New SEO- and User-Friendly Site Improves Deliverability of RISMedia’s High-Quality Content
In what’s been nothing short of a break-out year for Real Estate Webmasters (REW), the web design, branding and SEO powerhouse whose Renaissance website platform helps brokers compete with the Zillows and Compasses of the world, the firm also delivered a highly custom, transformational rebrand of RISMedia, as well as a complete overhaul and relaunch of the firm’s real estate news and events website, RISMedia.com.
RISMedia unveiled its new, modern brand design and tagline, “Integrity In Real Estate,” in March, and launched its new website and technology platform last month.
Real Estate Webmasters refreshed the brand with a modernized and more flexible look and feel, and the website with a clean, accessible and easily navigable layout. In addition to lightning-fast speed and a fresh mobile look, REW and RISMedia embraced more video on the revamped site, as well as less intrusive advertisements.
“Being selected by RISMedia to do their rebrand and then be offered the chance to completely rebuild their web platforms has truly been the highlight of my career,” says Real Estate Webmasters CEO Morgan Carey. “RISMedia is the most trusted source of news in the real estate industry and Real Estate magazine is read by the most influential leaders in the space. To have ‘Designed by Real Estate Webmasters’ on this new platform sends a message to the industry that we truly are the firm to hire for highly custom enterprise projects.”
A Transformational Year
The two teams met online often and worked closely together, initially to take a deeper dive into RISMedia’s 41-year history in the real estate space, their goals and vision for the future, as well as what their technical and content management needs are as a media company now and into the future. Then, over the four-month-long build, the teams continued to collaborate to bring RISMedia’s vision to life. According to RISMedia Founder, CEO and Publisher John Featherston, now was the right time to invest in these significant company upgrades.
“We recognized that over the past two years we needed to reinvent the infrastructure that makes RISMedia work,” Featherston explains. “We found in Morgan Carey and his talented team the best partner, with expertise in all the elements necessary to create a state-of-the-art platform that will ensure that RISMedia will serve its customers more efficiently and effectively—in a way they expect, and in a way that will allow us to grow. Information is our currency, and delivering that effectively is just as important as creating it.”
Building a Site for the Future
According to Carey, with RISMedia’s history and goals now in sight, when it came time to turn from the rebrand to the website build, “admittedly this was much easier for us,” given his company’s expertise in SEO, site design and engineering.
“We have 20 years of experience building SEO-friendly, traffic-generating web platforms that are fully responsive and look amazing,” says Carey. “Our specialty is high-end, custom platforms specific to real estate, and so for us, once the rebrand was done, we knew exactly what to do to make RISMedia.com the best it could be.”
A big part of that was designing for a media company that has been in the space for a long time, specifically, working with the firm’s legacy content. RISMedia has many different content types and as an early internet adopter, has decades of pages of content, posts, awards, backlinks and file structures, the teams explained.
“All of these things contribute to RISMedia.com’s SEO and must be handled with care and precision,” Carey explains. “Luckily REW was founded on SEO consulting, which is a core tenet of everything we do. Real Estate Webmasters provided full audit services and worked hand-in-hand with RISMedia’s content team to not only protect their most valuable asset, but also ensure that they were set up to grow their organic traffic and SEO results over time.”
What Else Can RISMedia Website Visitors Now Expect?
In addition to the modern, clean design and user-friendly experience, Carey says RISMedia readers will love the fully responsive, mobile experience, more video and how easy the site is to navigate.
“As most brokers know, video is the new preferred medium for the next generation of consumers and one of the most effective ways to build authority and connect with your audience,” says Carey. “This is such a great example of how RISMedia embraces change. John Featherston has been doing this for more than 40 years, yet he was the first to agree that video needed to be a part of this project—and in true John fashion, not only did he support the idea, he led from the front. You can see him featured heavily in the video content sections.”
Ultimately, the history and experience in the industry and the entrepreneurial spirit of these two companies combined to create just the right synergies needed for a phenomenal end result.
“Real Estate Webmasters did an incredible job with the rebranding of RISMedia,” says Kelli McKenna, RISMedia senior vice president of Creative Services and Marketing. “They really took the time to understand who we are and what our future goals are, and translated that into a fresh, modern design that begins with our logo and tagline and carries through across the new website design. That isn’t easy to do for an established brand with over 41 years in the real estate industry. We had such a fun, positive experience working collaboratively with the Real Estate Webmasters team. They truly knocked our rebrand and website redesign out of the park.”
What’s Next for These Two Companies?
In addition to the rebrand and website, RISMedia has made other significant investments this year, including a series of executive appointments and strategic hires, designed to further strengthen RISMedia’s editorial, creative, technology and customer service teams as the company plans its continued expansion throughout 2022.
For Real Estate Webmasters, 2021 has been a break-out year, Carey says, especially in the enterprise space (300-plus agent brokerages). In addition to launching the new RISMedia site in Q4, they are launching several other, very large, custom enterprise projects as well.
“We’re starting to see brokerages at the highest level invest in lead generation for their agents and we’re excited to share that we have recently been signed by one of the top 10 brokerages (worldwide) to provide the new Renaissance platform, REW CRM and lead generation services to their agents,” says Carey. “We’re honored to be participating in their story, and look forward to helping support their goals of continued exponential growth.”
As for the RISMedia/Real Estate Webmasters relationship, next year, readers can expect the innovation at RISMedia to continue as the two companies have agreed to a multi-year, multi-million-dollar contract extension that has Real Estate Webmasters playing a critical role in other innovative projects at RISMedia, and also driving massive traffic to RISMedia advertisers and Power Brokers, says Carey.
“For the Power Brokers, our SEO team has some exciting opportunities to help them benefit from the authority of RISMedia.com to both boost their online reputation and even help their own brokerage websites rank,” he explains. “Stay tuned!”
For more information, visit www.realestatewebmasters.com.
Beth McGuire is RISMedia’s vice president of Online Editorial. Email her your story ideas at beth@rismedia.com.
