Pinterest.com, a relatively new social website, is gaining a lot of virtual ground, quickly becoming a major contender for the time and attention of many internet users.

The chart to the right illustrates that in the last 6 months alone, Pinterest (blue) has surpassed LinkedIn (red) and is already roughly half that of Twitter (yellow) in terms of search volume index according to Google Trends.

Pinterest users can create and share virtual cork boards containing images and videos they’ve discovered on the Internet. Each pinned item, in turn, provides a backlink to the webpage on which the item was discovered. To really sweeten the deal, these backlinks do not include the dreaded ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ attribute, which means search engines will take them into consideration when determining the value of the destination page. This can yield big SEO benefits and traffic gains for real estate websites that provide share-worthy property photos and video tours. As Pinterest users pin photos and videos to their “Awesome Luxury Properties” and “Cool Places Around Town” boards, your website gets free marketing to a highly targeted market AND a free, followed backlink to boost your website’s SEO and general web credibility.

Like many social media sites, Pinterest also provides handy plugins and buttons would that fit neatly into home details pages, blog posts, and more. Curious if something on your website has already been pinned? Use this handy tool (just replace “YourWebsite.com” with your website’s domain):

http://pinterest.com/source/YourWebsite.com

Here are a few examples:

http://pinterest.com/source/cbhunter.com/
http://pinterest.com/source/century21.ca/
http://pinterest.com/source/results.net/

Why not create a board to showcase each of your listings? Or take visitors on a tour of your neighborhood? Setting up your own boards to promote yourself or your brand is simple. Follow other users who’ve created similar boards, repin photos, and share photos on Facebook and Twitter.

Lastly, once you’ve set up your account, don’t forget to heed Ed’s great advice and take your social media efforts to the streets. If you find someone who’s pinned your content, shoot them a quick E-mail just to say thanks! Or if you stumble upon someone with a board filled with DIY projects, send them a link to your “handyman’s dream home”.

Property Videos

Here are two examples of videos generated specific to properties. In both cases, property photos are used to create a branded slideshow tour of a listing. If someone views either video on YouTube, they are also presented with pricing information and a link to the listing page.

Property video with music by Coldwell Banker Legacy:

The version below takes things one step further with narration (by Century 21 Colonial Realty):

Videos like this allow agents to increase their marketing breadth to video, which could be the deal maker in listing presentations. The videos also offer some SEO benefits since YouTube videos (when done well) tend to rank well in Google search results.

Agent Profiles

With video being so easy to create and publish these days, hiding salespeople behind a photo and text does them a disservice. Here is a high production version from Knipe Realty:

Well done agent videos can increase the time spent on site by prospects, which decreases the time they’ll have to spend on competitor’s sites. And, clearly, a prospect who calls an agent after watching a video profile of an agent is far more qualified based on the investment they’ve made in learning about the agent.

Neighborhood Profiles

Use video to help prospective home buyers learn about cities or neighborhoods. The RE/MAX Results City & Neighborhood Film Festival has proven to be an effective way to get the community involved in telling the stories of neighborhoods through video:

Click here to watch the top-3 for 2011.

Corporate Communications

Using video to for corporate communications can be a great way to get the word out about change, both externally and internally. Prudential New Jersey Properties did a great job explaining a recent merger by bringing together leadership from both companies in this video:

For example, one could look at the distribution of home prices in a city like Old Westbury, NY, and see that it’s an extraordinarily wealthy city:

Few communities have such a large percentage of active listings above $1 million.

On the other end of the spectrum, checking where homes are selling for at the bottom of the market may illustrate something about which neighborhoods are succeeding or struggling. For example, a map of homes selling for $50,000 or less in Minneapolis, Minnesota looks like this:

As a Minneapolis resident, that shows – as I know – that the quadrant of town known as North Minneapolis together with the neighborhoods directly south of Downtown, are the struggling today compared to more affluent areas near the Minneapolis Lakes or the Mississippi River.

Here are a few more examples of what $50,000 or less buys around the country:

Syracuse, NY. Syracuse University is in the SE quadrant:

Cleveland, Ohio: There are pockets in the city such as Little Italy that are the exceptions to this search.

Omaha, NE. The further west you go, the wealthier it gets.

Detroit, Michigan. More than 4,000 homes for sale for less than $50,000.

While poverty gawking can be interesting, what are some real-world applications of WhereToLive.com’s search technology?

With buyers, agents can easily show buers homes throughout an entire metropolitan area that match their search criteria. There may be neighborhoods or cities they hadn’t previously considered that suddenly become interesting once they get a better feel for what their money buys in their first-choice neighborhood or city (often overly optimistic). Perhaps driving another 10 minutes starts to look more tolerable once they see how much further their money goes?

With sellers, agents can show sellers how much competition they are facing from similarly priced homes nearby. Used well, it may help sellers face the reality check they need in order to set a truly competitive price for their property.

Every real estate website has this data, but few websites present it in ways that truly help educate buyers and sellers about the realities of their local real estate markets.

1. Take local bloggers out for coffee or beer. Look for bloggers who are active in their community. Personally, as someone who blogs about my own community, I receive a lot of inquiries from my personal blog’s readers asking for real estate agent recommendations. Seek out bloggers in your own market who would be worth knowing.

2. Go to social media meetups. Online conversations are so much richer once you’ve had a chance to put a real-world name and voice with a username. Look for Tweetups in your community (or organize one) or check out Tumblr meetups near you.

3. Use email. If you find someone particularly interesting, funny, or insightful on a social media service that you use, considering dropping them an email to let them know. Positivity goes a long way toward building real-world relationships that last.

4. Spend less time talking to real estate agents. It’s amazing how much time some real estate agents spend talking to other real estate agents on social networking sites. Yes, this can be an effective networking strategy for earning referrals, but keep it a proper perspective.

In a nutshell, get out of the house and try interacting with something other than a glowing screen from time to time.

Now, here is another reason to create high quality unique content: it’s what Google is looking for. More precisely, Google is NOT looking for content developed through shortcuts, such as copying it from other sources.

Search Engine Watch recently published a report that goes into great depth regarding how Google analyzes pages. Most of this is done automatically, but they do spot-check the quality of their results using an army of human “URL quality raters”.

What are they looking for? High quality original content that people using their search engine would find valuable should the see a link to your site on Google and choose to click.

What are they not looking for? The report includes a few that are very relevant to this discussion:

- Keyword stuffing: You’ve probably run across keyword stuffed content on the web before. That’s when content has clearly been written with search engines as the primary audience to such a degree that it’s become unreadable for actual humans. Since Google is trying to serve humans, your interests are best aligned if you write for humans first. Sure, it’s important to use the same words that prospective buyers or sellers may type into a search engine, but don’t forget to write with humans in mind.

- Copied/scraped content and PPC ads: Most real estate sites aren’t running pay per click ads like hardcore spammers who attempt to direct free search traffic to their site, only to entice the visitors to leave through ads. But quite a few real estate sites do have copied or scraped content on them. For Google, it’s a bad user experience to show their customers 10 blue links that link to duplicate content. If you’re copying/scraping content, there is a good chance that your content won’t rank well since Google tends to rank the original content well, while burying the duplicate versions many pages down where it’s out of view. One common example of this is copying content from Wikipedia. You’re not going to out-rank Wikipedia for Wikipedia’s content, so don’t expect to rank well in search engines if that is your plagiarized content source.

- Templates and other computer-generated pages mass-produced, marked by copied content and/or slight keyword variations: This is similar to the previous issue, although slightly more sophisticated in how it attempts to manipulate Google. While some sites blatantly copy/past content from other sources and call it their own, other sites copy/paste the content, then massage it a bit to trick Google into thinking it’s original. There are companies offering this type of service to real estate brokers today. It’s a risky tactic. Are you sure that your site’s content could pass the sniff test when reviewed by Google’s professional URL quality raters?

What’s the lesson here? Do the work that needs to be done. Write (or hire someone to write) high quality original content about your community, your local real estate market, your company and agents’ community involvement, etc. Don’t plagiarize, don’t try to trick search engines, and don’t forget to write for humans.

It’s a level of quality that high quality companies should strive for in everything they do.

First, one of the biggest challenges real estate sites face is that there often is nothing unique about them. Sure, the logos change, graphic designs are different, and search interfaces vary, but the vast majority of the content on the site ends up being exactly the same as what can be found on every one of your competitor’s sites: syndicated real estate listings from IDX feeds.

That, of course, is a great starting point, but it shouldn’t be the end.

To take things to the next level, it’s critical to add additional content to help differentiate your site from the competition. And, not just additional content: unique content.

Here are some examples of additional content that may add some value, but certainly isn’t unique.

- Automated CMAs (ex. Zestimates)
- Walkscore
- Market Trends
- Yelp or other places information
- Local photos from Flickr or other photo site
- Basic school data
- Census level neighborhood information

The value of each of those content enhancements varies based on quality of implementation and quality of data. For example, we’ve seen sites where Yelp shows restaurants in the middle of a residential area where no restaurant exists. (They may be mistakenly showing home offices of a restaurant owners in some cases.) The issue here is that the data may actually be doing more harm than good if it isn’t credible on a truly local level.

The other downside to this type of content is that it’s easily copied. You will not have exclusive rights to using Yelp, Walkscore, or Education.com in your market, so while you may do a slightly better job than a competitor with your implementation, it’s not a huge differentiator.

Unique Content

Truly unique content is just that: unique. It’s content that can’t be found elsewhere, that speaks to prospective home buyers and sellers in a local and credible manner, and can’t be copied by your competition. It’s also the type of content that search engines like Google tend to gobble up and reward you with lots of high quality, targeted traffic from people searching for local real estate information.

One challenge faced by many real estate brokers is that their sites were not designed to allow for publishing of truly unique content. They are more set it and forget it type sites that tend to do as well as they deserve.

At WhereToLive.com, we’ve built a publishing platform that allows our clients to publish truly unique content in a wide variety of ways, from enhancing listings with information beyond what’s found in syndicated listings, blogs for brokers and agents that allow for easy publishing of relevant local information, and wikis for publishing city and neighborhood information that prospective buyers find valuable.

This allows our clients to publish additional information to their listings, such as links to relevant local landmarks and schools mentioned in property descriptions, or embed videos alongside listings.

It allows our clients to publish information about every city and neighborhood that actually reads like it was written by a local for locals because it actually was. It passes a sniff-test that syndicated content can’t.

And it allows our clients to quickly and efficiently publish timely information about the real estate market, company news, and locally relevant real estate news through a powerful blogging platform where their posts are syndicated throughout their website (and beyond) to reach prospective buyers, sellers, and recruits.

This unique content that WhereToLive.com’s platform enables clients to publish has proven to both increase traffic and increase leads among those who interact with this type of content. It creates the type of experience that Google rewards and prospective buyers and sellers find valuable. A true win-win.

1. Mobile: If a prospect is standing in front of your listing, can they find out information about that using your mobile optimized website or a mobile app? If they like what they see, how do you think they’d like to contact you? Do they want to use their thumbs to enter their name, email, phone, and additional information into an online form? Or, would they prefer to click your phone number to trigger a call on the spot?

Surprisingly, some mobile platforms overlook the importance of generating phone calls from mobile. While some people may be willing thumb their way into your inbox, a person who’s standing in from of a property, who’s just looked at photos of the place and knows the price, is a pretty motivated prospect, so make it easy for them to call you.

2. Web: Is your phone number on every page of your website? This may sound obvious, but it isn’t as obvious as it should be for some companies and agents who’ve put a huge hurdle between prospects and their phone. This seems to occur most often among real estate agents and companies who rely upon blogging platforms like WordPress to run their business websites. It’s not a limitation of the platform, but an oversight among people who seem to be relying too heavily on leads via online forms over phone calls.

3. Web (cont.): Have you ever watched someone while they’re pleasantly using a computer suddenly lose it out of frustrations? One way to cause that reaction is to embed phone numbers in images rather than publishing them as text. If your phone number is in an image, prospects will need to transcribe it in order to add it to their address book. Making it hard to get into prospect’s contact lists is not good.

4. Outbound calls: Real estate agents don’t sit back and wait for the phone to ring. At least not real estate agents who are making a lot of money. Instead, they are actively calling people. But, not everyone person they call will have that agent’s number in their phone. And what are people doing today when they see an unknown number? They’re Googling the number to see who called them before calling the number back. In fact, some (like me) are even Googling phone numbers while the phone is ringing to decide whether it’s worth answering the call or not.

If people are Googling your phone number, your phone calling success is reliant upon the quality of the search results prospects find when they Google your digits. Does your website show up? If not, issue #3 may be in play. If your website does show up, what do prospects find? Do you look professional? Do you have a photo? A professional bio? How does your currently inventory look? Basically, do you look like the type of real estate professional who deserves a return phone call?

If your phone number’s online reputation does not match your offline credibility, you may have an explanation for why you’re not receiving more returned calls.

This variable has stood the test of time (13 years, which is a lot of internet time) because it truly is a sign of strength AND also a hard variable to game. For example, while a person could create dozens of Google Plus accounts and give a +1 to their site of choice, it’s much more difficult to get a website to link to you; especially a credible website that’s respected and trusted by the audience you hope to attract to your site.

The Link Building Challenge

On a typical real estate website, the vast majority of the content is listings. That’s a good thing since the vast majority of prospective buyers and sellers are mostly interested in looking at listings. But, if all your site provides is the same inventory everyone else provides, but with a different logo and graphic design, you’ll have a hard time earning the links you need to gain authority with search engines like Google.

What’s the inflection point between providing content that people find valuable enough to consume to creating content that people will take the extra step to link to it from their blogs, social networking, or news sites? Two words: a story.

A listing is one thing, but a story gets people talking and linking.

Link Friendly Stories

You’ve likely run across many examples of stories executed well. Companies like Zillow, Trulia, and Yahoo Real Estate are experts at this. When they blog about celebrity homes, it’s not just for fun. One of the huge benefits of those posts is the long term link equity those posts generate.

For example, when Zillow marketing team blogs that “Brad Pitt’s Malibu Home Officially Listed“, they do so because they knew people will find the topic interesting, tweet about it, talk about it on Facebook, email their celebrity gossip obsessed friends about it, and link to it from their Tumblr, Posterous, or blogger blogs.

Now, clearly, not every agent and broker deals with Brad Pitt level celebrity homes, so isn’t in a position to create that type of news. But, you don’t need to play at that level. You’re most likely not trying to compete with Zillow in a search engine optimization battle at a national level. All you need to do is be the best real estate site in your local market, which, while still very competitive, is much lower bar compared to what Zillow is trying to achieve.

One tactic to do this is to replicate what Zillow and other national players are doing on a local level. Use your blog to tell stories about local listings. Celebrity real estate gossip works great, but is by far from the only angle that works for link bait. Here are a few other ideas to consider:

- Show how far a fixed amount of money goes in different neighborhoods. What buys a condo downtown likely buys vast amounts of land in a rural area.
- Show off housing styles by neighborhood, with examples.
- Give concrete examples of the impact schools have on housing prices.
- Show people how far their money will go by comparing homes in different property tax districts.
- Blog about notable historic homes when they hit the market. Was a movie shot there? A notable local resident born there?

Professional presentation of listings builds a strong foundation, but real estate stories are what can turn your site into a source of local real estate information that can’t be matched.

At WhereToLive.com, we have largely taken a wait-and-see attitude toward Google’s latest social networking service. This comes after Google’s earlier attempts with Google Buzz, Wave and Orkut, so our experience tells us that Google and social networking have a history with services that haven’t gained much traction (YouTube being a huge exception).

Because of this, we have not taken the time to integrate Google Plus into our client’s sites. Instead, we’ve remained focused on Platform enhancements designed to drive traffic, convert that traffic to leads and convert those leads to business.

While studying Google Plus to date, here are a few things we’ve learned:

1. Buyers do not seem to be interested in publicly sharing which homes they are considering buying. While they may share properties with friends and family members, which Google Plus circles supports, it looks like e-mail remains the most popular method for doing so, followed by chat (AIM, Gchat, Facebook Chat).

Example of a listing discussion within Gchat.

On the other hand, agents regularly share their own listings on social networking sites. This will continue. As of now, Facebook is where most of this type of action is happening.

2. People do seem to be willing to +1 the homepages of real estate sites. While they are not willing to tell the world which house they are looking at, they are willing to let others know that a site is high quality.

3. Google Plus does not appear to influence search engine rankings and is not driving a significant amount of traffic. Organic search engine referrals from Google to our clients’ sites continue to grow at an impressive rate. And the vast majority of that growth comes from pages that have never been +1′d. For example, here is a month over month comparison of the traffic changes from Google organic search results vs. Google Plus for one of our client’s sites:

Google Organic Search Engine Traffic Growth

vs:

Google Plus Traffic Decline

In this case, a site with 100,000+ visits/month brought in nearly 7,000 more visits month over month from Google organic search results while Google Plus accounted for 4 visits last month and no visits this month.

4. Pages that have been +1′d do appear to receive a higher than average click through rate from search results pages. While the rankings don’t appear to have changed significantly (if at all), a search engine result that has a +1 icon next to it – especially if that +1 is an endorsement from someone in their network. Here is an example:

Of the top-3 results on Google for the term “Western Michigan Homes for Sale” the #2 result stands out for me when I run this search since someone in my Google network has +1′d that result.

What to do with Google Plus?

A. If you’re concerned that Google Plus is going to make or break your website’s traffic and leads, take a deep breath…that does not appear to be happening. Instead, focus on what really does drive traffic and leads, which continues to be the creation of high quality original content, written for humans, that Google can see.

B. Be sure to +1 your website’s homepage, then encourage agents and clients to do the same. This should help you earn some extra traffic from people staring at a list of 10 blue links where one of them is for your site.

C. Encourage agents to +1 themselves and encourage them to ask their networks of friends, family and clients to do the same. A person visiting through a +1′d link are essentially visiting a pre-endorsed agent.

1. Less than 10% of visitors land on our clients’ homepages. In fact, it’s often closer to 8% and occasionally even lower than that. If your website is very search engine friendly, the majority of your site’s traffic will actually land on your property detail pages.

2. Agents drive traffic to their sites within the sites. Agents market themselves on business cards, email signature files, sign riders, print pieces, etc. When they do this, they don’t market their broker’s site. Instead, they market their site within the site, which allows them to present their company’s inventory and earn leads.

3. City/Neighborhood Searches: While most of our clients have an important search phrase they’d like to rank high for on Google, what they really want is to rank high for every city and neighborhood they serve. By creating sites that have pages tailored to every community, our clients earn more traffic directly to that type of internal page rather than the homepage.

4. Social Media: When people share your site on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, it’s rarely the homepage that they’re sharing. Interesting blogs posts and listings get the bulk of the shares, which means that the bulk of social media referrals are to pages other than your homepage.

That said, there is one group of visitors who routinely hit your homepage: returning visitors. Returning visitors that had a positive experience on your site in the past will often revisit your site after bookmarking your site’s homepage or by searching specifically for your company name on Google. In fact, it’s quite common to see a homepage’s traffic made up of a larger percentage of returning visitors than new.

What does this mean for real estate web design? Take every page of our site seriously since every page is a potential landing page. And think about what a returning visitor is looking for when they land on your site’s homepage.