One of the most important – and often least understood -
ways that we serve our subscribers is through lead generation via our public
site, www.mlslistings.com. Our site is the only direct-from-the-MLS source of comprehensive
real estate information in the greater Bay Area available to the general
public.
For that reason, it‘s hailed by local
real estate professionals, real estate media
influencers and even our largest public-search
competitors as the best site for reliable real estate information and
listing data. The site receives close to 500,000 visits and 4.5 million page
views per month from prospective clients looking for homes or visitors
interested in current real estate conditions.
Primary objectives
The directives fulfilled by mlslistings.com are very
focused. The first is to deliver the real estate industry‘s most timely and
accurate listing data to the public, as well as timely industry news and market
data at both the regional and national levels, for public education and
context.
The second is to deliver as many visitors as possible
directly to our brokers and agents’ websites and offices. While many
public-facing sites focus on bells and whistles, consumer tools and other
do-it-yourself features, we understand that the best resource for a homebuyer
or seller is the agent and broker, who intimately know the pulse of their local
market and are best positioned to serve that customer‘s interests.
Optimization and comparison with like MLSs
Evaluating our success relative to industry best practices
and comparing our performance to similar MLSs is a key part of ensuring our
public site meets its primary objectives. We regularly seek out and receive
reports from third parties who analyze our site and recommend areas for
improvement.
 This July, internet analyst firm HubSpot awarded MLSListings.com a
grade of 92 out of 100 on overall marketing effectiveness, using a propriety
algorithm including over 50 variables including search engine data, website
structure, approximate traffic, site performance and others. The firm also
cited our Alexa rank (which measures traffic on websites similar to Nielsen
ratings for TV) as within the top 1 percent of all websites.
The incorporation of relevant keyword search terms is another primary tactic we
use to drive qualified traffic to our site, as a part of our ongoing search
engine optimization efforts. Knowing and understanding the primary terms
consumers use to search for real estate information, and targeting our content
to not only match those terms, but deliver the intended destination as well –
is key to optimizing our content. Navigating this particular niche is
especially critical as search crawlers become more and more savvy – their
algorithms reward those sites who use keywords judiciously and within context
with higher rank, and punish those using less ―legitimate‖ keyword density practices.
MLSListings earns top marks in this category as well,
among our peers. The WAV Group, a real estate services consulting firm engaged
in measuring MLS-to-MLS performance and best practices, among other activities,
recently ranked MLSListings‘public site first among California MLSs in
delivering traffic via top keywords used in real estate search.
We continue to regularly monitor our traffic generation
practices, including content as well as technical infrastructure, to optimize
www.mlslistings.com, as well as to benchmark our public site against the online
community and our industry to ensure our subscribers receive the best available
advantage from these opportunities.
Ongoing changes and upcoming enhancements
We are continuing to evolve our public site. In late 2009
we launched a major revamp of the website, adding several new important
features. Since then we have added several new small-but-significant options.
In 2012 we are planning another significant overhaul of the site, to
incorporate some of the most popular consumer tools and flows, and to further
enhance traffic delivery to brokers and agents.
We have already collected a significant amount of feedback from both
subscribers and the public through several rounds of consumer and agent focus
groups, online surveys and through our annual customer satisfaction survey, and
look forward to sharing our plans and milestones as the project progresses.
While we will never be able to match the power and budget of venture-funded
sites such as Trulia, Zillow and others, we are focused on our unique value as
the most accurate and reliable data available, and our function to deliver
leads directly to our subscribers as your dependable, trusted partner in real
estate information services.
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