Here’s a true fact of BloodhoundBlog life: Trulia.com can be a redheaded stepchild around here. We’re always happy to pounce on Redfin.com or to pontificate about Zillow.com, but Trulia most often gets short shrift. It mainly comes across like Realtor.com’s younger, smarter, cheaper brother — and no one with a stock-option plan needs to write to me to tell me this is an unfair characterization. Trulia is certainly less adept at — or perhaps less interested in — grabbing headlines. The flip side is that the start-up is recovering its own costs, an unheard-of feat in the Web 2.0 world.
But here is another factor that sets Trulia apart, one that cuts much closer to this Realtor’s bones:
Trulia.com absolutely kills at long tail search optimization.
Mary McKnight advised us yesterday to ignore the long tail, but that advice doesn’t make sense in our business. If I were competing for prospects in Cedar Rapids, then focusing a lot of attention on Cedar Rapids keywords might make sense. But Phoenix is home to five million souls. The Metropolitan Phoenix real estate market comprises an area larger than Belgium. Moreover, our own real estate practice is focused on a tightly-defined niche. We live and die on long tail keywords.
And this is why I am hyper-aware of Trulia’s long tail efforts. I keep a constant eye on street names where we are strong or want to be strong. People cruise the neighborhoods we work at 15 MPH, looking at every house for sale. If they write down an address and Google it later, I want for them to find us. If it’s our listing, so much the better, but I want for them to find the breadcrumbs we leave behind us no matter what.
Watch this: 921 West Culver Street is for sale, but nobody told Google. In consequence, one of our old single-property web sites comes up first for that search (YMMV), giving us first crack at any buyers who Google for more information about that home.
By contrast: 714 West Culver Street is also for sale, but there’s only one dog peeing on that tree right now. That’s a thing of beauty…
This topic occurs to me now because of a phone call and email exchange I had yesterday. Redfin.com CEO Glenn Kelman placed a nice-guy call wondering why BloodhoundBlog uses post numbers instead of keywords in our permalinks. I’ve written about this before, but the short answer is two answers: 1. I live by the least principle, so I tend not to change a default unless I have a compelling reason for doing so. 2. Our permalink structure makes it very easy to produce error-free deep links back into the weblog, which is hugely beneficial for SEO purposes, since it shows Google how ideas are interrelated.
But it does raise some interesting questions. This is a Trulia link to a house:
http://www.trulia.com/property/39449511-714-W-Culver-St-Phoenix-AZ-85007
Here is Zillow.com’s link for that same house:
http://www.zillow.com/HomeDetails.htm?zprop=7521268
I’m thinking there is a tenable argument to be made that Google doesn’t attend to anything in a URL beyond the question mark (which denotes the beginning of program variables to be used by the target page). But even if Google is trying to parse the full URL, Zillow gives it nothing useful to work with.
Interestingly, a Zillow.com page is rich-enough with internal keywords that it would at least score with Google, even if it didn’t score high. Except that Zillow’s property pages seem to be inherently unspiderable. Absent a site-map or something like that, Google has no way of know that — count ’em — 80 million property pages even exist.
So this is thrown out to the house, especially to Eric Blackwell, Eric Bramlett and the members of Team Eric:
- Is Trulia’s permalink structure enough to account for its incredible long tail SEO performance, or is there more at work here?
- If you were Zillow.com, what would you do to assert your ownership over 80 million SERPs?
- What can you tell us in general about the SEO value of URLs?
So you know, I’ll be talking about a chunk of this at BloodhoundBlog Unchained: My strategy for using the long tail to dominate the short head in our market niche. I think I know how to push Trulia down the page. God help me if I have to fight off Zillow, too…
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, technology
Eric Bramlett says:
Greg –
Thanks for the props! URL structure is a piece of the puzzle. When you’re looking at hitting longtails, IMHO, the following pieces come into play:
1) The sites overall authority (PR)
2) The sites internal link structure
3) Proper on-site characteristics of the particular page – i.e. URL structure, title tags, & header tags
The URL structure, in and of itself, is not going to make something rank, but if you hit on all 3 cylinders that I’ve described above, you will do great with the longtail.
BTW – here’s a good WordPress tidbit that Ryan Ward taught me a while back:
Go to admin > settings > permalinks
Choose “custom” and type in /%postname%/
Now all of your wordpress URLs will be pretty & SEO’ed!
April 17, 2008 — 9:07 am
Milan says:
If you look at the google search for 714 west culver from above, the top 3 results have the address in the title and the URL. For 921 west culver, you are getting the serp from on page content. If you were to make a page that had the same photo, with the address in the title tag and the URL, then that page would likely beat the other page over time. AFAIK.
April 17, 2008 — 9:18 am
Greg Swann says:
Here is an example of us totally clobbering Trulia:
“718 West Moreland Street”
We’re getting five out of the seven results that I am seeing — again your mileage may vary.
I have plans for achieving results like that for thousands of houses in 35 different neighborhoods.
April 17, 2008 — 9:29 am
Eric Bramlett says:
Greg –
Briefly looking at Zillow vs. Trulia, it looks like Zillow’s internal link structure is their biggest problem. If you scroll to the footer on Trulia, you can see that they have internal links pointing to the major metro areas & states, and then the spiders can easily crawl through to the actual listings. Zillow’s internal link structure is almost non-existent.
Any local guy w/ a decent amount of PR should be able to clobber any national portal w/ respect to individual listings (especially if you’re putting your listings on blog pages.) Zillow & Trulia both carry a lot of juice, but it is spready REALLY thin by the time it gets to their hundreds of thousands of listings. So…a local guy w/ a PR5 site (BHB) who puts his listings w/in a couple of clicks of the home page will annihilate the big guys.
April 17, 2008 — 9:34 am
G. Dewald says:
Hello Greg,
Adjusting your URL structure for SEO is often referred to as making “Search Engine Friendly” (SEF) URLs. A Google search for that term will yield tons of resources.
Current thinking is that the SEF URLs don’t do much for your page ranking, but they do offer great usability advantages. For example, on a SERP all the keywords will be bolded. So if your URL has the keywords in it, they will be bolded on the SERP. I guess that Search Engine Friendly URLS are really People Friendly URLs.
This article at SEOmoz describes the situation pretty well (the SEF stuff is lower down in the article but everything else is good too).
As with all things SEO, the algorithm could change tomorrow and make this all irrelevant.
Your other questions:
Is the link structure responsible for Trulia’s Long Tail performance? I agree with Eric’s comment at 9:34am on that one. Internal link development is an oft-forgotten chore.
If I was Zillow how would I dominate? Fix the internal linking, maybe go SEF URLs for the usability, hire writers for niches to capture (starting with easy ones), do paid search (no effect on your organics but lead quality from paid searches tends to be greater–and it at least gets you on the SERP), do some serious analysis of keyword performance… list could go on forever I suppose.
April 17, 2008 — 10:42 am
Eric Blackwell says:
Ok, GREAT question.
First off, I really don’t want to address too much of the “how to” here in public for a national site to take out their local counterparts. (grin) As I have written before, I view Z! and T! as respected competitors, but competitors. So my comments will be more general.
Your question was “Is managing your url structure enough…”. In some cases it will be and in some cases it will not IMO. More often than not as things are currently YES…
However, I agree with Bramlett’s sentiment expressed here:
“Any local guy w/ a decent amount of PR should be able to clobber any national portal w/ respect to individual listings”
Why? Because there are less layers between the homepage and the “home” page. (grin).
Are there ways of a national site winning the battle? (theoretically -YES) (practically-more difficult). It’s all about the budget. How far down the rabbit hole can they AFFORD to dig and still recoup their investment?
I think that the long tail is a MUCH better target PRECISELY because it is harder for the national big dogs to profitably chase local sites there. (read: DISAGREE with Mary there)
I will look at Trulia’s structure in more detail in a bit…As for advice to Zillow? That typically comes with an NDA to them from me and a large check from them to me (grin). Remember that if I post ideas here, Trulia can more easily counteract them…
It is not about the strongest or the fastest, but those most responsive to change.
Best;
Eric
April 17, 2008 — 11:00 am
Pete Flint from Trulia.com says:
“Red headed step child”; “smarter, cheaper, younger brother”; and a few others I’m sure and not even a sign of canine comparison… Love the quotes!
It’s early days Greg, I’m sure we’ll give you a lot more to write about this year and for many years to come!
Pete
April 17, 2008 — 11:37 am
Todd says:
But wouldn’t just enabling the “clean URLs” option in WordPress or Drupal, then creating an entry with the address as the title, get you the same results as Trulia?
http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks
Also, if you are allowing cookies by Google, they are counting the hops the page request makes and that skews both the results you see and the Adsense ads( regional, in the context of where you are ). Won’t that mess up the idea of using the house address as the URL?
Confused.
April 17, 2008 — 12:58 pm
G. Dewald says:
Another SEOMoz link with a bunch of insights about various aspects of page elements in getting good SEO.
For SEF URLs they mention that people will often use a URL as link text, which will help as part of your backlinking as well. Not directly helping your SERP ranking via the algorithm, but helping it indirectly as part of your backlink strategy.
April 17, 2008 — 1:16 pm
Todd Carpenter says:
When I first publish a “just listed” post on Denver Modern, I almost always beat Trulia. Well after the listing has left my home page, Trulia tends to overtake me.
I wonder if switching to clean links would help me?
April 17, 2008 — 4:39 pm
Eric Blackwell says:
@Todd-There are some tricks to taking an already established blog with tons of posts and flipping it to search engine friendly links.
Yes, when you are starting a new blog it is as easy as Bramlett has indicated. Much more to it later on. Don’t have time to go into it.
@the post- After further review, there is actually much more going on that just clean links with Trulia…and needs more to beef Z! than just that change by a longshot.
Best;
Eric
April 17, 2008 — 5:04 pm
Ryan Ward says:
There is more to it than just the URL. Just as an example, here are some search results for a home using different terms. First, Search by MLS#
Next, the property address.
In the first result (search mls#), you will see my individual page 1st in google. For the address, you will find truia first.
Upon further inspection the answer may partly be found in the url, but, the magic takes place elsewhere. Look at the title and description in the search results.
I have chosen to pull the “city real estate listing #1234567” as my title where trulia has elected a different approach in using the address as the title.
You could look in further detail at those two search results and find other significant differences. Some deal with “click through” while others deal with “optimization”.
I look at like this: it’s an extremely competitve environment and sometimes the difference between 1 and 2 are in the details so it’s best to make sure that everything is “search engine” and “people reading” friendly.
For you it would be insane to change your urls – unless you don’t like sleep as you would really need to redirect all of the current URL’s to the SEF url’s – that would be a nightmare.
April 17, 2008 — 7:57 pm
Bob Wilson says:
Trulia has authority and link structure. Their urls help with click through conversion.
Links are not all created equal and Trulia understands this. One aspect of the ranking algo is local rank, where Google factors in links from pages in the same subset. A very simplistic explanation would be to take the top 1000 results for a specific search query and score it, then see which pages have links from other links in the same subset. Factor those in and reshuffle. That is local rank. Factor in the local rank score with the 1st score and reshuffle again. Then you have the results you see when you Google the query.
In the end, Trulia will win the war against the agents in the markets they target since the agents keep arming Trulia by giving them links via their widgets with alt text like “real estate search“.
April 17, 2008 — 10:13 pm
Ryan Ward says:
Can’t argue with you on the widgets Bob. It’s agents that are powering them. While they nofollow the links back to agent sites, their widgets are NOT nofollow.
That and maybe some paid links…
April 18, 2008 — 4:05 am
Eric Blackwell says:
I’d agree on the widgets as well on that Bob…yet again we feed the hand that competes with us. ( I don’t want to hear any griping from folks when the revenue model magically “changes” grin…). Those free widgets will not be free then. (Well, they aren’t now..)
They are very good at creatively letting REALTORS bring the keg to their party IMO. That’s not a knock on them as much as an indictment of us. Gotta appreciate their work.
April 18, 2008 — 4:16 am
Bob Wilson says:
Those links are a double whammy because they contribute to the local rank aspect of the algo and they are extremely relevant.
As Eric points out, agents need to understand that most widgets these days are not free. You are paying for their online marketing.
In most cases, no.
April 18, 2008 — 8:44 am
David G from Zillow.com says:
Hey Greg, just because I have nothing to add, that doesn’t make me “sphinx-like”! 😉 This was simply a very well researched and written piece and I agree with you. I can confirm that we are actively working on this opportunity; there is a lot of similar opportunity for SEO on zillow.com and we plan to make the most of it.
April 30, 2008 — 7:59 am
Greg Swann says:
Not to worry, David. Rock and a hard place. Plus which, Zillow wins my vote by setting up the hierarchy as owner/agent/broker/third-party-vendor, rather than letting brokers or brokerage chains eat their own young.
April 30, 2008 — 8:04 am
Jay Valento - Long Beach real estate says:
Thanks for sharing about Trulia.
August 21, 2008 — 8:07 am
Jay Valento - Long Beach real estate says:
I notice T! and Y! ranking ahead of us for some of our key phrases.
I’m a little confused here…T!, R! and Y! are all in the business of selling ad space.
We should be able to share in that revenue…since it is our listings helping their businesses grow. Doesn’t that make sense.
When you take a listing, add a page to your website with the address. Stick the address in the title. Describe it in the description and add some keywords for that page. Then, blog about it.
Remove your “real estate search” links to T!…and any to Y! so neither one pushes ahead of the pack in your local marketplace.
Thanks for sharing about Trulia.
August 21, 2008 — 8:21 am