SEO Benefits: Responsive websites for estate agents

The internet is no longer limited to your home or office. Wireless internet connection, 3G and 4G has allowed us to break away from cables, giving us the freedom to connect to your estate agent website from almost anywhere.

This freedom has allowed the mobile market to explode over the last few years which has brought on another obstacle for website owners. Your audience can now visit your website from almost any device; this may be a mobile phone, a phablet, a tablet, a laptop, a PC or even a television. The obstacle for estate agents is accommodating your website to be able to be easily used via all these devices and screen sizes.

With this issue you have one of three choices:

1. Continue to only have a website that fits a desktop screen and allow your customer to suffer, which could lead to them choosing a competitor over you.
2. Create a mobile website to run alongside your website.
3. Go responsive.

Responsive or mobile website?

What’s the difference?

A responsive website is a single website that adjusts to fit the users screen size.

A mobile website runs alongside your existing website and will switch to the mobile version when the user visits your site from a mobile device.

Which one is better for usability and SEO?

For SEO, responsive design is usually your best option as you only have to worry about one URL. With mobile websites the URL changes to m. or mobile. which means you have to worry about getting the coding right for each version of the page. If you get this wrong you can cause all types of problems for your SEO. Mobile websites are still able to perform just as well for SEO as responsive websites as long as they are built correctly.

Responsive is definitely better for usability as well as it resizes for all types of screens, whereas a mobile website is still a fixed website. For those of you who are intent on giving your users the best usability possible responsive is definitely the way to go.

However, although responsive is the better option it may not be suited for everyone, due to cost. Responsive website are still very expensive to build so unless you are intent on giving your users the best experience possible, a mobile websites may be the best choice for you.

Whatever your decision, mobile is the future. If you haven’t got a mobile friendly website yet, it is crucial you get one.