I’ve been working a lot lately on www.carlycarey.com on sold listings lately, preparing to start a campaign to advertise the fact that we have the kind of access to sold inventory that no one else on Vancouver Island has. Kind of the “search like a Realtor®” approach.
The idea is to have such an awesome and feature-rich sold search (better than Matrix in a lot of ways) that even Realtors will want to use it. Once we start advertising it, my hope is to leverage it into backlinks for our SEO by making sure every local website in the region knows about it (think tourism sites, local bloggers, etc) and of course because we have sold data, we can also do some cool things like generate stats that can be easily used by local newspapers etc.
Be the “go-to” website for sold data.
Of course, we have to do it in a compliance way, force registration, and (in BC) also require a link to a specific TOS
It’s a pretty big investment in terms of coding, design and SEO, as well as the promotional effort to promote it afterwards (we might put $50k into it) and the ongoing cost for hosting and maintaining the whole feed with multiple photos etc is higher like $500-$1,000 a month, but I think the returns will be worth it!
But let’s talk about the SEO opportunity here, and also what we should consider in terms of “impact” of adding this many listings to a site.
Your site’s authority can only support so many pages
This is an important element of SEO to remember. Every site only has so much PageRank (established authority) which means if you try to put “everything” on the site, by trying to rank for “everything” you are less likely to rank well for “anything” - so you need to make choices.
Making these choices are what I generally refer to as “sculpting” - which basically means deciding which pages are in, and which pages are out from a priority perspective.
Consider this for a moment:
You can only rank 10 pages on your site (example)… but you have 100 listings in your feed.
If you do nothing and allow access to everything, Google will randomly decide which pages it wants to pick and you might end up (out of your 10 pages) with:
- List item - 3 mobile homes under 100k
- List item - 4 rentals (you don’t even do rentals)
- List item - 2 average priced homes with high DOM that don’t seem to be selling
- List item - 1 luxury home that everyone is interested in
So it could be argued that 1 out of 10 are going to be “high value” from a potential earnings perspective.
Now imagine this: You don’t show Google “mobile homes”, “rentals” etc at all. If Google can’t access them, then they won’t have the potential to take up valuable rankings.
Now you might end up with
- List item - 1 super pricey house that will never sell but gets lot of traffic
- List item - 2 average price homes with lots of interest
- List item - 2 condos that move very well
- List item - 5 luxury home that everyone is interested in
Ask yourself: If you could choose (because you can) which list would YOU prefer to get traffic from?
This is the concept of sculpting. By setting up your website in certain ways, combined with working with programmers to setup unique or custom “views” into the data set and purging specific listing types you can guide Google to the highest value pages on your site.
How does this apply to my sold data conversation? This is the feedback / interactive part.
By adding sold data, you’re adding more listings (more pages) and thus you have more options to consider and more choices to make (remember you can only rank so many pages)
So do I want this:
- List item - 1 super pricey house that will never sell but gets lot of traffic
- List item - 2 average price homes with lots of interest
- List item - 2 condos that move very well
- List item - 5 luxury home that everyone is interested in
Or do I want this
- List item - 3 luxury home that everyone is interested in (That just sold)
- List item - 2 average price homes with lots of interest (That just sold)
- List item - 2 condos that move very well
- List item - 3 luxury home that everyone is interested in
Your choices and combinations are endless.
Of course, the cool thing about being an SEO (and the process I talked about above for link building) is that as I get more links and more Pagerank, I have more “authority” and thus, the # of pages I can actually rank goes up (so I can pick more of each) so my question is not simple “do I add solds and risk diluting my active pages” the question is - is the addition of solds valuable enough that if I use it for pagerank and other marketing value, should I do it?
All interesting questions - what are your thoughts?
What questions do you have on sculpting? Would you like to know how to do this? (hint, you can already do some of it yourself with no programming)