What is a “Real Estate Sidebar Widget”?
I noticed today there were a few people who found Geek Estate organically by searching for “real estate side bar widget“.
Frankly…I’m not exactly sure what they are looking for. “Real estate” is a fairly broad term when it comes to widgets. Were they looking for an actual “widget”? Were they looking for a wordpress plugin that includes a sidebar widget?
What exact kind of content are they looking for within a widget? Mortgage rates? Newest listings? Real estate Q&A? Recent sales? Evergreen buyer content? Quizzes? Mortgage calculators?
I guess we’ll never know…
It’s been a long time since we covered real estate widgets (2007 and 2010) or WordPress plugins (2009). What are the best and most valuable widgets or WordPress plugins that you currently use on your website?
Jeff Manson
Posted at 07:55h, 27 SeptemberIn most cases the sidebar widgets were created by the portals in part to help boost their rankings above agents and also drive traffic away from their sites and to the portals. By the looks of the search results they are definitely succeeding.
You can read more about “How Agents are Helping Zilliow and Trulia Outrank Them”
http://www.realgeeks.com/blog/how-youre-helping-zillow-and-trulia-outrank-you/
Bad advise to be telling agents to ad those to their sites. Yes, I do have an interest in this as real estate broker in Hawaii. It makes me sick that other agents are unknowing helping the portals outrank them by these tactics and also using our listings as to content to sell leads back!
Drew Meyers
Posted at 09:57h, 27 SeptemberI personally wouldn’t add a bunch of widgets to my site either. The options for getting content and functionality onto a website are pretty straight forward:
1. You create the content/functionality on your own
2. You put other people’s content/functionality on your site and link back to it (no $$)
3. You put other people’s content/functionality on your site and pay for it (no links)
So, let the agent choose which route they want to go. You are one of the very few agents/brokers in the country that even stand a chance at competing. For the regular agent who doesn’t have an internet marketing background (95% of agents)….competing with Zillow or Trulia in the seo world is not an option on the table.