XSites go hyper-local for better search engine rankings
Matt Krodel, Product Manager, Real Estate Solutions Division
labs@alamode.com
If there's one thing the roller coaster market of the last few years has pointed out, it's the need for appraisers to diversify their sources of business. Relying solely on lender clients means you'll bob up and down with the unpredictable lending market. But that doesn't have to be the case. There are tons of other sources of business out there that result in appraisal orders every day: Divorces, probates, bail-bonds, home owners, and tax challenges just to name a few. So how do you get a share of that business?
One of the most common approaches is to get a website. That's a great step, for sure, since there are more than a million Internet searches each month for appraisal services. But what most appraisers don't expect is the effort it takes to start grabbing up those non-lender web orders a reality. Things like writing custom pages, blogging, updating content, and tracking analytics all make a site more search engine friendly. But that's a ton of work. Luckily, XSites and our exclusive GhostWriter technology makes it easy and practically automatic.
The concept behind GhostWriter is simple. Search engines don't promote sites with predominantly "stock" content. So Ghostwriter uses information you've provided (like your city, services, e-mail, etc.) and merges those variables into randomly chosen sentence fragments. Those fragments are then combined into unique, yet properly written phrases, sentences, and longer paragraphs. Those are as unique to Google as a handwritten sentence, and our sites rank higher as a result.
The numbers don't lie. Traffic on our Appraiser XSites from people searching Google spiked up 40% after running GhostWriter on our sites with boilerplate content last summer, and page views are currently up 57% since the beginning of the year - all with no effort whatsoever from our XSite users. These numbers are inspiring to say the least. But in web marketing, you've got to continually press forward. So now, GhostWriter is tackling the latest web marketing strategy known as "hyper-local content."
GhostWriter Featured Community Pages
Featured community pages make your content even more specific and unique to the areas you serve. That's critical because on the web, most people don't typically search for "Cleveland County Appraiser." They search for "Appraiser in Edmond, OK" and sometimes get even more specific by using small suburbs or even neighborhood names.
Rather than the basic GhostWriter feature which was completely automatic, Featured Community Pages will require just a few minutes from you. Trust us, they'll be minutes well spent. To get your Featured Community Pages set up, you'll use a quick Wizard to give us a few pieces of information. Things like community name and type (suburb, subdivision, etc.), major community features or landmarks, attractions like shopping and entertainment, and photos. That's it.
We handle the details from there: page layout, inserting your info into variations of our featured community phrases, attaching a map and even feeding in local school information from education.com.
It's without a doubt, the easiest, fastest way to get completely custom, hyper-local content on your website. We're confident that you're going to get better search engine rankings and more traffic to your site because of GhostWriter and the Featured Community Pages. Check an example of the final product below and look for Featured Community Pages this summer.
