Google Is Important For Real Estate Website Traffic

Why do discussions of search engine optimization (SEO) for your real estate website boil down to knowing how Google ranks or penalizes websites? Real estate agents adding web content in order to improve their search engine ranking (and add information their clients need) have asked IMCD Web Design why we do not give guidance on optimizing for Yahoo, MSN or the other search engines.

The answer to search engine positioning is interesting and simple. Some search engines are like “relabeler” sales companies – companies who depend on a manufacturer to create their product to which they affix their label. Other sales companies may also buy and relabel the same product from the same manufacturer, with or without minor variations. In the search engine world, Google’s indexing engine also delivers search results to AOL and Netscape. The next three important search engines are Yahoo, which supplies results to AltaVista and AllTheWeb, MSN who only uses their results, and Ask.com who feeds search results to Hotbot and Lycos.

With Yahoo and Ask appearing to be influential players on the search engine scene, why not also factor their search criteria in your real estate website’s SEO? To a certain extent Yahoo is figured in the SEO landscape, but the fact remains: Google is the search engine used by most Internet searchers. With most Internet searches done on Google, it is the most important search engine on which to rank highly. Webmasters can tell from their websites’ visitor statistics that most people are funneled to their websites from Google.

In IMC’s experience, in many cases if you rank on Google, you may well rank even higher on Yahoo. Yahoo appears to do a better job of filtering out off-topic websites and focuses more on content and less on external links to index your real estate website. For instance, on a keyword search of “bozeman real estate”, Google gives Weather Underground a high ranking, even though it is a weather information website. As best we can guess, it ranks in the real estate keywords due to the geographically targeted ad links on the website that are Bozeman real estate companies. Yahoo does not return any websites high in the real estate search that are not real estate websites. Yahoo also appears to target more local companies over the national real estate websites also – which is nice for real estate agents!

IMC provides our real estate clients with websites that are optimized primarily for Google, but with a secondary appreciation for Yahoo’s ranking patterns. Our experience with MSN, the third most popular search engine, is twofold: less than 10% of traffic comes from MSN and if your keyword placement in your web content is good, you should rank well in MSN following the standard Google SEO steps.

If your real estate website is not highly visible on Google, contact IMC and find out how our real estate web design and search engine optimization services can improve your search ranking on Google. High visibility on Google is followed by high profitability on your real estate website investment!