Whether you define ROI as Return on Investment or Realtor on Internet, Trulia’s business was built on the premise of helping agents and brokers improve their ROI. “You do this out of the goodness of your heart?” You might ask. The answer: We have good hearts, but the bottom line is that if we can’t prove our ROI to you, we don’t have a business.
What’s the news here? Well, there really isn’t anything new; we’ve been doing the same thing since we started Trulia three years ago. But in the past few days I’ve had the opportunity to pick up the phone and chat with some agent and broker partners to talk about Trulia’s search strategy, business model and the changing dynamics of real estate marketing. My calls reinforced that we are proving our ROI and on the right track. I thought it would be good on our blog to take a moment to explain the fundamentals of our business model and why we do things the way we do.
When it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), it’s no surprise that there could be confusion or doubt in a topic that is difficult to understand. Creating confusion about difficult topics is easy as no one really knows how google really works but everyone would love to learn more about it.
But there’s nothing confusing about SEO at Trulia. Our site was designed to help agents and brokers acquire customers and promote their brands as cost and time efficiently as possible. The data is undeniable and our rapidly growing number of both broker and agent customers is another testimonial to the sound business model we have built.
One agent I talked to yesterday mentioned that he heard someone say: “Trulia has some very smart engineers who can outsmart you and have figured out how to optimize search results at your expense.” We certainly have a rock star team here at Trulia, but I’m happy to share that all of our site design and link methods are proven and commonly accepted practices that have been used for years by other leading online companies in other verticals.
Big companies, in real estate, social networking, and entertainment, among others, that we all use everyday utilize “nofollows” or “temporary redirects” on their external links (please, check it out!). We’d love to take credit for inventing some wicked smart SEO magic, but in reality we just followed industry best practices. To bring it closer to home, Realtor.com doesn’t even have external links to your site unless you pay for it! And if your broker/agent competitors rank higher in the search engines than you do, I’m guessing that they won’t link to your listing either.
So here are some of the Trulia basics:
Listings – Your listings, your links, for free. The Trulia business model was a concept we introduced in 2005. At that time thousands of IDX sites where popping up, and listing agents and brokers were credited with a little foot note (at best). No links and no traffic passed to the actual listing owner – or you had to pay dearly for it. Meanwhile, we’ve grown to the point where we send more than 8,500,000 monthly visits directly to our listing agent and broker partner web sites. In the past six months, we sent roughly 40 million visits. We don’t resell those consumers to the highest bidder; like Google, they go directly to you. To be part of Trulia’s search platform is free, so that is a huge ROI for our partners.
Trulia Voices – Only a year old, Trulia Voices has become a real source of new clients for our 60,000+ agent participants. Besides actively participating in the community and responding to consumer questions, you can manage your identity, links and even SEO on your Trulia Voices profile page. Not only is Trulia Voices very cost efficient (free to use), but it’s also very time efficient compared to blogging which takes planning, frequent posts and lead generation to become effective (not to say that you shouldn’t blog! Blogging is great too :). We have thousands of agents who have built significant new business from clients they have received through Trulia Voices. That’s huge ROI for our partners.
Trulia Widgets – We offer tools and widgets to real estate professionals to help them enhance their websites, free of charge. There are relevant Trulia links on our widgets, which is the industry standard and there is link benefit for Trulia for providing these services. No secrets here; please take the time to look at any widgets that you currently use and you’ll see that all have links back to the sites of those who developed them. We’ve heard accusations that we are using widgets to secretly hurt brokers and agents. This is absurd and absolutely not true. For example, Trulia Map is a widget built to drive engagement on your site; any click on a listing stays on your own website (our tracking shows this drives 80,000 property clicks per month!). Before we came around, agents typically had to pay top dollars for any web site enhancements. As all these tools we provide are free, that’s huge ROI for our partners.
Everything about our strategy is to build a great consumer experience and useful and vibrant real estate community and deliver ROI for our real estate broker and agent partners. This is where we started over three years ago and we’re not changing. We have always been open and transparent, and we are going to continue focusing on the same path and on on your ROI. And the good news, we are not going to decrease the value you are getting from Trulia. We do what we do for a reason and it is to drive you business at the lowest possible cost.
Still have questions? Let’s talk. Post them here or email me directly - sami [at] Trulia [dot] com).
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May 15th, 2008 at 8:07 am
I am still learning the value of Trulia because I just joined recently. I have jumped in and answered questions that are directed to my Las Vegas area only. I do not understand people outside of Nevada answering questions about Nevada. I would never presume to be an expert in any other area but my own. Look forward to getting to know all of the possibilities Trulia offers.
May 15th, 2008 at 8:26 am
Can you clarify what you mean by this paragraph?
‘Big companies, in real estate, social networking, and entertainment, among others, that we all use everyday utilize “nofollows” or “temporary redirects” on their external links (please, check it out!)…’
May 15th, 2008 at 9:16 am
Thanks for the detailed explanation. Thanks for continuing to be upfront and for offering valuable services and tools to Agents.
May 15th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
@MBY Realty Group - thanks for your question. Let me break down that paragraph:
“Big companies, in real estate, social networking, and entertainment, among others, that we all use everyday utilize “nofollows” or “temporary redirects” on their external links (please, check it out!). We’d love to take credit for inventing some wicked smart SEO magic, but in reality we just followed industry best practices.”
–> Yelp, Yahoo Real Estate, Kayak.com, Shopping.com and Facebook, are all examples. Nothing secret here - just industry best practices.
“To bring it closer to home, Realtor.com doesn’t even have external links to your site unless you pay for it!”
–>Putting your listings on Trulia is free (of course we have paid products too). And if someone is interested in your listing, they go directly to the listing broker/agent sit (whether or not you pay for a “featured” listing).
And if your broker/agent competitors rank higher in the search engines than you do, I’m guessing that they won’t link to your listing either.
–> If your competitor has your listing on their site via an IDX feed, that interested consumer isn’t redirected to your website. We always and only send the consumer to the actual listing agent/broker!
Hope this helps.
May 15th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
“Whether you define ROI as Return on Investment or Realtor on Internet, Trulia’s business was built on the premise of helping agents and brokers improve their ROI. “You do this out of the goodness of your heart?” You might ask. The answer: We have good hearts, but the bottom line is that if we can’t prove our ROI to you, we don’t have a business.”
That would make a good banner across your site –
Helping Real Estate Agents Improve Their Return On Investment!
May 16th, 2008 at 5:53 am
Thank you for finally posting this.
May 16th, 2008 at 11:26 am
I would love to put your widgets on my website homepage. Could you do me a favor and have your engineers recode your widgets so that the link going back to your website is a no-follow link. I’m sure all my fellow Realtors as well as myself would like to follow “industry best practices” as well.
Thank you, and let me know when the coding is complete.
May 16th, 2008 at 6:48 pm
Sami,
Thanks for your follow up. Are you saying by including these “nofollows” or “temporary redirects” on your external links, do we get credit from an SEO standpoint, or not?
May 18th, 2008 at 9:26 am
I second honest agent. I will use your widgets if you put no follow tags on all the outgoing links back to Trulia properties. After all that is they way you want to treat me and the other REALTORS.
May 19th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
Hey guys - sorry for the delay in posting replies!
@Mike - Sorry your comment got stuck in blog moderation. Glad to see your comment came through.
@MBY - there is no “SEO credit” by using any widget that I know of, so if that is what you are after, you should not install it on your site.
@Honest Agent and James - if you want to install the widgets feel free to add “no follows” or remove the links yourself. Enjoy!
May 28th, 2008 at 5:44 am
Hi! This is Paul From http://www.LasVegasRealEstateHome.com!
You guys do a great job in getting ranked higher then us in the search engines which now means our potential future clients reach us in a roundabout way. If you get higher rankings, then potential clients reach you first and then they can choose from the 60,000+ agents where to go.
I don’t think anybody that’s attempted internet real estate marketing for a year or two needs to be educated on just how important search engine rankings are. You can have the greatest real estate site in the world but if you can’t get listed near the top of the search engines, nobody is going to find you which means no ROI. It’s precisely why Google makes a ton of money on their PPC campaigns — they provide a great search that the majority of people use.. but they make their money from AdSense. Yahoo! gives people free e-mail because every time somebody uses it, that’s a click to their site so they can charge more for their advertising. (More clicks, higher advertising costs.)
It’s a very smart system you set up because now the 60,000+ agents feel compelled that they have to spend their time on Trulia answering questions which means adding content to get higher rankings for Trulia (and more clicks to your site). Regular real estate agents can’t compete with that — power in numbers as they say.
The funny thing is, for some of these agents that seem to live on Trulia and don’t even have their own websites, it’s kind of funny that if they realized that their 1,000+ answers were put on their own local real estate specific blog, they would not have to spend their whole day on Trulia… and maybe actually sell some real estate.
Easy to understand why you guys do the things you do but I’m curious why our listings now go to the national franchise site instead of back to our own site? You guys seem a little too savvy to create this unintentionally IMO. The new setup is now a triple detour. (Search engine rankings, national franchise site, local franchise site, agent.)
Which, in a way, the only reason why I’ve kept the template site for http://www.LasVegasRealEstateHome.com was because of the auto feed system the provider had that automatically uploaded the listings to Trulia and the other third party sites. The new “arrangement” finally made me decide to upgrade to a new site under development by another service right now — which was long over due obviously. (Sorry, no widgets will be on it — just accurate and detailed information on my specialty markets within Las Vegas, Summerlin and Henderson.)
Basically, detours are being created just to get traffic to get to your site. (I’ve often thought of doing that for open houses — create a detour to increase drive by traffic to the front of the open house I’m doing so more people will see it. But… I think if anybody found out that I created the detour, they might get a little pissed so I’ll stick to all of the multiple signs I use.)
So, let’s be really honest here. You are running a business and not a charity and I can certainly appreciate that. We are not doing this stuff for free so we have to earn money in one form or another. For you, it’s selling advertising. The more traffic you get, the more money you can make. Nothing wrong with that and it’s a lot easier then actually selling real estate.
For Real Estate agents, it’s a far more complicated process and just because you get somebody to your site, does not mean you are going to make a dime. (And as we all know, just having a website means nothing. It’s like buying a car - if you don’t know how to drive, it’s going to be worthless…Just because you get a real estate license, it does not mean you are going to make any money.)
Now, some companies out there on the net are paying bloggers to promote their products and services. They are pretty easy to find if you know what’s going on and what to look for — the funny thing is that you get the real estate agents to promote Trulia for free. (Real Estate agents are notorious for working for free anyways so no surprise
)
So, call it what it is and even though you guys are so nice, you can’t honestly tell us that when you set out to create the widgets that you were doing it solely for being such nice people and looking out for the poor ole Realtors.
Just like Voices, you did not create it JUST BECAUSE you wanted to provide a free service… you created all of the above for clicks to your site & Search Engine Optimization which is absolutely genius because now you can tell everybody how much traffic you get and create the mandatory feeling that homes have to be listed on your site.
Which… creates more value in the amount you charge to advertisers.
Very smart and real estate agents can learn a ton about marketing by just evaluating what you guys are doing. It makes for an absolutely great study for a marketing class and actually your concepts are a long standing fundamental part of any business. (Great real estate agents understand this value — send postcards telling people how great they are, or send them an interesting bit of useful information.. Neighborhood report, etc..)
Provide some free value and invest some time to build up relationships and the business will follow.
Much, much smarter then the way Realtor.com set up and maintained their business over the years. It took long enough for real estate agents to catch on (myself included)… but the savvy real estate agents eventually did.
Anyways, thanks so much for creating Trulia to help improve our ROI. Very nice of you…
Hopefully all of the sites that e-mail me on a daily basis to add our listings to their site are as kind as you are.
Have a Great Day