Indivdual Property Listings

[Charity2841]

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?

[dohertyjf]

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

[MattAntonino]

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.

[MiriamEllis]

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.

[GlobeRunner]

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.