Hosted website builder CRMs or marketing sites – whether for real estate, services (like yoga, personal trainers, and restaurants) and so forth are still very popular especially with startup businesses. They promise many benefits, with the price for creating a website being the most attractive, but they fall short one one thing, the most important thing. SEO.
What Are Hosted Website Builder CRMs?
Hosted Website Builder CRMs or marketing platforms are companies that offer an easy “prepackaged website” in a particular industry sector. For example, real estate, vacation or short-term rental properties, services (yoga, meditation, restaurants), etc.
Examples of hosted industry Website Builder CRMs are
- Real estate – Placester, AgentFire
- Short term rental hosted listing sites – OwnerRez, Lodgify
- Services – OfferingTree, MyPersonalTrainer, PopMenu
Instead of building a website from scratch, these services offer a ready-made, templatized platform to get your business website live in only a few clicks. All you need do is choose your domain name and write the copy.
Why do People Use Hosted Website Builder CRMs?
It comes down to ease of use vs skill and of course, money.
When starting out, many businesses do not have large budgets. These website builders offer a very attractive all-in-one packaged website solution including booking facilities, pricing management, calendar management, property listings or table reservations – depending on the industry. An easy way to get your business going without having to pay a designer or website developer.
It makes a lot of sense, and they do work well, up to a point.
When your business is established around 2-3 years and you really want to invest in business growth, these platforms become very limiting.
Why does SEO Suffer with Hosted Website Builder CRMs?
The platforms have pre-built fields or content areas for most of your industry requirements. If we look at the real estate example, they typically offer a home page, page about the company, service page and also allow you to add property listing information. Title, price, description and a few photos – the usual fields one would expect for a real estate site.
A good brochure type site. But marketing this site will rely on inbound digital marketing practices as for all intents and purposes, it will always remain just that. A brochure site. You can’t grow your site content by much, and you can’t rely on it achieving great rankings in Search Engines like Google or Bing.
Hosted Wesbsite Builder CRMs claim to have SEO capabilities, but it generally is more of a sales-pitch than actual SEO capabilities. Many of them have very strict, or predefined, field-naming-conventions for URLs, images and sometimes even content. Some do not allow you to edit these fields, or your Title and meta descriptions per page! All of these non-editable elements throttle SEO.
When you start to pay more attention to your digital marketing efforts and how your website could work to attract more customers, you are stuck. A growing business will hit the surface ceiling of digital marketing capabilities very quickly on these platforms.
When you start to get serious about growing your business and speak to marketing professionals, most people do get a little shock at what they learn. The fact that you’ve hit the surface ceiling of what your platform offers and if you wanted to take it to the next level, you need to consider changing platforms.
The second shock comes when you learn that you’re kind of locked-in with this provider as the site that you’ve built is not yours. This is how the platform makes money after-all. There is no way to export any of your content or hard-earned achievements. You will be starting from scratch if you switch to a new platform, or own website.
I have previously been asked:
“Can’t you just create a blog on a sub-domain and connect it to our existing CRM site?”
Sure you can. But there is NO SEO value there! Well, let’s put it this way, you will need to work triple as hard to build value from that. A sub-domain is seen as a separate domain in the eyes of Google. You might as well create a new site then anyway! The value comes from being able to manipulate technical areas such as URLs, image naming conventions, Title & Meta data and building content on the SAME domain, not a separate domain.
“What will happen if I build on the sub-domain regardless?”
The simplest answer is that the sub-domain will achieve higher rankings in Google than your “primary domain”.
If you’re taking the time to build out a separate blog, the work involved is really not that much more to add your core pages, booking forms or calendar integration. And the return you will receive in performance is 3-fold.
And lastly, all the other sites (your competitors) that are built on an industry hosted website builder CRM platform have the same technical functionality. The content may vary and the design might vary, slightly, but for all intents and purposes you can’t really outperform anyone else on the platform – unless you’re investing more in your other digital marketing channels like Social Media, email marketing or even Paid Search. The latter can become expensive too, especially if you are not able to edit the technical side of the site. Paid search values good SEO foundations and you will pay less CPCs (cost per click) where you have a solid SEO foundation available.
Costs vs Skills: Hosted Website Builder CRMs vs Own Website
As already discussed, when starting out it makes a lot of sense to use these industry website builder CRMs. You can get launched very quickly and with very little technical or design knowledge. You know what you will pay monthly or yearly upfront and what that will provide for you. Some of these CRMs make you pay in addition for your leads, so read the fine-print!
To build your own website you would require a few more technical skills depending on which platform you choose to build on. SquareSpace has quickly become an easy-to-use platform and provides drag-and-drop functionality and existing design templates to make things easy for you if you’re not technically, or design inclined. BUT SquareSpace is also a type of website CRM builder and does have limited technical and SEO functionality too. It is one step up from the industry CRMs though, but ultimately you will also hit a performance ceiling here.
To truly have full control of your website, you need to build on a platform where you have control. WordPress is a good option, but even here, you can get locked into platform limitations depending on the designer/web developer you choose to work with. This is a reason why many people opt out of this route – because it is difficult to tell when you’re getting the wool pulled over your eyes. It is critical to work with a digital consultant that knows their stuff, and able to advise you.
I have helped businesses successfully switch from hosted website builder CRMs.
Real estate : PropertyFox was the first flat-commission based real estate agency in South Africa who were locked-in with a website builder CRM. They approached me to help them take their business to the next level as they had been operating for a year, but were not making any performance progress. My recommendation was to move platforms. At first they were very hesitant as they did not wish to spend money doing this, but after showing them the potential performance rewards, they approved it. Under my strategy it quickly gained momentum as the as the number one flat-commission based real estate agent in the country in less than a year after switching.
Service : Pilates Wellbeing Studio in California. The studio was struggling to gain clients for new instructors. Everyone wanted to only have a consultation with the primary founder and owner, who had limited time. The website at the time was locked-in to a service based hosted website builder CRM and was not really able to market itself and the new offerings very well. I advised them to consider breaking away from the CRM and create their own standalone site using WordPress. We built out various profiles for all the instructors, integrated with Calendar system called MindBody, and quickly the instructors also gained new clients as we were able to market each of the instructors in their own right, not only the founder.
Lessons to take away:
- If you choose to use the pre-built CRM platforms, go in with your eyes open and plan to rebuild 2-3 years down the line if you want to grow your business exponentially.
- Do not rely on your website as the only source of traffic for your business. If you’re using a pre-built CRM you will need to rely on other marketing channels regardless.
- Do not think that you can bolster your hosted website CRM by attaching a blog on a sub-domain.
- Work with an experienced digital marketing specialist to help you navigate your options once your business is more settled and ready to take the next steps.
If you need expert advice on how to increase your business leads from your website, get in touch. Christine da Silva is a highly experienced digital marketing strategist and consultant with her speciality being lead generation and optimizaton across all marketing channels, most notably Search Engine Optimization (SEO).