Do You Have a Leads Problem?

Image via CrunchBase

I was recently asked by a long time client about a looming leads issue. Without getting into the identity of this client or some of the specifics. I do wish to reveal the problem which this client does not seem to be alone. The name has been changed to protect our fiduciary relationship.

I identified her biggest problem is that her competitors have more traffic because they have more pages.

Ida-
I know your current provider seems to be parsing words on their SEO capabilities. However, with most providers of IDX we are able to work around most of their inherent limitations as far as SEO by muscling up with your linking.

So in that frame, you do not have an SEO problem. Except on the issue of pages I illustrated to you prior and again below. You rank well for mostly anything you type into the engines as I demonstrated to you.
Watch my most recent video on lead counts.

Your issue is the other sites you are competing against are sites like Trulia and Realtor.com whom have thousands more pages than you. More pages=more opportunities to get found in Google = more possible traffic.

Its as simple as that.Those pages that they have get them traffic in longer worded phrases (long tail-more specific words). Not the big phrases (fat tail-city + real estate)_that you already rank for. Long tail tends to get better conversion and should be 80% or so of your traffic.

Your current provider is blocking your opportunity at getting long tail traffic trough the robots.txt protocol. Therefore you cannot get found for those.   So even though your site actually has more probably more pages than the one Realtor competing site, it cannot be indexed into the search engines. Because it is blocked by the robots.txt. (Many IDX providers block their/your listing pages because it burns expensive bandwidth)

That is your real SEO problem. There are plenty of other issues too. But most IDX cos duffer from something. But if you could have more pages. In some cases hundreds if it is your MLS. Then that may make up for the other problems. Assuming we can make some crucial changes and leverage then IDX pages to help us.