Home Sales Data By Zip Code And Other Relevant Info Helps Google Determine “Intent”

Adding homes sales data by zip code to your website could be very beneficial when dealing with a concept that Google experts call “intent.”

Now, every real estate broker and agent in America wants to rank high on Google for their company. When you do, in a way, it’s like hitting the lottery.

When your real estate website appears on Page One (which by the way, is one of the benefits of WordPress real estate websites), the phones ring. People visit your website. Fill out contact forms.

All for free.

Great right?

Okay, of course by now, you realize there are people out there who try to manipulate the search engines so their website ranks on Page One. It could be for anything – baby strollers, park benches, purple socks, you name it.

Google knows this. It’s a smart company.

How smart? Well, in May their company was valued at $729 billion with a “B” dollars. The stock price for their holding company, Alphabet, is about $1,000 per share.

Their search engine is their No. 1 product.

So obviously, they are going to devote quite a bit of resources to make sure that product delivers the best results it can.

Because here’s another interesting fact most people might not know about Google. They have more than 70,000 employees.

That’s a lot of brainy people working on the algorithms, quality and the standards for their search engine product.

Home sales data by zip code adds more property-related content

Now back to intent.

Used to be, when Google first started, if a visitor typed in the words “Hoboken Real Estate” in the search bar, the website that had those mentioned more often usually got pretty decent rankings.

Of course, there were many other factors in the Google formula besides just keywords.

But those were the early days, when they had a handful of data engineers on staff.

Now, they have quite a few more, tens of thousands of data engineers in fact, to make sure people searching on their website find what they are looking for.

After all, that other major search engine, Bing from Microsoft, is right on their heels continually fighting for market share.

So experts now say the geniuses at Google have devised formulas to anticipate what they refer to as “intent.” It’s a way to determine the broader goal of a person searching for answers.

How deep is the content on your website?

For example, when a visitor to Google types in the words, “Hoboken Real Estate,” Google’s algorithms search through their massive databases and figure out what could be the objective of someone typing in those words.

That person is probably interested in purchasing a home.

When Google evaluates a website, they also scan a page and check their indexes for websites that have content relevant to purchasing a home.

This is where home sales data by zip code plays a huge factor.

Because by adding homes sale data by zip code and other real estate market data to your website, your website will be filled with information that Google knows is important to a web visitor looking to purchase a home.

They know that visitor will be interested in home sale prices, market trends, sales data by zip code or in certain neighborhoods, historical data, school data, property attributes, and other factors.

As you can imagine, those Google engineers have dug even deeper. They also look at a factor experts refer to as “secondary intent.”

From its massive database on search history, Google apparently knows this type of visitor who searched for “Hoboken Real Estate” will also be interested in school attendance zones, neighborhood demographics, crime statistics and other related content.

Google will reward higher rankings to websites that have a vast array of in-depth content related to homes. On the other hand, Google won’t give much credence to websites that display what is referred to as “thin” content. Websites that do not offer visitors much information and might in fact, just be created to try and game Google.

That’s why in today’s day and age, it is important to use the advantages of data technology to add as much hyper-local content that you can on a real estate website.

You could go out and try to find all that data yourself. You could try to add all that data on your website (although some of it, you probably can’t because it’s proprietary). You could also try to update that data every week or every month. Quite an undertaking.

But why bother? As the saying goes, “Whose got time for that?”

There are aggregators out there now, such as Home Junction Inc., who with their real estate data API can easily embed widgets that will feed home sales data by zip code and other relevant data to your website.

Instead of just home listings, your website could also contain a ton of other relevant information:

• Recent property sales
• Trends in sales in a particular zip code, or even a neighborhood or subdivision
• Property attributes of homes in a neighborhood
• Square footage
• Municipal boundaries
• School data
• School district boundaries
• School enrollment numbers
• Student/teacher ratios

And much more.

Moms searching for school data have a specific intent

Here’s another benefit of adding this type of local, neighborhood information.

Think about how your website addresses this concept of “intent.”

Say a mom goes on Google and starts searching for information about schools.

Why?

One definite “intent” could be that she is thinking of relocating to your town and wants to check out where the schools are located.

She is also going to want to know detailed information about the types of schools her children might attend.

Again, if you add real estate market data to your website, you are going to be meeting the “intent” of that searcher.

Here’s another example.

Say a home owner is getting ready to move and is interested to find out, “What is my home worth?”

A local real estate agent now has the ability to provide their own “Home Value Estimator Tool” (just like the big real estate portal that starts with a “Z”).

Rather than put a few words of text on your site, “Call me for a CMA estimate for what your home is worth” you can have a tool that lets the home owner check out some factors on their own. (Naturally, these are estimates and not formal CMAs.).

But, if you have a Home Value Estimator tool on your website and lots of people are using it, Google sees your website is doing a great job of answering search queries for “What is my home worth?”

Sure, many people using an Automated Valuation Model (AVM) will just be “lookey-lous” curious about the value of their home.

But a good number of those people will be checking out the estimated value of their homes because they are ready to list now, or in the very near future.

Search visibility anymore is a complex beast. As you can see by the number of engineers working at Google, they are checking the value of websites from many different angles.

Fake or phony content won’t cut it.

Adding supplemental and relevant data such as home sales data by zip code to your website will help establish in Google’s mind, that your website has highly relevant information that meets their requirements regarding this concept known as “intent.”