Real Estate SEO Design

Recently I finished reading The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande.

Dr. Gawande is a world class surgeon (and New York Time best selling author) who has a goal to change the quality of health care in the world. He studied how standardized a procedure with checklists, before and after performing surgery, helps make health care better simply by reducing easily preventable mistakes.

Captain Scully, the Hero on the Hudson, has a section in the book about how he  and his crew kept everyone safe by, you guessed it, following checklists all the way down to river and continuing on until everyone was out of plane. Amazing stuff.

I wanted share a post-listing checklist for agents to use, modify, add to, and make their own. Please share your additional ideas in the comments section.

The following list is for reviewing a real estate listing of a residential home which you have in the multiple listing service (MLS).The list has four objectives

1. Maximize the exposure of your advertising
2. Increase accuracy & reduce liability
3. Verifying you are using all the tools you have available
4. Communicating well to the best parties you can

• Do you have 25 photos?
• Virtual tour – is it loaded and did you check the link?
• Did you write realtor.com custom language?
• Did you create a realtor.com header?
• Have you added realtor.com banner text?
• Have you posted a link of virtual tour on MLS??
• Do you have an open house scheduled? Promote the open house online
• Are Documents such as brokerage forms and sellers disclosures uploaded onto the MLS so that buyer agents can access them easily?
• Spell check the text
• is the text written jargon free for buyers or with jargon for agents. I prefer jargon free for buyers.
• review the directions – I suggest driving directions from a major highway
• If you have a blog, did you make a listing announcement on it?
• if you have a twitter account did you make a tweet about it?
• if you have a Facebook business pages did you make a post about it?
• did you share your listing off of your brokerage site?
• review pricing – are you pretending people don’t use the internet or search parameters? $499,950 homes are invisible to half million dollar and up home buyers looking online. If home searchers don’t see the house, they cannot buy it.

There is the list to start with. Still awake? Great. Please add your suggestions to the list in the comment section below.

Here are the reasons to do the items on the list;

• Adding 25 photos (or more if you can) allows your listing to rise to the top when home buyers search by homes with number of photos. If 25 is the maximum number you can put it, put in 25. Take a look at homes for sale on Realtor.com that are competing with your listing for sale sort by number of photos (like home buyers do). Check where your listing is before and after getting to 25 photos. It makes a difference.
• Did you make a virtual tour of the home yet? The virtual tour company options are the subject for another day, but they can range from $50 each to $300 each or something else depending on your subscription or your offices subscription. Video increase your listings findability
• Did you write custom language for Realtor.com or the other sites where you can expand the number of characters used? Take 5 minutes to spell out words and use less jargon when you are able. Not everyone speaks,reads or understands real estate agentese. Here are some examples of real estate jargon;
• flr
• low E/Argon
• w/
• hrdwd
• 13 seer
• MBR
• HOA
• w/i pantry SS
• fp
• 2 sty
• dbl
• BI TV*LivRm
• hrth rm
• hwy
• frpl
• LL
• “HERS” certified

Well, you get the idea. Its Jargon. Don’t use it. Write for the home buyer not another agent wherever possible. Not everyone speaks English as their native language nor have they been hanging around real estate agents all day. If you were looking for homes in German, Ukrainian, Spanish or some other language how confusing would you find abbreviations?

“85 destro lock lfg FL have cheev” – an example of specific jargon perfectly understandable to at least 12 million gamers online, but not to the rest of the world. Extra points if you can tell me what that means.

Did you take advantage of the options available to you on Realtor.com? Did you write a catchy header? Showcase the Pool in the spring and summer, talk about the South facing driveway in Winter.