We were alerted to the new Coldwell Banker site by this post over at Property Portal Watch (a must read for those in the industry). PPW pointed out the snazzy new features like the ‘BlueScape‘ search which really is pretty cool. But what I wanted to see was how a big, well resourced, real estate company approached basic site architecture and SEO best practices. This is my quick SEO site review…
Any site is always in a constant state of progression, but I was a bit surprised by some things, particularly considering all the great examples of excellent real estate SEO in the US market (think realtor.com, trulia.com, and zillow.com for starters).
In summary, these are the four things I would address if I was CB:
- Limit the number of towns/cities linked to from the state level pages to just those where CB has an office and some listings. Too many links has a negative impact on those few towns/cities which really matter.
- At the city level add links to pages for all the neighbourhoods in that town/city. People quickly narrow down where they want to live in a city and will typically search for property by neighbourhood. If you don’t have a page for that you can’t rank.
- Add pages for different types of property, eg. apartments, condos, townhomes etc. Real estate online is extremely competitive and if you don’t have narrowly targeted and highly relevant pages for specific local queries focused on a particular type of property you will struggle to rank.
- Add well optimised pages with lists of real estate agents at the city/town level and the new neighbourhood level. The current pages are internal search results and not well optimized to rank for relevant phrases…and arguably this is the most important keyword territory because these are sellers looking for agents!
If you have any of your own thoughts we’d love to hear them…hit the comments!