Indivdual Property Listings
-
In Missouri real estate once a home hits our MLS it sydicates out all over the world. The question is this: How do I help each listing rank high organically over trulia, zillow, realtor and nationally owned companies such as Remax or Bershire Hathaway. We are a local firm who dominates our market and our website is the highest ranked in the area. The listings are not.
Thoughts?
-
This is definitely a good answer and the way to be thinking about it. You're never going to outrank Z/T/HP/RDC based off domain authority if you're a small site. First you need to have your onpage SEO absolutely dialied (H1s/H2s/keyword mentions (in this case address)). Then as Matt suggested pull in other content that is related to that listing or area, such as pricing and information about other homes selling or being listed in that area. The more of this rich content you have, the more you will be able to compete. But as others have said, you also need to get more links. If I were you, I'd find aggregators that you can form partnerships with as the originator of the content.
Qualifications: I ran SEO at HotPads and Trulia Rentals for a while
-
You likely won't outrank them just with the MLS contents. But can you put unique content around each result?
If you can make your page look more like:
- Header
- Unique Content
- MLS
- More content
- Footer
then you can definitely compete. Using this formula and strategy I was outranking sites like Amazon, Ebay & Polyvore for clothing-related searches. It's fine to have some duplicate content. It's not fine to have ONLY duplicate content if you want to rank against some top sites. The good news is they aren't doing much in the way of unique content so if you do, you have a good shot.
-
Hi Charity,
Great topic. Unfortunately, in your industry, Google does tend to favor aggregators over individual businesses, and the ability of a business website to outrank these giants organically with temporary listings is going to be limited. They may simply have too much strength.
So, barnacle SEO is going to be important (ensuring that you are properly profiled on the major real estate aggregators that outrank you) but you may also need to resort to PPC and pay to be ahead of these huge competitors if it's essential to do so. Not ideal, but unless you can find a way to make your house listings somehow tremendously more relevant and popular, every time you list a house, than the same data appearing on the aggregators, chances are, the goal of outranking them is not realistic, and you might be better served by setting a different goal. At the end of the day, if your properties are at least appearing highly in the results of the aggregators and you are receiving conversions from that, you may need to shift organic goals to ranking other types of content well. This post from Bruce Clay is a couple of years old, but might have some good inspiration for your business: http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/real-estate-seo/
I hope you'll receive additional community feedback.
-
This is certainly a big issue for all of the real estate websites that pull in the MLS listings, since those are essentially duplicates of each other. It creates a lot of duplicate content.
There are a few things to keep in mind:
- The first crawled is considered the originator of the content--so you'll want to get those pages crawled as soon as possible or frequently.
- Pages that get crawled quickly tend to have more Domain Authority (you get DA from other sites, through links)- Links to pages typically help rankings, as well as social media mentions, as well.
So, in order to get your site crawled quickly or frequently, you'll need to get your Domain Authority to be higher than your competitors' sites. Also, new pages need to have links. So, if you can get those pages (new MLS listings) some links quickly then that will help, as well.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google My Business: Company listing is showing in search instead of division address - similar names/same city
Hi! I have a client whose company name is very similar to one if their company divisions. This division has multiple locations but its main location is in the same city as the parent company. The problem is that when you search for the division, the parent company shows up. The parent company has a physical address, but most users searching need to be going to the division address which takes customers. They are having problems with customers coming to the parent company address instead. I have made the Google My Business parent company page to show service areas instead of their business address. Yet, their listing still comes up first when searching for the division location. This is because of part of the parent company name is in the division name. My client wants users to be able to find the division more so than the parent company. Anyone had this issue before? Any tips would be great!
Local Listings | | agrier0 -
Google Local Listing Visibility for Regional Queries
I manage a variety of small local programs that are located in areas that are more known by the region than they are by the town (the Adirondacks and the Catskills to be specific). In the past, the local algorithm understood that when the query was related to the region, it would show a variety of results from that region. It seems that for the Catskills they have changed the algorithm to pinpoint the center of the region and only show results that are in the near vacinity of that pinpoint, rather than a variety of results from the region. The Adirondacks however is still showing a variety of results. For those of you not familiar, the Adirondack are 9,375 square miles and the Catskills are 5,892 square miles and are both very rural mountain regions and popular travel destinations. Google clearly understands that these regions are geographically oriented and shows a local pack for relevant results such as "Catskills Resorts" or "Catskills Restaurants", but over the past few weeks, they have started only showing 2 results for the query Catskills resorts, both located near Shandaken, NY becasue that is where Google has deemed the marker for the Catskills is (https://www.google.com/maps/place/Catskill+Mountains/@42.009289,-74.3996212,14z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x89dc665668f82f31:0x3b012376423b8efa!8m2!3d42.0092908!4d-74.3821116) In reality, there are hundreds of resorts within the Catskills. (Note there is a Catskill, NY within the Catskills, however Google is not even confusing this town with the region). Does anyone have ideas on how to get Google to understand that the Catskills are more than Shandaken, NY? I feel like we suddenly have no hope of ranking locally and most of the businesses I manage are located in very small towns that people are not specifically searching for.
Local Listings | | Your_Workshop0 -
Will using call tracking phone numbers in paid legal directories listing negatively affect our website?
I know it is important to have consistent NAP across directory listings but I would like to gauge the ROI on the paid "premium" listings in legal directories like FindLaw, AVVO and Lawyers.com by using call tracking and recording. Could using different phone #'s in these listings affect our website negatively? Same question for YELP ads (ads only, not organic yelp listing).
Local Listings | | SEO4leagalPA0 -
Higher Value: Google Local Listing or .edu link?
A client of mine is putting together a partnership with a local university to offer a certain type of medical test through several of its clinics. They are writing up the contract now and asked me if there is anything they should ask for that would benefit us in our listings. Since we do not have an actual local footprint, my first inclination was to ask for them to help us get verified as owners of "practitioner" local listings at their business addresses (as discussed here). We would provide local numbers that would ring our call center. My thinking is that these listings and backlinks would benefit on searches similar to "medical testing in San Antonio". I have a number of concerns with this track but would love to hear from the community on why or why not this might be the way to go. Another potential option is to ask for a link from the university's website outlining the partnership. Something along the lines of "Our labs have partnered with BIZNAME to provide medical testing in San Antonio to our valued patients." I'd obviously love the EDU links, but I'm hesitant after Overstock's penalty a few years ago to try to set something like that up. I'm not sure which (if either) to ask for in the contract. I'm leaning toward the latter since it seems more in line with a long term strategy, and Google seems to change their treatment of the local listings pretty frequently. However, getting that high visibility real estate in the local listings is really appealing to me. What does everyone think?
Local Listings | | Andrew_Mac0 -
Google Local Listing Ranking/Traffic Metrics in the Google Search Console?
A client of mine asked me if it was possible to see local listing data (ranking/traffic stats) in the Google Search Console for a URL. I figured the Google Search Console only shows organic metrics not 3-pack/local listing performance. However I could be mistaken. Does the Google Search Console report this?
Local Listings | | RosemaryB0 -
Inconsistant & Duplicate Listings
Hey guys, Our agency inherited a client that no longer has all of their log-in information for a large number of listings. This is killing their rankings. Can anyone give us some advice on how to handle this? We subscribe to Moz Local, but it seems like it can only help so much (or so we think). Thanks in advanced for any advice!
Local Listings | | theideapeople0 -
How can I add another Google Places listing to my existing business?
Hey there, Does anyone know how I can add another Google Places listing to the following account? The company now has two stores so I'd like to get both listed. https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/107389046695957843430/+FinsahomeCoUk/posts I've tried using https://www.google.com/local/manage but that only appears to let you add a minimum of 10 locations?
Local Listings | | Webrevolve0 -
Google+ Pages and the old places listing dashboard
I'm wondering if anyone can help me... I'm trying to set up Google+ and Google Local pages for some of our clients. For the newer clients this is easy as all their accounts are using the new Google Places dashboard which allows you to create the Local Listing and then the partnering Google+ page. Simples. Example: https://plus.google.com/+twistfix/ (A verified Google Local listing, with a verified Google+ page for the company) The problem I'm having is some of our older clients already had a Google Places listing from years ago, but this is on the old Google Dashboard (doesn't allow me to create a partnering Google+ page for the business). What is the best way around this? Do I delete these old listings and start fresh using the new Google dashboard (creating the local listing and Google+ page together?) or is there another fix?
Local Listings | | bricktech0