If you have been around the real estate industry for a while, you recall that a vital part of any brokerage website is SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO is the process of developing websites and webpages that are optimized to allow search engines to rank your website high for keywords that connect your business with the most likely clients for your service. If you rank above the fold (known as the part of a web page that appears before you scroll), it can have a dramatic impact on your website traffic and lead generation.
In truth, SEO is not talked about much amongst brokers anymore. When you do a keyword search that you believe will drive the right clients or prospective clients to your website, it's daunting to see Zillow, Trulia, Movoto, Realtor.com, or Redfin sitting above the fold in that prized position that you want. It’s so also daunting that many broker website providers have given up. They would prefer to sell you advertising rather than earn customer traffic with SEO. That is not how we do things. We believe that great SEO is what our clients deserve and we deliver that through many strategies developed over decades of experience. One center of excellence we have developed that differentiates us is website topology - commonly referred to as hub and spoke.
Our enterprise brokerage clients enjoy our website topology strategy. It is a hub and spoke network of websites that need to be properly connected. The hub of the enterprise firm is the broker website. The spokes are primarily co-branded agent websites, but may also include regional websites or sub-sites of the brokerage like office.
If you look carefully at the link-beds at the bottom of the listing detail pages of the top sites, you will see that they have created subsites which cross link across the hub and spoke sites. If done correctly, these “spoke” websites take on a life of their own in search results and provide valuable information to the consumer.
Here are a couple of keynotes to the strategy that we are eager to explore with you in a meeting setting. You can evaluate your website against this criteria - or we can show you how.
We encourage all agents and teams to have their own domains. Your current site probably uses a subdomain for agent websites like ‘agentname.brokerdomain.com’ - i.e agent.compass.com. That topography has no value because there is no linkback credit from the agent website to the broker website. Linkbacks drive domain authority and improve SEO. The same strategy holds true for community pages and even office pages. If you want to geek out on this, study canonical linking strategy.
Content is also vital to the hub and spoke strategy. Content published by the broker should be published carefully on the agent websites. Moreover, the broker website can mirror content that agents publish on their website or community pages. Think of content as a new page, like a blog post. Just about every broker platform has the ability to allow you to publish to your website and agents to publish to their websites, but the key here is the control dashboard and…canonical linking.
Imagine your website as a spiderweb of websites that all connect to each other. Those spiderwebs are crawled by search engine spiders all day long. With the correct website topography and linking between those sites combined with actively creating new content across the company’s connected domains, you can win locally - and stick it to the big, national portals.