

Somebody who found you by Googling your name already knows a little about you. Somebody who found you through a town search knows nothing. Both of them decide in the first screen whether to keep reading.

So the top of the page should say your name, that you sell real estate, and the towns you work: Wallingford, Meriden, Cheshire, Southington, North Haven. Not serving Connecticut and the surrounding area. A buyer looking in Cheshire needs to see the word Cheshire on your site before they see anything else.

Under that, one phone number and one form. Not four ways to reach you scattered down the page. And use a real photo of yourself near the top. Stock photography of a couple holding house keys tells a visitor nothing, and half the agents in the state are using the same three images.

A page for every town you work

This is the part that brings in people who have never heard your name. One page per town. Nine hundred to fifteen hundred words about that town and nothing else. Housing stock, what prices are doing right now, what the taxes run, commute times to New Haven and Hartford, and three or four of your own recent sales there.

Four real town pages beat twenty thin ones. I would rather see an agent publish one good page a month for four months than fill a dropdown menu in a weekend.

Your about page gets read more than you think

On most agent sites the about page is second or third in traffic behind the home page. People read it right before they call.

Write it the way you talk. Where you grew up. How long you have been licensed. How many closings you did last year. What part of this job you are best at. If you swung a hammer for ten years before you got your license, say that, because somebody looking at a 1958 cape in North Haven wants to hear it.

Cut the paragraph about being passionate about helping families find their dream home. Every agent in Connecticut has that paragraph, and it has never made one person pick up a phone.

Tell them what happens after they call

A first time buyer in Meriden has no idea what the next six months look like. Write the steps out. The first call, the lender conversation, showings, writing an offer, inspection, appraisal, closing day. Seven or eight short steps is plenty.

Do the same thing for sellers. Walkthrough, pricing conversation, repairs worth making, photos, listing date, showings, offers.

This page does the work of a good first meeting, and it does it at eleven at night when somebody is on their phone and not ready to talk to anyone yet.

Why an IDX feed is usually not the first move

IDX is the listings search that pulls MLS data onto your site. It is the first thing agents ask me about, and it runs somewhere between fifty and a hundred and fifty dollars a month on top of what the site costs.

Here is the problem. Those listing pages are the same listings sitting on Zillow, Realtor.com, Redfin and every other agent site in New Haven County. Google already picked which version of that page it shows, and it did not pick yours. And anybody can search listings anywhere in two seconds, so a copy of that same search gives nobody a reason to stay on your site.

Build the rest first, then add IDX once you have traffic worth feeding it. There is one case where it earns the money early. If you are running paid ads at a narrow search, something like multi family under four hundred thousand in Meriden, you need somewhere specific to send that traffic. Short of that, it is a monthly bill attached to pages Google will not show.

What to leave off

Mortgage calculators. There are a hundred free ones and nobody ever chose an agent because of one.

Automated market reports pulled from a data feed with none of your own writing around them.

Chat widgets that are really an answering service in another country handling your leads before you see them.

Home valuation pop ups that demand an email before they show a number. Most people close those.

Drone footage playing behind your headline, which slows the page down on the phones most of your visitors are using.

And a blog you will post to twice and abandon. A blog whose most recent post is dated eighteen months ago says something about you that you do not want it saying.

It has to work on a phone

Roughly seven in ten of your visitors are on a phone. Your number should be tappable, not typed out as text. Forms should have three fields: name, phone, and what they need. Every extra field costs you submissions.

The page should load in under three seconds. That usually means not stacking oversized photos and five tracking scripts on one page.

Questions I get about this

Want to know what your site is missing?

That is what the Get Your Free Online Visibility Audit is for. I go through your site page by page, run the searches a buyer in your town would type and see who comes back ahead of you, look at your Google Business Profile against the agents sitting above you, and check whether AI tools know enough about you to name you when somebody asks who to call in Southington. Then I tell you the two or three things worth fixing first and what each one would change. Sometimes the answer is that your site is fine and your reviews are what is holding you back, and I will say that too.