Jumping into the Real Estate Fray, Part 2

It’s day three of real estate week here on the Bruce Clay blog. We don’t typically focus on a single industry in our coverage of all-things-SEO, but the current controversy over whether Google should be allowed to “scrape” listing information from IDX Web pages is a golden opportunity. It’s timely, too, because this week thousands of real estate industry leaders have converged on Washington for the annual Midyear Legislative Meetings. Before I take the real estate industry as a case study and prescribe some SEO/SEM medicine to cure their ills, there’s an update to the story!

Breaking News from Washington, D.C.

The announcement broke just hours ago, and Twitter was buzzing about it. It looks like NAR has seen the light! They’ve decided to change their IDX policy, which is used as the model for MLSs nationwide. Here’s the news in a nutshell:

This means that NAR no longer considers Google a scraper! Another Twitter reporter snapped a photo of the policy change as it was announced:

In case you can’t see it clearly, the revised policy reads: Participants must protect IDX information from unauthorized use. This requirement does not prohibit indexing of IDX sites by search engines.

So NAR sees the difference between unauthorized site scrapers and search engines. Hallelujah! This is a happy day for real estate professionals, who know they have been losing the Web marketing battle for years.

What Real Estate Professionals Should Do Next

Don’t spend a minute wondering whether you should back out of the IDX data share. It’s time to put that old fearful thinking behind and go full-steam ahead into Web marketing. Redefine yourself as a service provider and let go of the role of information hoarder. That self-image should be left crumbling in your trunk with the last edition of the old MLS book.

Instead, instruct your webmaster to allow your IDX pages to be indexed as soon as you hear the all-clear from your local MLS. And consider creating static pages with listing information in addition to your framed IDX searches and displays. You want to give the search engine spiders lots of indexable content to chew on!

And read on for more advice as I use the real estate professional as a case study for applying Web marketing and SEO.

SEO to the (Real Estate Industry’s) Rescue!

Perhaps NAR’s change of heart was the result of an “ah ha!” moment. Maybe, just maybe, they realized that by allowing REALTORS&#0174’s sites to be better indexed, the industry might be able to claim more search engine real estate (pun totally intended). One can always hope.

Most real estate professionals understand that they desperately need to improve their online presence. But how? Despite the fact that most for-sale property information online originates with their listings, third-party Web sites get the credit. Run a Google search for real estate for any local area and you’ll find at most one or two broker sites ranking on the first page of the SERPs. Primarily you find third-party real estate search sites, like Trulia.com, Homes.com, Zillow.com, Movoto.com, Yahoo! Real Estate, and the industry flagship Realtor.com. Many of these sites do direct traffic back to the listing broker’s Web site if people click to “view more details,” but not all. And there’s no reason why a successful local broker’s Web site should not come to the top when it’s their neighborhood’s real estate that’s wanted! After all, they ARE the experts.

#1: Befriend the search engines. If you don’t already, understand that Google is not your competitor, but your ally. When people search for a property in your area, you want them to find your Web site, right? Do a good job of letting Google know what you’re all about. Put plenty of original text content on your site using keywords like “real estate,” “homes for sale,” “My Town Name” and lots of local area references, and that can happen.

#2: Submit your listings to Google. Brokers should be proactive andsubmit your listings to Google directly. You should be the one to get the information out there first. Consider submitting to the other search engines, as well. Yahoo! charges a hefty fee for this ($49.95 per listing), so check to see if your brokerage firm lets you do this on their dime.

#3: Don’t hide your listing information. Many brokers hide listing information behind a form like this one:

Look at all those fields! Now I don’t know how many people searching for home information actually take the time to fill out a form like that. Maybe it’s working for some brokers, and they’re really getting prospects this way. But what I do know is that search engines can’t get past these forms. They’ll act like a roadblock to search engine spiders, and your listing information won’t be indexed. They may also be diverting users away — after all, why fill out a form when so much listing information is easily available through the third-party sites?

#4: Build links to your site. I checked a bunch of broker sites’ link counts. (You can do this using our handy free SEMToolBar, or by doing link: searches in Yahoo!) Not surprisingly, they had almost no inbound links. Seriously, the most I found was “3” links, and those were internal! If real estate is essentially a local business that builds credibility by networking within their communities, why isn’t that network being reflected on the Web? As any SEO can tell you, without links to help establish your authority on a subject, you don’t have a very good chance of showing up on the front page of Google.

One more point about building links is that not only do search engines quantify the links to your site, they also follow them. So if you’re sure that for usability reasons you want to keep that roadblocking contact information form I mentioned before in place on your site, you can at least LINK to static pages all about your featured properties and other information. Spiders can then index those pages by following the links.

#5: Make your Web site unique. Many real estate professionals, knowing that they “had to have a Web site,” took the easy route and set up a prefab template supplied by their brokerage firm or some third-party company. It’s next to impossible to get indexed by the search engines if all your site offers is duplicate content, because it’s the search engine’s job to filter out duplicates and present searchers with the original, best, most authoritative version. And guess what — that isn’t going to be the cookie-cutter site. I loved the comment left by Foot In Mouth on our blog yesterday about this:

“I think real estate agents who just get a template based site and do nothing with it have a very expensive business card.”

If you want your site to be found in the SERPs, you’re going to need to make it different. Write about your local schools, neighborhoods, hang-out places, and your favorite frozen yogurt shop. Talk about new housing developments underway, changes in the rental market, and so forth. Give your site lots of locally specific information for the search engines to index. Then the next time Mr. and Mrs. Homebuyer go to Google and search for homes for sale in your area, your Web site might just be the first one that pops up.

Paula Allen started at Bruce Clay Inc. in 2008 as a senior technical writer and now manages the company's content and documentation. An English lover at heart, Paula enjoys working in a team where grammar is frequently discussed and in an industry where there's always more to learn.

See Paula's author page for links to connect on social media.