Recently I had a call from a pair of REALTORs® in Brooklyn NY. Our conversation impressed upon me once how poorly many REALTORs® understand the important role text content plays in attracting search visitors to a site. A real estate website must attract a significant number of daily visitors, perhaps 50+, to generate sufficient leads for the site to earn its keep.
At the time, this couple had a Point2agent website. Point2Agent sites come with a lot of “boilerplate” text pages, pages which can deceive site owners into believing that they’ve done all they need to do to get traffic to their sites. In actuality, site owners would be better advised to delete all or most of the boilerplate pages and replace them with original text content.
These two agents had recently been involved in a long, very unpleasant tussle with a well-known search engine optimization company. They contacted me because they had convinced themselves that the company had maliciously installed “malware” of some kind on their site to prevent it from getting traffic. They wanted to know if I could remove this malware from their site.
I logged into their site and quickly determined that 1) there was nothing wrong with it and 2) it was getting just exactly the amount and kind of search traffic that I would have expected after scanning the contents of their site. They are averaging about 7.5 visitors per day — better than some sites but far from enough to support a real estate business.
They had added 3 pages of original text to their site, one describing each of 3 neighborhoods within their city: Marine Park, Sheepshead Bay and Ocean Parkway. I asked them to look closely at Ultrastats>Referrers>Search terms (see below). (Ultrastats is Point2agent’s branded version of Urchinstats and nearly identical to Google Analytics.)
When I looked at their stats, it was immediately apparent that virtually all the search traffic to their site is attracted to it by those three page of original text. Out of 20 search terms used by search visitors who visited their site in the last week over half the search terms used included the name of one of the three neighborhoods that they had written about. So, there’s basically nothing at all wrong with their site. They’ve made a great start by adding 3 pages of original content, but their site just doesn’t have enough text content to generate a lot of traffic.
I would be willing to bet that every time they add a few more pages, they’ll see a nice little increase in their traffic. And, once they’ve added perhaps 15-20 pages, they’ll be getting enough daily visitors for their site to be bringing them nice leads.
It’s incredibly important for a Realtor® who has a website to understand the direct relationship between the text content on his or her sites and its chances of being ranked well in Google search results. Ranking well for a very competitive keyphrase such as “Brooklyn real estate” can be very challenging. However, when a site has lots of hyper-local content such as descriptions of neighb0rhoods, condominiums or subdivisions, then there will be lots of opportunities for the site to be found by searchers.
So, if your website doesn’t get many visitors, first get rid of any boilerplate content that may have come with your site. Then start writing and posting to your website or blog! The good news about writing hyper-local content is that no SEO expertise is required. Pretty much all you have to do is write about topics relevant to real estate and the search engines will find your site.
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Hi Suzanne – We hooked up on Chrome last week and I can not find your phone number (or email) in my stream – pretty ironic for a Google product eh!
Can you reply back to me with that info – I would like to talk to you about a few issues in my business now. Thanks – Mitch