pete_gregory

Hi Lana!

Simply displaying listings will not get you found in the search engines. In fact, if not careful an IDX can actually hurt your overall rankings. It doesn’t matter how nice your site looks or how many listings, if it does not rank in search, you won’t get found.

I’m the web/seo guy for my realtor son. We don’t get a ton of IDX leads either. In fact, most leads come from our overall SEO plan, keyword research and helpful local blog posts. Our philosophy is, as real estate professionals we owe our web visitors the ability to search for homes. As a side benefit, by offering listings, we get a few leads here and there.

Straight up, good SEO is hard work! it requires amazing original content, perfectly structured for search engines, and humans. It all starts with research and a solid foundation. There is NO secret sauce. There are tricks of the trade, yes, but no one great thing! I’m not trying to discourage you, but this is reality. Yes, as a starting point we all need fast loading websites that displays well on ALL devices. My most lucrative web pages have little to do with listings and everything to do with providing helpful and original content. Determine the pain points of your audience and provide great content directed at solving their problems. Then, once you gain visitors, I promise they will take advantage of your home search offering. That is assuming, your listings don’t take too long to load.

I will suggest doing extensive research into the process of holistic SEO. Start by searching the term on google. The guys ranking at the top can be trusted to lead you in the right direction.

I must say, I’m experiencing Diverse Solutions server downtimes as well, but it’s usually only for short periods of time. I understand, sometimes this is beyond the control of DS but other times, I’m not so sure.

Regardless, my biggest concern is Google Bots reporting these crawler errors and possibly hurting my sites rankings. There has been an increase in errors in my Google search console over the last couple months.

There’s not much any of us can do about this and I’m betting other idx providers have the same problems. I do plan to monitor some other sites using other providers and see if I can notice the same issues.

In the end, DS has always been very responsive to my support inquiries and I really do appreciate it. Sometimes, the problem is of my own making, and when it is, they are still willing to provide some direction and advice.