Posted by REW Marketing

Updated on May 3rd, 2023

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Published in Lead Generation

Using Sold Data For Traffic & Leads

Will sold data actually drive traffic to your real estate website? Does it have any SEO value at all?

The short answer is: yes.

But understanding why and how to use it is tricky.

So let's learn a little more about using MLS sold data for real estate SEO…

What is Sold Data in Real Estate?

In real estate, "sold data" refers to information about properties that have recently been sold in a particular market. This data typically includes details such as the sale price, property features, and the length of time the property was on the market before it sold.

Real estate professionals use this data to gain insights into the local market and to inform pricing and marketing strategies for new listings.

Sold data is also valuable to buyers who want to understand the market value of a property they are interested in, and sellers who want to learn about the potential value of their home.

Why Use Sold Data On Your Real Estate Website?

The main reason why you should incorporate sold data into your online content is because people want it. It’s that simple.

People look for sold data for a number of reasons, from simple curiosity to research for imminent real estate decisions. Providing that data on your website means providing value and, as we know, developing helpful content is generally one of the best strategies for improving your search ranking.

By incorporating sold data into your website's content, you can establish yourself as a trusted resource in the real estate industry. Put that data behind a registration form and you can generate buyer and seller leads from it as well.

Overall, using sold data is great for building a trustworthy brand identity and for generating leads from your website.

How To Use Sold Data On Your Real Estate Website

Here are some ways that you can incorporate sold data into your real estate website.

• The simplest way to present sold data is through a feed of sold homes similar to the one that users browse for homes for sale. Context is important. Place the feed on an appropriate page with information on how to use and interpret information from the feed.

• Show off curated sold home data along with brokerage, team or agent profiles. This demonstrates local expertise and shows potential clients you're a great agent.

• Celebrate sold properties into your social media marketing strategy. This falls under “social proof”, reassuring potential clients that you’re both active and effective.

• Compile interesting data into infographics and publish it to your blog, LinkedIn, Facebook, everywhere. Market trends are especially sought after and presenting it in an original and engaging way, along with some expert analysis, is a value-add that's hard to resist.

• Incorporate sold data into area pages to enrich the information given on a community. If you can find creative ways to incorporate your sold data into your general community information, you'll be able to provide more insight into a community and help buyers make smarter decisions.

A feed of recently sold homes that users can browse

Sold Data For SEO: Best Practices

While sold data can be good for SEO, it’s not suitable for every site and its effectiveness is overshadowed by many other changes and factors that should take priority.

To make the most of sold data for your real estate website, remember the following:

• Use sold data if your site already has strong search authority. If your site isn’t well established in search results already, then adding sold data likely won’t have an affect and you’ll just be taking away time and resources from improvements that will.

• You might get complaints. Some people aren’t happy about their home sale information appearing online, so be prepared to field some requests to have specific sold data removed.

• Don’t present sold data “as is” without any thought to context or the overall SEO health of your site. Effective use of sold data can take some custom work, which requires additional time, budget, and maintenance.

And finally…

Keep The Sold Data Fresh

One of the challenges we've seen with sold data is that it accumulates. The goal with regular MLS data is to show active properties, so it makes sense that the data is purged shortly after the home is sold. This means there's a fairly steady amount of data as homes are added and removed on a regular basis.

With sold data, this isn't the case. A sold home never becomes "unsold", which means the data sticks around for years at a time. That creates a drain on your database and can also add hundreds of thousands of pages to your site, impacting speed and ultimately the user experience.

There's no magic number for how many sold listings to keep on your site but if it's impacting performance, it's too much. Consider purging sold data every year or two to keep your site running in tip top shape.

Case Study: Carly Carey

Here's a graph showing Google search performance for 16 months after adding sold data to CarlyCarey.com:

Clicks, impressions, and average search position for searches including the word "sold"

That’s around 84,000 clicks in 16 months from people looking for information on sold homes!

You can read more of an analysis of this case and using sold data to drive traffic on the Real Estate Webmaster forums.