Odd. Unique seo question - Can you help?

[Cfarcher]

This should be an interesting question - gobble up all those MOZ POINTS folks : )

Our company website is real estate based.  We have nearly 30,000+ paid members on the inside that put up real estate listings (properties for sale). The members do this on their own. From an SEO stand point it sort of feels like we have a huge team of content creators putting up unique content for us.

To see what I'm talking about I'll drop some links so you can review:

In this first link you'll see a member of ours advertised on the NYTIMES and the clickable anchored text waterfront leads back to us or I should say the members listing.  See the link below:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/realestate/city-island-a-quainter-side-of-the-bronx.html

This second link is the listing page for our member that the anchored text led to.

https://www.nystatemls.com/profiles/NY/SAINT_ALBANS/NEW_YORK_ESTATES_GROUP_INC/Dale_Davids/68966/listings/

When I use MOZ i can see that we got some serious link juice from the above.

**This is what is happening naturally: **

When someone joins as a member the public profile of their name & office is ranking in the SERPS.

Example: Higgins Realty  / it's ranked #1 and brings back 100 visitors per month.

https://www.nystatemls.com/agency/NY/BROOKLYN/HIGGINS_REALTY_GROUP_LLC/5575/

When someone creates a listing with our system and publishes it the address is ranking.

Think of this on a mass scale. Even though they are small niche names, offices, keywords it's generating traffic. & every once in awhile the name of an office is closely related to a major keyword and we pick up something that generates say 500 to 1,500 visitors per month.

When someone advertises their public profile or their listing depending on the site they advertise on or the anchored text they use it's helping our domain.  Again, all of this is happening on its own we aren't pushing SEO. This simply is real estate agents and brokers doing their job and in return our Domain Authority and Page Rank is climbing. Our monthly traffic is climbing. The number of keywords we rank for is increasing.

This situation must be unique because wouldn't you say that in most cases with a website they have a blog. Someone needs to write good content then try to get it linked. But in our situation our members are creating (unique content) and publishing it.

How do we capitalize on this though?  or I should say capitalize in a bigger way?

To help everyone benefit would it be to possibly teach the members some basic SEO. What if the name of their public profile was key worded or what if we explained advertising that listing, Sharing it, getting it on other sites would benefit them. To have them link back to their profile or listing page.

Maybe give them a list of suggested sites?

Maybe give them a list of possible anchored texts they could use which would be keywords we want to rank for?   What are your thoughts? Do you have any clever or creative ideas that would help all parties?

If you want to do some research our main website is www.nystatemls.com you can review the ranking keywords, linking domains that sort of thing.

Thanks for the input  -

Chris

After

[effectdigital]

In terms of the on-site architecture I think that could be improved to rank better, e.g: convert:

https://www.nystatemls.com/profiles/NY/SAINT_ALBANS/NEW_YORK_ESTATES_GROUP_INC/Dale_Davids/68966/listings/

to:

https://www.nystatemls.com/new-york/saint-albans/new-york-estates-group-inc/dale-davids/

But keep in mind that if you did this, you'd have to do a massive internal 301 redirects project using rapid redirect technology like NginX instead of basic web.config / .htaccess mods (and NginX redirects aren't even available on all server types) to cover the change in architecture. I think it could be a good move but with that volume of URLs you'd need a forensic approach

Yes I do think basic SEO training for your members would be good, allowing them to access the H1, <title>, URL slug and Meta Description fields could be very useful. Also allowing them to set bespoke FB OG / Twitter Card share images (1200x630 for dimensions) as well as OG titles and descriptions, could significantly boost your traffic intake across SEO and social - but only if these fields were used correctly. Maybe you'd want to isolate some of the best profiles and take over the Meta updates yourself, to ensure they are 'proper'</p> <p>Incentivisation could be an issue. Yes these guys already promote their own listings, but getting them to do basic keyword research and Meta updates could be a big ask. A review system would be good. Say someone updates this data, then you review it and give it the 'good' stamp of approval - maybe they could get slightly enhanced listings for a duration in some way. Make it worth their while and you will really benefit!</p> <p> </p></title>