This morning I received a call from a homeowner in a subdivision that I have an active IDX page on our Wordpress site and a blog post written in July 2012. Yesterday I received a call from another homeowner in a different subdivision, this time a bank had given her my number to call. The source? Another post written in June 2012.
Now in both cases, the calls were seeking the property manager for the communities, which obviously we're not, but since we have a line item in the community information block for Property Management Company and we name the company (but without the phone number) some people still assume we're the HOA or management company. We generally point them in the right direction.
A Chrome incognito search for the two communities shows our IDX pages either spot 1 or spot 4 on page 1. I stopped looking for the original ActiveRain blog post around page 3. I'm sure it's still out there, but how many consumers would search past page 1?
The absence doesn't mean I think ActiveRain SEO is kaput, and not knowing the inner workings of Google's current algorithms, I could make a guess. I'm not an SEO guru nor did I sleep at a Holiday Inn Express recently.
However, I used the ActiveRain blog post as the source of almost my entire IDX page writing, so maybe the bots see the original blog post as duplicate content. The other aspect of the blog post is that it is static, NOTHING EVER CHANGES ONCE WRITTEN.
On the other hand, our Wordpress IDX page is dynamic, refreshed regularly with the current homes for sale information (at least when any are available for sale).
I suspect the other nudge in favor of Wordpress IDX pages is our website is focused to a certain geographic area and homes for sale/real estate information. SEO is not diluted by all the things we write for fun here in the Rain.
Concentrated, dynamic information gives us the opportunity to outrank the big portal sites because we're out on the long tail search section of the bell curve. IDX pages can be just as relevant today as they were when created a dozen years ago. Once you've done the work to create a dynamic page, you don't have to keep doing it again for the same search term, and you've got pull marketing working for you from that day forward.
Until next Tuesday, just Ask An Ambassador if you need help,
Bill & Liz aka BLiz
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