Are You Using Recycled Content on Your Real Estate Website?

Recycling is a very good thing to do to bottles, cans, cardboard, printer paper and pretty much everything except text on a website. If one is looking to rank high on Google, copying and pasting text from another website is not the way to go. The importance of unique, relevant content cannot be overemphasized when it comes to a website getting attention from search engines and, ultimately, human eyes.

A search on real estate in just about any community nets a plethora of sites that repeat the same chunk of prose. While this may be useful to the person who is reading it for the first time, the second, third, and fourth times can be wearying and frustrating. This is why Google does not rank copied text that high. Unique, relevant copy is what gains both Google's and the reader's attention.

You may think that ranking high on Google is all that matters to get someone's site out there and gathering hits. However, you must keep in mind that Google is striving to mimic the habits and desires of a human web surfer. The kind of text that would interest them is what Google wants to give. The first site Google crawls that has the text, it will rank. Subsequent sites will be given lesser rankings.

In any case, your first priority shouldn't be Google. It should be the potential client who is looking at your website. This is who is going to hire you to represent them, not Google. If someone stumbles on your website during a search for Community X Real Estate and sees the same text they've been seeing on every other website they've been visiting, what is going to convince them that you're the right person for the job? A bunch of plagiarized text isn't going to do it. In fact, someone might think that if you'll plagiarize text from another website, you might not be adverse to doing other underhanded things and we don't want that.

Now let's look at the other side of the website. Say John Q Lookinforahouse stops by while idly surfing listings and Realtor® pages and sees some information he hasn't seen before. Let's go a step further and say that it's information that he would like to know, say a blurb about the restaurants in X Community that you personally think are the best or your overview of the schools in the district. It's pretty likely that he's going to stick around a lot longer than if you had the same regurgitated information from Wikipedia or another Realtor's® website.

Unique content is what is going to set your website apart from competing sites. If you don't have the time or inclination to write good copy, pay someone else to do it. You want a good overview of the areas and types of homes you specialize in, which is spellchecked, grammar checked and formatted properly. Someone who is experienced in writing copy can produce effective pages for marketing your business.