If you want to target international markets to sell property in your area, don’t be fobbed off with by website designers who tell you that all you need to do is create a few translations of your website and some flags in your header. In today’s competitive environment, that’s just throwing money down the drain. Multilingual real estate websites are a waste of money unless done properly. Here’s why.
Let’s say you are selling property in Portugal. You have been selling property to the UK market for years, and your "example.com" website has been doing pretty well. But now you have noticed and increased volume of potential buyers from Germany, Italy and France.
Your website designer has told you that all you need to do is translate your site into German, Italian and French and you will start attracting those buyers with example.com/de, example.com/it and example/fr on your server by creating a multilingual real estate website.
Wrong.
Google has favours local search results, so if you are searching from Germany with Google.de, the search engine will favour websites that are based in Germany. And for France and Italy, Google will want to see sites based on servers in those countries. You need to make real estate websites multi-regional not just multilingual.
Simple adding an extension to your site and serving pages from your existing location is going to be an uphill battle to convince Google’s algorithm to rank you in search results in other countries. A post from Searchengineland.com in February 2018 explains this. Your website needs to appear in the regions that people are searching from, not just in their language. Multilingual real estate websites are not enough.
To reduce SEO costs and compete effectively, you need to base your German site in Germany, your French site in France and your Italian site in Italy. Each of these sites is going to need its own local domain, which could be example.de in Germany, example.fr in France and example.it in Italy.
Now Google is going to take these multilingual real estate websites seriously as information sources for users searching in those countries because they are multi-regional. They have local domain names and they are based on local servers in the appropriate country.
For website designers is that this is a real technical problem. Translation software on the market is simply not capable of synchronising multilingual real estate websites across different servers spread around the world.
Fortunately, this is what the Respacio system has been designed to do. The Respacio CRM can populate your sites with your properties around the globe, on separate servers with unique domain names by creating a multi-regional real estate website network. The Theme and plugins ensure that all pages are synchronised, so if you press the Italian flag from Germany, you will be taken to the equivalent page on another server with a different domain name.
This is a feature unique to Respacio, yet absolutely vital for any agent or developer selling to an international market. Book a demo today and discover how this can work for you.
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