Marketing Your Real Estate Listings

Posted on August 22, 2007
Filed Under Real Estate News | 1 Comment

Listings with One Way links back to your site

Chatting today with an associate who does a great deal of SEO sparked an idea I’m going to entertain. For months we have been following all the blogs we own and write in for SEO performance and although reciprocal linking is likely dead we have noticed that some listing links are getting good results. I’ll show you what I mean.

It seems that when a Realtor has the opportunity to publish some of their listings off domain as we have been tracking, its certainly noticeable to see a marked increase in listing recognition as opposed to those listings that reside on domain. Before you conclude the obvious assumption I’ll elaborate a bit;

Realtors are essentially in the business of doing what? Selling homes? Part of being a valuable service to your client is to demonstrate that you can effectively market a home by employing the resources you have available. Realtors we have been tracking based on their market conditions, SEO and general lead generation seem to have more frequent visits and responses from qualified buyers by simply posting select or featured listings on remote services or domains. Before you say “duh” note that it doesn’t work consistently where certain factors are not present.

What I noticed or should I say noticed after it was tossed in my lap a dozen times was that listings with a combination of features out performed offsite listings that didn’t have them. These features are entirely search engine bias because in all the listings that I can get to come up in google or msn for instance, only those that don’t look like a big fat inventory perform better. Why? Well I’m not 100% but I can guestimate that like some online e-commerce sites, real estate listings or “inventory” may get kicked to the curb by search engines if the listings appear to be a bulk repetitive catalog of similar items. I’ve tested this with commerce sites before and noticed that even with the aid of site maps, search engines will stop at some point from indexing entire catalogs of products or in this case listings.

What I’m going to do is put up an external listing manager on a blog with real estate related news and content and allow Realtors to publish “DETAILED” listings free of charge. In fact I think I’ll do it on this very blog. I could have fully mis read the data and be barking up the wrong tree but if I’m write the results should be as we expect.

If you have a few featured listings you would like to try out with this then let me know.

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