Use Real Estate Data To Move Up In Search Rankings
Want to know how Google became a gazillion-dollar company that owns the Internet? Want to know how you can use hyper-local real estate data to build up your business just like Google?
Actually, it’s very simple. Here’s how Google did it. Back in the day, when Sergey Brin and Larry Page were doctoral students at Stanford University, they were thinking, “How can we make a better search engine?”
At the time, Yahoo was it. Yahoo was famous for being one of the first websites to be able to categorize the booming number of websites online and give searchers some direction on how to find what they want.
The young Googlers came upon this idea: research papers frequently cite other research papers for authority and credibility. What if we created a search engine that measured how well websites linked to other websites that they thought offered authoritative and credible content?
Simple premise right?
Nothing really ground-breaking about it. This was the practice for research papers for as long as research papers were written.
But Brin and Page were smart enough to be the first to apply this to the web. They developed algorithms that ranked pages and then tracked which ranked page linked to other pages.
The rest is history. (By the way, in one of those stories that make you wince, Google once offered to sell their formula to Yahoo for $1 million. Oops, that turned out to be a $513 billion with a “B” mistake that could actually spell the demise of Yahoo).
What’s all this go to do with you as a real estate professional?
Using your own real estate data to show authority
In this era of “big” data, massive amounts of data can be transferred quickly and can be displayed easily on websites.
For example, Home Junction is a data provider of hyper-local real estate data – demographics, school information, business information, recent home sales, home prices, weather, cost of living indexes, etc.
For counties and cities all over the country.
As you can imagine, that’s a massive amount of data. “Big” data actually.
But Home Junction is able to place data widgets on local real estate websites so they can display a subset of their data for their particular neighborhoods that the broker or agent is trying to farm.
What this means is that in an instant, a local real estate website can not only be a source of local property listings, but also a valuable “hub” of hyper-local data.
Now in a recent article on Inman entitled, “How to Master The Big 3 Content Marketing Drivers” there is an agent who mentions how he gives valuable content to other websites. This helps out those websites.
In return, he asks for reciprocal links back to his website.
There’s the Google “authority” link we talked about earlier.
That’s Google’s business model – that’s how websites move up the ranks to Page One for search results.
So, with your Home Junction real estate data, you can provide valuable hyper-local facts and information to other local websites.
Take a mommy blogger in the area who writes about shopping for example.
Send her some information about the local Cost of Living Index for the area. How this area compares to the national average for apparel, education, entertainment, food, health care, housing, transportation and utilities.
Get her to link back to your website.
Bingo! Brin and Page now see your site as a valuable resource and will probably and hopefully move you up in their rankings (okay, as you can imagine. It’s a lot more complicated than this. Especially when every Tom, Dick and Zillow wants to move up in the results on search engines.)
But you get the idea.
Real estate data is great for SEO. Go get some. Call Home Junction.
