I had a great chat yesterday with Kye Grace, a partner at deBruyn Design+Marketing about Ubertor’s auto fill categories and how they can effect a real estate agents website. Kye was telling me about some of the results that he was seeing so I asked Kye to drop me an email about his thoughts so that I could re post it here. Here is what Kye sent me:
Over time we have seen time and time again that utilizing MLS reciprocity to place listings from your niche or community on your Ubertor site will not only drive traffic but result in quality leads.
These are all pages that have the potential to be crawled and indexed by the search engines and in turn be found by consumers using the search engines. You’d be surprised how many people search an address or MLS number.
We have clients for whom we perform on going Search Engine Optimization for and I would say on average two thirds of the traffic they are getting is coming from long tail searches such as address, variations of the address and MLS numbers. These are fairly high traffic sites so we know the sample size is large enough to indicate how well they work.
It is important that the listings are filtered in a way that not only ensures as many listings as possible get crawled but that it is actually usable by the searcher. It is important to understand that site visitors and the search engines are not going to go through pages and pages of listings in one AFC. Breaking them down in too more manageable sizes is key. Having one AFC for all of Vancouver doesn’t serve anyone well, having them broken down into one of 40 sub areas does. Everyone can find what they need quickly and easily this way.
A couple of examples of how this can be done is a niche site or in conjunction with custom maps.
Rebecca Permack has niche site targeting the neighbourhood of Burke Mountain, a quickly growing area popular for buyers of both resale and new developments. Being a tight niche there is about 40 homes listed at any given time. Being a smaller number it is easier for the search engines to crawl most if not all of these listings. The beauty of it is her site is a one stop place for buyers or potential sellers to see what is listed in Burke Mountain. She hasn’t broken the listings down by development yet as being new there are only a few resale listings relating to the new developments. Once these properties start to be listed by the original owner each development page will use and AFC to show the properties just in that development. www.burkemountainhomes.com
The other is utilize AFCs to create your own map search. The Experience Real Estate Group in Edmonton wanted to allow people a quick and easy map search so we designed maps for every area and sub area in Edmonton and linked them to the appropriate AFC. Now visitors to their site can come and search their way around Edmonton in just a few clicks. You can see examples of the maps at www.experiencerealtygroup.com with links in the right hand column.
We have a few other sites on the go that drill down as far as a AFC page for each condo building in an area. These are great for tighter areas like Yaletown or Newport Village. Another great way to serve home searchers and ensure you are getting as many pages into the search engines that you can.
Kye Grace, Partner
Digital Strategist
deBruyn Design+Marketing
