If you are using WordPress for your real estate marketing website, then there are countless customizations that are available to you. Many of these plugins and page enhancements are offered to users for free or a very modest price, and can be easily added to your site with very little hassle. Additionally, each upgrade can greatly enhance your visitors’ experience and really improve the overall appeal.
Although the following options are not ideal for every single real estate professional, there are plenty for you to pick and choose from for your own purposes. So without further ado, let’s review a list of 4 powerful tools that you can start to use right away on your own site.
Simple Real Estate Pack:
This is a comprehensive real estate marketing plugin that provides a ton of functionality. Some of the features include:
- Trulia market trends, charts and graphs for your local area
- A set of calculators to evaluate your mortgage and closing costs, or the affordability of a home
- Google Maps
- Up-to-date Zillow API mortgage rates
- Local schools based on various search criteria
- and Yelp listings (up to a 3 mile radius)
Realbird or IDX Plugins:
Since every agent and broker has different goals and expectations, there is not any one IDX solution that I will recommend above another. With that said, the system we provide our clients for their real estate marketing websites is known as Realbird.com.
The benefit of this platform is that you can easily set up customized searches on a specific page or within your sidebar area. However, this does not pull listings from the MLS, so there are some who choose to use their own system instead. Other plugins that are available at WordPress are Optima Express IDX, IDX Broker, of Flexmls IDX.
Headspace or All in One SEO:
Again, these are not the only two SEO friendly plugins, but they have worked wonders for many of our own sites. For those who are trying to fully optimize their real estate marketing websites for specific local search terms, you probably want to consider downloading one of these two options.
Both plugins will give you the ability to submit meta descriptions/keywords and search engine friendly titles for each post or page that you are creating. Therefore, whenever the search engines visit your site, content will be properly indexed and your site can begin to rank better.
Slick Social Share Buttons:
As you may have heard, social sharing and promotion continues to have greater influence on both SEO rankings as well as driving traffic. Therefore, you must setup up a super simple way for folks to “like” content from your real estate marketing website.
One tool I absolutely love for this is the Slick Social Share Buttons plugin, because it provides a very clear-cut yet non obtrusive “floating” box for users to quickly share information. People are much more likely to do this when it is gently suggested to them.
Finally, if you are still in need of some additional options not covered here, then there are some simple steps you can take. You can either type in your search terms into Google to find plenty of articles and tutorials that can guide you along the way. Or you can simply run a search within your website’s backend by selecting “add new” under your “plugins” menu.