There’s always something to howl about.

De-Commodotize Your Listing Content

This is in response to Greg’s post about Jim Flanagan’s question, “What does today’s real estate consumer want in (on) a real estate brokerage’s website?”  “Listings” was the predictable, correct answer.

It’s no secret that Real Estate Web site users are primarily interested in listings. That’s why everyone has them, and that makes listings a commodity.  That begs the question: When everyone offers the content that your target audience is looking for, how do you set your site apart?

Blogging is one answer, but at the outset most consumers are not looking for you or your expertise, they are looking for listings, so at the end of the day, listing content is still the most powerful thing you have control over when it comes to attracting users to your site.

Before I spent most of my time on Real Estate (I heard you get to make your own hours and its easy money, plus I am a real “people person”), I managed eCommerce sites for a living.

If there is one golden rule of successful B2C eCommerce, it is this: Content is currency.

Consumers are used to the wealth of content that Amazon puts around a copy of Home Buying for Dummies. They are not impressed by cheap, 50-word “descriptions” full of Real Estate jargon and one or two grainy pictures from the IDX feed that feature cat boxes, dishes in the sink, and amateur porn lighting.

Google is not impressed when the content you offer on your own site is identical to the content that is offered on sites it considers more authoritative than yours.

The answer is to add value to your currency. Start by minting rich content and then stop giving it away and you will get more visits from both Google and humans. It’s a three-step process:

Step 1: Develop rich content for your listings, or for listings that you get permission to modify on your site. At a minimum, that means a few hundred words of grammatically correct English, lots of decent photos, and the right meta data in the right places.

(There have been many posts on BHB about how to write decent listing content. There are also books about how to create eCommerce content that sells. Intelligent Selling by Ken Burke is a good one. There are no shortcuts.)

Step 2: This is crucial: Devalue the content you give away to your MLS and to third-party aggregators like Trulia.

Boil your rich content down to a version that hits the highlights, but is less fulfilling than the rich content you created in Step 1 so that users on third party sites who may be interested in your listing can find it on those sites.

Step 3: Make sure the GoogleBot knows about your richer, more valuable content.

When a Google user enters keywords that are relevant to your listings, Google will be comparing your rich content to the devalued content you gave away. That devalued content ends up on Realtor.com and hundreds of competitor’s sites via IDX, and it ends up on Trulia, surrounded by no-follow tags.

In most cases where Google is comparing Property Detail pages, the value of your rich content will be enough to overcome a larger, more authoritative site in Page Rank, and you will own your listing in the organic results.

Do that, and you will have the opportunity to introduce the users you attract to your listings to other content, like your blog. That’s how you get them to come back to you over the course of their research period. Think of it as a benevolent “bait and switch”: Get them in the door with listing content, get them to stay because you are a credible expert in your area.