There’s always something to howl about.

Looking for long tail search results from your on-line real estate marketing efforts? Don’t clean up your breadcrumbs

Comes tonight an email — over the transom, out of the blue — from a family relocating to Phoenix. Here’s a piece of it:

Somehow, I stumbled on to your website (looking at an old commentary on 1415 E Flower) and googling deeply. I am grateful that I did, because it seems that you focus on the kinds of unique homes that my family and I really love.

This is the web page I had built for 1415 East Flower Street in the Cheery Lynn Historic District of Central Phoenix.

That page was one of maybe 40 I made in February of 2004, when Ronan Doyle was relocating to Phoenix. I would send him listings, he would tell me which houses he was interested in — and I would add some I thought he should be interested in. I would preview the homes, taking photos and making web pages so that he could assess his options from Atlanta.

We’ve worked this way with buyers for years. In consequence, we’ve taken pictures of hundreds of homes, making hundreds of web pages in dozens of web sites. By talking in web sites, we give our clients an easy, fail-safe interface for viewing homes.

What do we do with the web sites and web pages once the purchase has closed?

Nothing.

We leave the pages and sites on our file server forever. If there were anything confidential in the pages, we would excise it. But there never is — because the web is not secure. So the pages live on forever, each one a detailed chronicle of a particular house at a particular moment in time.

Why do we leave them on the server? For the reason named in the email quoted above — so that people can stumble on them and find out about us.

We never kill any worthwhile work product. Every single-property web site we’ve ever built lives on forever. Even though I have rebuilt our Phoenix real estate web site as a blogsite, all of the old pages are still out on our server — just in case they’re linked from somewhere — or in case some search engine thinks they’re still live.

But the lingering breadcrumbs of houses we have previewed for buyers are especially good sources of long tail search traffic.

Why? Because, as with my correspondent above, the people who find those pages will be highly motivated — determined to find exactly what they’re looking for. And whoever finds any one single breadcrumb has found the trail back to us.

It’s good odds that people who follow our breadcrumb trails are interested in knowing more about us. They’re definitely interested in the kinds of houses we sell. And there is a strong chance that, by the time they elect to make contact, the sale is ours to lose. That’s the Unchained ideal: Beyond competition.

We make these web pages and web sites with engenu by now, which simply means that we can make a lot more of them. Their job is to communicate with the clients they’re built for. But because they will be out on our file server forever, there is always the chance — eventually the lead-pipe certainty — that someone else will find them — and thus find us.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,