This is in response to Greg’s post about Jim Flanagan’s question, “What does today’s real estate consumer want in (on) a real estate brokerage’s website?” “Listings” was the predictable, correct answer.
It’s no secret that Real Estate Web site users are primarily interested in listings. That’s why everyone has them, and that makes listings a commodity. That begs the question: When everyone offers the content that your target audience is looking for, how do you set your site apart?
Blogging is one answer, but at the outset most consumers are not looking for you or your expertise, they are looking for listings, so at the end of the day, listing content is still the most powerful thing you have control over when it comes to attracting users to your site.
Before I spent most of my time on Real Estate (I heard you get to make your own hours and its easy money, plus I am a real “people person”), I managed eCommerce sites for a living.
If there is one golden rule of successful B2C eCommerce, it is this: Content is currency.
Consumers are used to the wealth of content that Amazon puts around a copy of Home Buying for Dummies. They are not impressed by cheap, 50-word “descriptions” full of Real Estate jargon and one or two grainy pictures from the IDX feed that feature cat boxes, dishes in the sink, and amateur porn lighting.
Google is not impressed when the content you offer on your own site is identical to the content that is offered on sites it considers more authoritative than yours.
The answer is to add value to your currency. Start by minting rich content and then stop giving it away and you will get more visits from both Google and humans. It’s a three-step process:
Step 1: Develop rich content for your listings, or for listings that you get permission to modify on your site. At a minimum, that means a few hundred words of grammatically correct English, lots of decent photos, and the right meta data in the right places.
(There have been many posts on BHB about how to write decent listing content. There are also books about how to create eCommerce content that sells. Intelligent Selling by Ken Burke is a good one. There are no shortcuts.)
Step 2: This is crucial: Devalue the content you give away to your MLS and to third-party aggregators like Trulia.
Boil your rich content down to a version that hits the highlights, but is less fulfilling than the rich content you created in Step 1 so that users on third party sites who may be interested in your listing can find it on those sites.
Step 3: Make sure the GoogleBot knows about your richer, more valuable content.
When a Google user enters keywords that are relevant to your listings, Google will be comparing your rich content to the devalued content you gave away. That devalued content ends up on Realtor.com and hundreds of competitor’s sites via IDX, and it ends up on Trulia, surrounded by no-follow tags.
In most cases where Google is comparing Property Detail pages, the value of your rich content will be enough to overcome a larger, more authoritative site in Page Rank, and you will own your listing in the organic results.
Do that, and you will have the opportunity to introduce the users you attract to your listings to other content, like your blog. That’s how you get them to come back to you over the course of their research period. Think of it as a benevolent “bait and switch”: Get them in the door with listing content, get them to stay because you are a credible expert in your area.
Donna Malone says:
Yes content is king, there nothing more important than the information you have that others doesn’t.
February 12, 2009 — 10:45 am
Thomas Johnson says:
Devalue the content you give away to your MLS and to third-party aggregators like Trulia.
Do they make a bulk porn pixellator for jpegs? Perhaps a waxed fruit catbox with decorator faux finish as a prop? We can’t forget silk Truliups in a vase as the ultimate in staging for the MLS shots.
Benevolent bait and switch is a very fine tightrope.
February 12, 2009 — 11:29 pm
James Wheelock says:
Tom, you crack me up! I personally don’t want to be connected to anything that has bait and switch in the title. I personally see a huge issue with this “Benevolent bait and switch.” My client must always come first far ahead of myself. This being the case if I am not framing my clients listing in the best light possible I should have my licensed stripped.
February 12, 2009 — 11:54 pm
Thomas Johnson says:
@ James: As I said-very fine tight rope.
February 12, 2009 — 11:57 pm
John Rowles says:
@ Thomas: The keyword is “benevolent” — You are baiting with decent listing content (selling the property), then switching to decent blog and other content (selling you), b/c that’s the order in which most Homebuyers approach the process.
@James: This is about owning your listings on Google, which is where most Real Estate searches start. Using the content you build around your listings to increase traffic to your Web site is in your client’s best interest as well as your own.
I didn’t advocate withholding listings from the likes of Realtor.com and Trulia. What I am saying is that you can compete for “primary eyeballs” in the same place that those sites get most of their traffic (Big G), and modulating your content is one of the most effective tactics you have at your disposal to do that.
February 13, 2009 — 6:14 am
Buenos Aires Real Estate says:
Thanks John for your interesting post.-
February 13, 2009 — 6:27 am
Cheryl Johnson says:
Maybe people are put off by the term “devalued”. But, this is a good practical, common sense idea.
After all, there are limitations to how much information you can place in an MLS listing, or in a online classified posting. So all those services receive the “executive summary” version.
Your own sites/blogs contain the “expanded” version. (If you are Greg Swann, the expanded version is multiple pages of passionate prose 🙂 )
And the “expanded” version gets better search position by virtue of the fact that it ~is~ expanded.
February 13, 2009 — 7:09 am
John Rowles says:
@Cheryl: You’re right. Both “devalued” and “bait and switch” are terms that typically have a negative connotation, but I thought they were helpful way to “think outside of the box” in the context of Content=Currency.
February 13, 2009 — 8:18 am
Teri Lussier says:
I also think that you must understand who you are talking to at each site.
As CJ says, the MLS is limited in characters and you are talking to Realtors who are talking to buyers. Make sure the copy reflects that.
I work with buyers exclusively these days, so I’ve not had the unique pleasure of working with Trulia, et al, but I think creating unique copy for each place my listing shows is as Cheryl says, common sense. AND, best marketing practices, which always serves clients. No issues there.
The idea that one laundry list of features for a home is “marketing” and we can copy and paste the same list here and there and expect buyers, or buyer’s agents to draw any sort of idea of what living in that home is like, is asinine. off my soapbox. 🙂
February 13, 2009 — 9:46 am
John Rowles says:
@Teri: It is asinine, but copy and paste one version of listing content is still SOP for the majority of agents we work with, which is really what prompted this post in the first place.
Your point re. the MLS is a good one. The MLS ostensibly exists to organize the market among Realtors. It was never intended to be the sole source of content for consumer-facing Web sites.
February 13, 2009 — 11:02 am
Bob says:
That is no longer the case.
It doesnt matter what it was intended to be, what matters is what it has become. Today its IDX. That means that not only are your listings being seeing by far more consumers than agents, but the consumer is frequently the one to notify the agent about the new listing.
Consumers dont want to just at look at your listings, they want the whole enchilada.
If your online strategy is to own your own listing online, you’ve already lost.
February 13, 2009 — 3:24 pm
John Rowles says:
@Bob: I respectfully disagree.
Common sense and the available research tell us that people look for listings first. They get interested in the rest of the “enchilada” later, if and when they get serious.
Given that listing content is what people want, why wouldn’t you position yourself as the definitive source of information for your listings on the Web, and especially on Google, by providing superior listing content on your own site?
This is especially effective if you can, as Greg does with his descriptions, convey the quality of your service through the quality of your listing content. That is the intangible that hooks people into reading your non-listing content.
February 13, 2009 — 3:50 pm
Bob says:
I didnt say people didnt look for listings first. What I meant by the “whole enchilada” was all the listing inventory, not just your own, which is more often than not, the only listing data you have the right to modify.
The issue here is the goal. If the goal is to market the listing, then who cares whether or not Google attributes it to another entity as long as you are getting the greatest amount of exposure possible. If the goal is to get search traffic that converts into business, then cannibalizing a listing to get minimal short term results is short sighted. If the goal is the greatest possible ROI, then the strategy that yields the most should be to go after the greatest amount of eyeballs with the intent to convert as many as possible.
In a high inventory market, going after needle in a hay stack traffic from search results for a single listing by virtue of a dumbing down of the MLS copy that is likely to garner the greatest amount of eyeballs via IDX and listing syndication, is aiming low.
If your premise is that superior content equates to superior positioning on the web, that has never been the case.
February 13, 2009 — 9:46 pm
Jim Flanagan says:
Interesting! It is my local experience that the vast majority of property descriptions (whether they be MLS, IDX or REALTOR.COM)are insipid pleas or gross exaggerations. So, in essence, I would be dumbing down the aggregators so as not to compete with myself?
The symbiotic relationship of our websites with GOOGLE prompts another question; if GOOGLE loves video, do we use it exclusively on our primary sites?
February 13, 2009 — 9:49 pm
John Rowles says:
@ Jim: “Dumbing down” your aggregator content is the glass half empty way to look at it, as is “devaluing” the content, come to think of it. We could also say you are “smartening up” your own content.
As to your hypothetical about video (and I have no information about how or whether Google considers video content), that is a concrete example of what I am talking about.
@Bob: I thought we were talking about the “value a good broker/agent adds to a transaction” enchilada.
I agree that consumers expect to have access to all the listings. IDX achieves that by repeating the same information across every broker site that uses it, hence the commoditized nature of listings on the Web.
The whole point of Google is that is enables us to find what we are looking for, that “needle in a haystack” as you put it. You seem to be assuming that reach trumps relevance on the Web. It doesn’t, but turning this into “either/or” is a false argument.
Think of it in terms of a signal to noise ratio: The “noise” is every other listing in IDX, and the loudest noise comes from the listings that are similar to yours, crowding out your signal.
Your signal is ANY place you have your listing on the Web — your own site, Trulia, Realtor.com, whatever.
As a potential Homebuyer hones in on your listing’s signal, the tactic I describe gives the signal you are transmitting from your own site a boost. All of the places you are publishing your listing are needles in the haystack, so make your site a crochet needle that is easier to find.
There is no disadvantage to your seller in that, and now you have the opportunity to use your content the way Realtor.com and Trulia use it: To get people on your site where they can conduct follow-up searches and quite possibly end up more interested in a property other than the one they clicked on in Google.
At least when this happens on your own site, you still get the lead.
February 14, 2009 — 8:21 am
Dan Gobis says:
From John Rowles:
“This is in response to Greg’s post about Jim Flanagan’s question, “What does today’s real estate consumer want in (on) a real estate brokerage’s website?” “Listings” was the predictable, correct answer.
It’s no secret that Real Estate Web site users are primarily interested in listings. That’s why everyone has them, and that makes listings a commodity. That begs the question: When everyone offers the content that your target audience is looking for, how do you set your site apart?
Blogging is one answer, but at the outset most consumers are not looking for you or your expertise, they are looking for listings, so at the end of the day, listing content is still the most powerful thing you have control over when it comes to attracting users to your site.”
I ask:
Has anyone considered putting properly priced listings on your website as the ‘most attractive feature’?
If your listing is the best priced property among the competition, it will be the next one sold! (I know, most sellers don’t want to be the most attractively priced.)
A competitively priced listing “is still the most powerful thing” you can have on your website. Price it right and they will come.
Can we not see the forest for the trees?
February 14, 2009 — 5:43 pm
Bob says:
I didnt say that, but I’ll get more leads to my agents with reach than you will with relevance. Of course having both is better, and that is my point. Your advice has been to focus on a handful of listings which only a handful of people want and dumb down the IDX info, versus going after numbers for a more generic search which will yield more leads, while still leveraging the reach that is gained via IDX marketing.
More buyers search neighborhoods and zip codes more than streets and housing tracts.
My biggest issue with your post though, is this:
This is a gross generalization and to a large degree, just flat out inaccurate. “Rich content” is a relative term, but more importantly, has little to do with ranking. Page rank is a non issue. Authority, however, is not relative nor a non issue. It is the entire issue, and it trumps content. You are advising people to do less marketing in an area where the greatest number of eyeballs are, in order to “own a listing” for a page that may or may not rank, and for terms where the number of searches is so low that they may not ever get a visitor.
Owning the listing can easily be done without “de-valuing” anything.
February 14, 2009 — 8:24 pm
John Rowles says:
@Jim: “Can we not see the forest through the trees”
A true search function enables consumers to do just that, without pissing of your sellers.
We use Google technology which enables users to create a list of properties that is relevant to their search criteria whether that search is a traditional general search (town, property type, price), or a more specific search (town, property type, price, attribute — like “big yard” “stone fireplace” “near train” etc.).
Once users can group similar properties together in a list, they can sort by price, and the cream you are talking about either rises to the top or sinks to the bottom depending on how they sort.
@Bob: I think I figured out why we are in disagreement as to the relative value of reach vs. relevance. I looked at your Web site, and there is literally no way for Google to determine if your property detail pages are relevant to a search on Google, because you don’t have any property detail pages in Google.
For example, I searched for a single family home in Ocean Beach on your site. The very first listing that comes up is 895 Sunset Cliffs. Then I searched Google for “895 Sunset Cliffs Ocean Beach San Diego inurl:www.homesalessandiego.com” and Google returns Zero results.
Why? Because you have your Property Detail pages blocked behind an annoying pop up gate keeper that, if you click to close it, backs you out to the search results.
Since GoogleBot isn’t going to sign up for an account, there is no way for Google to judge the relevance of the contents of the Property Detail pages on your site.
It is not surprising that you would have a hard time seeing the value of relevance since you are not benefiting from it at the listing level.
“Reach” is a general concept, but I think we can agree that one form of reach is brand recognition. As Century 21 likes to point out, they have the “most recognized” brand in Real Estate (FWIW).
We have several Real Estate Search Engines in the field for Century 21 brokers. On average, the brand (searches that have the number “21” in them), drives 20% of the traffic to our C21 sites.
On the other hand, 40-60% of the traffic for those sites comes from very specific searches and, get this, addresses and housing tract searches are by far the most popular form of those searches.
In other words, relevance trumps the reach of the #1 brand in Real Estate by at least 2-1.
How? Because we do the opposite of what you are doing and go to great lengths to make sure the GoogleBot can access our Property Detail pages.
Search 105 Third St Newport RI and our agent has the top 2 spots because her detailed description is, in Google’s estimation, the most relevant thing out there, and it is a lot more detailed than what she provided to Trulia (which is also on Page 1, but lower).
February 15, 2009 — 10:18 am
Bob says:
John, I have no problem seeing the value of relevance when it comes to search. The difference is that I see the value of relevance where it applies to terms that people actually search for in Google. The fact that your agent ranks for an address that includes city and state abbreviation doesn’t matter, because the number of searches for that query are minuscule.
The fact I don’t rank for a listing that isn’t mine that you referenced in your example also doesn’t matter, because once again, it is a term that may NEVER be searched for again. If I want IDX listings in Google, turning off the “noindex” is easy, but I still wouldn’t waste link equity on temporary pages that won’t produce long term results.
I am curious as to whether or not you are aware that if I were to pick a listing out of the hat as you did, and do the same Google search for it with that agent’s url, the odds are that it wouldn’t be indexed either, since she only has 241 listings indexed. Same applies to your RI C21 site with only 92 pages listed. The difference is that you are trying to get them indexed and I’m not. Why do you think those listings aren’t indexed?
Where I do see relevance is in targeting the greatest possible number of potential clients, and that isn’t accomplished by focusing on individual listings.
The search engine you have may be great, but what matters is traffic to it and conversion from it. If I can rank for terms that potential buyers search for in substantial numbers, versus just those for which I have listings, then my ability to convert is greater.
Where we really disagree is in the way we use tools to do business. Our business isn’t complicated. We need buyers who are willing and able to buy, and sellers with a salable property to sell.
If I have a listing, I know for a fact that the absolute best exposure I can get for my seller is by leveraging the reach of the MLS via IDX and all the various aggregate listing sites. Top it off with craigslist and my listing is out there to be found by anyone looking for it.
You made the point that if I focus on the listing and my content is decent, then the potential buyer who stumbles across the listing they aren’t likely to buy, will continue to search for property on my site. If they are indeed the needle in haystack buyer who may buy the listing they searched for by address, then they clearly knew specifically what they were looking for and I have a transaction anyways.
As I mentioned earlier, the other part of this biz is the buyer. My goal is to meet as many as possible. As Tommy Hopkins said, you have to get “belly to belly”. Therefore, my goal is to get them into the property search and into my database. I can’t put a transaction together without then establishing a relationship. While that step may include an “annoying pop up gate keeper”, there is logic to that approach and results that prove it works. Our current traffic is producing 40-50 registered users a day with valid contact info. I now have the ability to get belly to belly with them right now via email or phone, and not have to hope for them to someday appreciate the fact that I gave them access to listings and out of their gratitude, call me. It’s about being proactive. As Confucius say, “Man who wait for Peking Duck to fly into mouth will soon starve”.
IMO, you and I see this differently not because I don’t know what I’m doing online, but because you employ the search as a tool for traffic generation, whereas I rely on it as a tool for conversion.
February 15, 2009 — 3:23 pm
John Rowles says:
@Bob: ” fact that your agent ranks for an address that includes city and state abbreviation doesn’t matter, because the number of searches for that query are minuscule.”
That’s just wrong, Bob. An d more to the point, how would you possibly know when you don’t have a single Property Detail page in Google?
As I said earlier, the amount of traffic we see from specific searches on addresses accounts for 40-60% of our traffic, depending on the site and alignment of the stars.
105 Third St has, in fact, been a landing page 9 times in the last 30 days.
It’s great that you rank well for general searches like “San Diego Real Estate”.
I am sure that you get hundreds of visits a month as a result, but riddle me this: Which click through to a web site is more likely to result in a closing? The one from someone generally interested in “real estate” Or the one from the person who has come to your site for information about a specific listing?
The majority of moves are *local*. That means the majority of people searching for listings are doing so with the benefit of local knowledge.
Often, people are aware of a house for sale that is in their neighborhood, or they know what street they are on when they pass a yard sign. When you give them a chance, as Google does and as we do using Google’s technology, people use that knowledge in their search terms.
February 15, 2009 — 4:10 pm
Joe Hayden says:
Hi John…
Interesting idea. I didn’t thoroughly read every comment so pardon any redundancy…
Do you have a specific example of where you have personally tried this tip, or where you know someone else has? I’m interested, but need to see it in action to better break down the application for the way our IDX system functions.
February 19, 2009 — 2:09 pm
John Rowles says:
@Joe: Sure. I referenced 105 Third St Newport RI in an earlier comment, so let’s stick with that. Also, this is something we just began teaching a few weeks ago, so we haven’t had a lot of agents put new listings in using this tactic yet. A few have tried it with existing listings.
Google 105 Third St, Newport RI or 656 High Ridge Rd in Stamford CT This listing’s agent is using the same content in our database and in Trulia’s, and in this case, Trulia beats us.
February 19, 2009 — 4:30 pm