Trade Up/Downs

Buyers who decide to make a move within the city or neighborhood they already reside within tend not to use neighborhood or school information during their search process. Why? Because they live there.

Relocations

People relocating to new cities often search based on a landmark they’re familiar with. This may be the location of their new job, a school, or an area they previously had a chance to visit. Being new to a community, they may not be familiar with the names of counties, suburbs, neighborhoods, and other ways that locals describe the market. If your site requires that type of local knowledge, it will be very difficult for non-locals to navigate.

Motivated Buyers

The most motivated of buyers tend to pour over listings online, but also get out of the house to drive around neighborhoods and properties that interest them. When they turn to the web, they run searches based on cities, zip codes, property addresses and MLS numbers. They know what they’re looking for. Getting them to that content quickly provides a good experience to them.

The quality of listing presentations may be what convinces this type of buyer to rely upon your site for their online research. It also increases the chance that they’ll share your site’s versions of listings with their friends, thus introducing your site to future prospects in your market for free.

Faster Indexing

As Google explained on their blog, the first major benefit should be faster indexing of new content on the web. Google’s robots are continuously scanning the web for new content. This change should allow them to get more fresh content into their search results faster. For real estate, this may mean faster indexing of new listings or blog posts.

Annotating Content

Former Google employee, Vanessa Fox, writing at Search Engine World, explains that Google will be able to associate more information with the content they index:

The Caffeine infrastructure provides more flexibility in the type of details that can be stored with a document. As the web changes and new valuable data about web content emerges, Google won’t have to build new code to take advantage of it. This means that while Caffeine itself is not a ranking algorithm change, it could impact ranking in the future (as new signals are associated with pages).

So, what does that mean? Here are a few possibilities. This doesn’t mean that Google is or will do any of these, but they seem possible.

1. Better tracking of country of origin (mentioned in Fox’s piece) in order to help people find content from their own country.

2. Geocoding of content. If an address or lat/long are included with a page, Google could use that to improve “what’s nearby” type searches.

3. Industry specific content. If Google could detect and classify content as real estate related, they could use that to improve results for terms that have proven to be real estate related.

In practice, Google may be able to do provide better results than they do today for terms like “3 bedroom 2 bath home for sale”. Today, that term appears to be too broad to deliver quality results. However, if Google detects where you are (they can do to varying degrees based on what you allow them to do), determines that this is a real estate related search, checks their index for relevant real estate related content, then serves it up in a relevant manner, they’ll provide a better experience to searchers.

What do real estate sites need to do to take advantage of this? The same sort of things they should be doing today:

A. Make sure Google can see your website’s content. If they can’t, you simply will not show up in search results.

B. Make sure you’re creating original content for your site. If you have the exact same content as every other site competing in your market, you’re not giving Google a particularly good reason to bother indexing your site. Blog posts are one of the easiest ways to publish original content.

C. Make sure your site has high authority. Google’s measure for this is called PageRank. If two page have identical or nearly identical content, which one will Google rank higher in their results, or bother indexing at all? The one that they’ve determined has higher authority. This comes down to link popularity. The quantity and quality of websites that link to your website help Google determine whether your site is an authority site. Fly by night sites have a hard time gaining links. If you’re a credible business, people will link to you. And people will link to you more often and faster if you’re creating the type of content that they want to talk about, such as definitive blog posts on why certain neighborhoods are family friendly.

In conclusion, Google’s goals haven’t changed. They want to provide high quality results to searchers in order to keep them coming back and occasionally clicking on an ad. If you’re creating quality content on your website, you should be rewarded for this if you’ve done your A-B-C’s.

Every once in a while, it’s fun to step back and try to quantify the value of changes that are made. Here are two examples that I think help illustrate how much impact design changes can have on the front-end of our client’s websites. Both of the graphs below illustrate a month by month perspective of a representative client’s website’s performance. First, let’s look at page views per visit:

Notice the significant lift last fall. At that time, we made a significant number of changes to the search interface on our client’s websites that made their site’s more usable for consumers. By learning from website visitors experiences, looking at website traffic statistics, and listening to feedback from clients, we came up with a series of revisions that let to a 40% increase in page views per visit on average. That’s a huge difference. The beauty of this is that the increase in page views came from an increase in visits to property detail pages. Exactly the type of pages we want prospects to get to during their home search process.

Slicing this data another way, here’s a look at a representative view of the lift in Time on Site statistics:

If people are looking at more content per visit, they’re also spending more time on the site per visit. The more time they spend on our client’s sites, the less time they have in their day to spend on our client’s competitor’s websites. Over the past few months, our clients have benefited from a 35% increase in time on site among their website’s visitors.

Continuous improvement. Measurable results. That’s real estate web development experience in action.

The real estate industry loves abbreviations. Some seem to be legacy code used as cost saving measures when placing print classified ads. Others are nice shortcuts and obvious to everyone. Well, almost everyone.

While humans are pretty good at parsing out the meanings of most abbreviations, computers may or may not possess similar skills. At WhereToLive.com, we work hard to identify common abbreviations, then get people to what they’re looking for regardless of how the prospective buyer asked for it or how the agent entered it. This creates a better user experience for website visitors.

However, we know that not all sites where our client’s content may appear possess sophisticated search algorithms. Because of this, we recommend that agents use the most common format of addresses when inputting their listings.

St > Street
Ave > Avenue
Blvd > Boulevard
Rd > Road
Dr > Drive
Hwy > Highway
Pike > Pk
Parkway > Pkwy
Lane > Ln

This is one small form of search engine optimization (SEO) at a real estate property search level. While search engines – including real estate specific ones such as broker websites – work hard to resolve differences, it never hurts to give people exactly what they’re asking for.

As I thought about that more, I thought I could distill this further into something that seems to often get missed in real estate website design: Who is the primary visitor to your website?

Looking through website visitor stats, it’s clear to me that

- The primary visitor is someone who’s searching within a market where they already reside. (Based on locations of visits.)

- They’re often familiar with the company behind the website they’re using (based on search referrals and direct visits).

- They know what they’re looking for. (Based on internal searches conducted on the site.)

- They pour over photos. (Based on internal stats.)

- They share properties that are well-merchandised. (Based on internal stats.)

- They contact agents most often about listings that are well-merchandised. (Based on internal stats.)

When I add all of this up, I see the biggest opportunity in real estate marketing coming from getting the basics right. Syndicating additional data onto the site from third parties doesn’t help your primary visitors achieve their goals and is probably more of a distraction than an enabler. Look no further than the differences between Google and their competition in search to see how effective doing the core service right can be. It doesn’t matter how many bells and whistles you have if people can’t find what they’re looking for.

Are all of your agents doing the best job they can of merchandising their listings on your website? If not, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to win over the most important visitors in your market one listing at a time.

I think it’s pretty clear to anyone working in real estate that schools have a large impact on the buying decisions of some buyers. Not all buyers, but some. With that in mind, it’s worth considering how many people are factoring schools into their buying decision, and how they go about finding that information.

As an exercise to help prioritize this information, consider taking 100 points and distributing them among the following seven types of buyers:

______ Buyer is single with no kids.

______ Buyers are together with no kids yet, or young enough to not be considering schools yet.

______ Buyer(s) kids are beyond school age.

______ Buyer(s) are moving within a community they already live, so already know about the local schools

______ Buyer(s) are buying a vacation property

______ Buyer(s) are buying an investment property

______ Buyer(s) have school aged children and are moving to an area where they are not familiar with the schools and don’t plan to homeschool their children

I’d argue that the points you put into the final option are the only ones who’ll possibly benefit from school information on your website.

However, the next step is to consider what percentage of those buyers plan to use a real estate broker’s website to analyze school information. As I see it, a parent who’s serious about comparing schools is likely to go to websites that specialize in school ratings such as greatschools.net, SchoolDataDirect.org, US News & World Report’s Top High Schools rankings, or the National Center for Education Statistics. Once they’ve determined the schools or school districts that suit their needs, they then start looking for homes in or nearby those locations.

With this in mind, I think it’s important to prioritize school information appropriately – and in most cases, lower than one might initially think – based on the percentage of people who’ll find the information valuable rather than distracting.

It’s possible that many brokers would see greater benefits from focusing on the most common tasks nearly every visitor to a real estate broker’s site is attempting to achieve.

It’s too early to say whether this is a game changer, but one thing seems clear to me today: Inventory matters.

As an example of this, I queried Google Maps and an IDX driven Re/Max site powered by WhereToLive.com for homes in my zip code (55406).

Google Maps returned this (properties in the upper-right hand corner are from a different zip code across the river in St. Paul, MN):

The Re/Max site returned this:

There are significantly more homes in the MLS than on Google today in my zip code. Google Maps displays a combination of listings provided by organized real estate and FSBOs yet still comes up short of what the MLS provides. However, there is probably enough inventory there to keep people from being immediately stumped and turning away from the search results.

I happen to live in a market where a couple very large companies syndicate their listings to Google, so it’s possible that Google’s listing inventory could be significantly less in some markets. However, there are some real estate boards syndicating their entire MLS to Google, so Google would likely have more local inventory than organized real estate sites in those markets (since Google co-mingles MLS listings with FSBOs).

Here are a few things for brokers to consider:

1. Do I benefit from syndicating listings?

2. Should I do it myself or go through a 3rd Party Syndication service. In some cases, this leads to traffic from Google sending people to the listing service’s website rather than your own.

3. Does this level the playing field vs. companies with lower quality brands and websites?

4. What branding benefits do I receive from this?

5. Is the data accurate and in sync in a timely manner?

6. Do sellers expect this?

7. Is someone already syndicating my listings, such as a national franchise? Where does that traffic go?

8. How does this effect lead flow?

9. Will this help or hurt my website’s traffic?

10. Will ads for my competition be served alongside my inventory?

There may be other things to consider as well. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this evolving playing field in the comments.

And they’d be right.

But not as right as they could be.

A better answer to this would be, “To rank high on search engines for every conceivable term a prospective buyer or seller types into a search engine.”

It turns out that there is a significant difference between those two perspectives, and that difference is generally referred to as the Long Tail. The long tail of real estate searches consists of terms that are more obscure than “_______ homes for sale”; precise terms by motivated buyers and sellers.

To illustrate this, here is an chart of the popularity of the top-100 search terms that drive traffic into a typical broker’s website over a month. To the far left are the terms that are used most often (over 1000 visitors used the most common search phrase over the past month). Moving right, we see a drop off to a steadily declining slope of terms through the 100th most popular (8 people used the 100th most popular term over the past month):

Tomorrow, if this broker lost all of the traffic they currently receive from those 100 search terms, they’d lose only 25% of their search traffic. That’s because the other 75% of their search traffic comes from with only a handful of visits per month to only one visit.

Obsessing over rankings for a single popular term has merit, but raising the bar for thousands of terms will have a larger impact on your website’s traffic.

How long is the long tail? For the broker listed above, the full graph of search terms over the past month would be 175X wider if every term that produced traffic was listed. At that graph’s current scale, it would need to be around 70 feet long to account for every unique search phrase that brought in at least one visitor over the past month.

Quantity or Quality?

More precise terms are also often used by motivated buyers. For example, a person typing in “Minneapolis Homes for Sale” is probably going to work their way through neighborhood research before narrowing down to homes matching her lifestyle and financial criteria. While it’s great to show up for terms that broad, the conversion rate from more precise terms further down the long tail is considerably higher.

For another perspective on this, consider watching this video from Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz called “Ignore the Long Tail at Your Own Peril“. Rand does a great job breaking this concept down in a whiteboard lecture format:

Here’s an interesting nugget about SEOmoz: They work with Zillow, who does a great job making sure they show up on on long tail searches. When Rand says, “Ignore the Long Tail at Your Own Peril,” he could very well be referring to real estate brokers around the country who do just that. In fact, Zillow and Trulia’s success is largely built on their ability to sweep up valuable long tail search engine traffic that brokers continue to ignore.

Adjusting the search criteria along the right column filters the results on the map to properties matching the price range, bed/bath, and other criteria selected by the user.

Properties can be previewed with photo tours, saved, and compared without leaving the search page, thus avoiding the need to bounce back and forth between web pages.

Thanks to Paul Chavez for creating the great demo.

To assist friends in their search for the perfect home in the perfect neighborhood, people often send links to what they believe are ideal homes or neighborhoods. However, this doesn’t always work out as planned.

The Search Results URL Problem

Sending people a link to a search result is often much more difficult than it should be on real estate websites. A common problem people run into is broken URLs. They drill down on a real estate site to create the perfect set of results for their friend, email the link, then hear back from their frustrated friend that the link didn’t work.

At WhereToLive.com, we’ve worked to address this issue by creating custom URL shorteners for our clients’ websites. Here is an example of how this works:

I visited Coldwell Banker Hunter’s website then drilled down to city of Shaker Heights, OH. I also filtered the results for luxury homes (in this case $750,000+) and filtered for 4+ bedrooms, and 3+ bathrooms. The map of the left updated every time I made a change to the search criteria.

After creating a search result I’d like to share, I click the “Link to Search” icon on the upper-right hand part of the page to generate a unique shortened URL for this custom search result:

I can now email this URL to friends, bookmark it so I can check back from time to time, or blog about it (that link will take you to homes matching that search result. Or, if I was an agent with Coldwell Banker Hunter, I could build a series of links like this for the neighborhoods I commonly serve, then publish them to my CBHunter.com website. Then I could tell prospective clients to, “go to my website and click on the Shaker Heights $750,000+ link” if they’re looking for high-end homes in the area.

Persistent Search Results

It’s worth noting that the URL shortener is not taking a snapshot in time, but capturing only the search criteria. Clicking the same shortened URL a month from now will show the current results matching the same geography, price point, and bed/bath filters. Properties will come and go but the search criteria at that custom link remains the same.

Small Things Add Up

I don’t have to worry about disappointing my friends with broken links. I don’t have to visit a 3rd party URL shortening service like tinyurl.com. Instead, I have a branded integrated solution to this common neighborhoods discussion problem.