Primary marketBuyers Want MLS Searching; Provide It Or Die On The Webvine
Look at any realty industry study and it will tell you that a majority of home buyers and sellers (let’s call them “consumers”) want to look at homes on the Internet before they buy or sell their home. Only after previewing homes on the Web, will they then choose an agent (usually online) to show them homes in person. Moreover, the agent that they choose is most often the one whose Web site let them search the MLS in the first place.
Sellers want to see what homes like theirs are selling for and buyers want to see what kind of bang they can get for their buck. And there YOU are, not offering either one of them any MLS searching from your site.
A consumer normally searches for homes on the Internet this way: He enters the most common key words for the county or city that he’s searching, plus the words “real estate” as in…Orange County Real Estate, or San Clemente real estate, or Anaheim real estate, etc.
When he searches on a search engine using such key words he will rarely see the big national MLS search services like www.Realtor.com or www.homeseekers.com come up high on the search engine results. What he will see likely are links and descriptions of local realty offices and agents.
On pay-per-click search engines like Overture.com, generally, the first results he sees will be the local offices of low-ball national realty firms like erealty.com, ziprealty.com, sold-my-home-for-free.com, or ones like homeownershipteam.com that are closely tied with mortgage firms. Such firms pay dearly to come up high on Overture for certain key urban marketplaces and certain key word phrases there.
Most of these firms do offer MLS searching from their sites, but oddly, they generally highlight their cheap commissions, big rebates, or low-cost loans (nonetheless, however, closely linked to your credit rating) instead of their MLS access.
On most other search engines or even on AOL.com, Altavista.com and many others, the top most search engine results are delivered there by Overture.com. So unless you intend to outbid these national firms on Overture.com for one of the top three positions (any position after third position is mostly a waste of money on Overture), you won’t get much value out of advertising your MLS searching-from-your-site with the search engines.
Now you can keep even, at best, with the big national firms mentioned above by bidding against them on Overture.com. I do it off and on with my custom web site at www.DebbieFerrari.com, depending on how much business I want. But I have found that to stay in the mostly-first or sometimes-second position for some 100 key word phrases in Overture.com, it costs me about $3,000 per month at the start of 2003 in one of the most competitive realty metro markets (Orange County, CA) in the U.S.
Overture says you get better results when you repeat the search term you’ve bid on—the one which people are using to search for your site---right in the title of your site. So your site and description for the Overture bid/search engine might be something like:
Search Orange County CA MLS Yourself – Debbie Ferrari
See photos and text of homes for sale in Southern California. Get auto-updates as matches come on the market. Also school, city, utility info, plus local market outlooks.
or you could use….
Search Orange County CA MLS Yourself – Debbie Ferrari
See photos and text of homes for sale in Southern California. Visit most-awarded Realtor site in U.S. Get school, city, utility info, plus local area pics and latest realty-mortgage news.
You’d do similar for your county or city, but it’s a good idea to put your state (see CA above) Why? So that people seeking Orange County, FLORIDA or NEW YORK don’t click on your site and cost you extra clicks and bid money. You put your own name there to build “name recognition” for yourself so that consumers find your fame “familiar” when they get down to picking an agent.
What’s a cheaper, but not necessarily better approach to paying lotsa money to bid search engines? Well, you could pay a marketing-oriented designer (remember, they must be marketing-oriented, and not just graphically-oriented) to build you a better Web site with more content that is valuable for buyers and sellers than any other agent in your city or county. Once that is done, then set about getting hundreds of links on large, real estate-related Web sites that point visitors to your site.
Why? Because then you can come up first on www.google.com the search engine that now surpasses Yahoo, and is perhaps the most relevant in evaluating sites based on what key words the searcher searched for. Then, if consumers are searching for words like “Little Rock MLS,” they have a good chance of visiting your site and making you their buyer’s agent.
Oddly, in Little Rock, AK, most of the agents who do come up when you search for “Little Rock MLS” on Google do not offer MLS searching directly from their sites by consumers. Instead, they tell consumers that if you fill out a form for the agents, they will do the searches for you and report back to you. Naturally, consumers will see this as a come-on to get contact information and recognize it as inferior to them being able to search themselves. Too many agents do the same thing today, and I think it is a rip off of the consumer, as well as being misleading.
Basically (and I am oversimplifying here), Google ranks a site largely by how many links on other relevant/important sites point to the site. Google reasons, “If a site is really relevant to a certain subject, then other web sites in its same field should recognize that fact and have links on their sites, pointing to the site. So if we count how many relevant links---not just links per se---but links there are on related and substantial sites, then we should be able to get a strong indication of which web sites are good and which ones are just trying to fool us.”
Most agent sites have from three to ten links on other sites pointing to it. Mine has some 250 to 350, depending on which link-counting service you ask. And 95 percent of these sites are realty-related and big, thus significant. Therefore, a link on them means more than a reciprocal link on some other single agent’s site, yet, I also have those and welcome reciprocal linking with other agents. I created a special page for that purpose at: http://www.debbieferrari.com/other_links.html. You might want to do the same on your site as thousands of agents are doing right now. Why? Because as I said above, you need traffic in order to best offer MLS searching from your site.
Say that you go out and get 300 popularity links in the next year on a variety of sites. Once you do, if you are in a rural or semi-rural area, you will almost overnight start coming up much higher on www.google.com, given that you have sufficient content, relevance, key word density and several other key factors covered in your site.
Editor’s note: To see graphically the “link relationship” between your site and others, there’s an astonishing new tool for this. It’s called the TouchGraph GoogleBrowser and you access it at: http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html. Instructions for it are at:
http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGB_FullInstructions.html. Go see this and read the instructions first. It is truly a revelation and don’t be shy about moving the graph around with your curser.
Since Google today gets more usage than Yahoo, you will have done monstrous good for yourself in your online marketing and your site may start to dominate all other agent
sites in your marketing area. This particularly benefits you if you are offering “from your site” MLS searching performed by the visitor himself.
You’ll even do well on Yahoo.com because in late 2002, Yahoo began using most of the results supplied by Google on searches. Your site, however, will come up only AFTER the sponsored (paid for) links have appeared atop the Yahoo results page. Sadly, those sponsored links come from Overture.com, and sometimes from other bid engines. However, if you are one of the highest bidders on Overture.com, this same positioning will make you very happy.
Regardless, just promote the fact that your site offers MSL searching and you will be appealing directly to what the consumer wants today. My purpose in discussing search engine strategies above is that it is worthless to promote MLS searching on your site in any way if your site never gets found.
For more on this topic, yesterday, I gave you the strategies of promoting your MLS search service on your site plus I showed you concrete examples of what to do and what not to do in attracting home buyers and sellers to your site.
Guest columnist, Debbie Ferrari, e-PRO, EMS/CE, RECS, Broker Associate, Prudential California Realty, who serves South Orange County, California, is one of the earliest Realtors® to embrace Internet marketing. Her site at www.DebbieFerrari.com is among the most-awarded known Realtor® sites in the country. She can be reached at Debbie@DebbieFerrari.com.