You’ve probably come across many articles, bloggers, and some internet marketers saying you don’t need IDX on your real estate website. Their reason is that the top 10 famous Miami architects websites led by Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor.com, account for about half of all website traffic, and therefore, it is “useless” and “a waste of money” to try to compete with them.
The term IDX gets thrown around a lot. When people hear IDX, they automatically think it’s just home search for your real estate website. While property search is the main component of IDX, many don’t realize how to utilize it to the fullest and the valuable lead-generating tools it provides.
When speaking to real estate professionals, I always make this analogy. As a real estate professional, you are a business. You can think of your real estate website as your “store”. The MLS listings on your website are your “inventory”. The listings are all the products that exist in your “store” where visitors can browse around and purchase. What happens when you have somebody visit your “store” but you have no product to offer? That person would do exactly what you and I would do… leave and go somewhere else where there is a product to look at and possibly purchase.
These are valuable leads you will be losing if you don’t have IDX on your real estate website. Unless you are solely generating business on referrals, your website (store) must have IDX (product).
IDX gives you access to all the hundreds to thousands of listings in your MLS. Like I mentioned above, this is your inventory, and it’s like having thousands of products on your website.
Having access to all the listings, you can create listing pages that focus on specific search criteria. For example, you can create a listing page that shows all listings under a specific price. Or you can create a listing page that displays listings in a specific subdivision, area, community, or school district. These listing pages provide a better experience for users in that they help direct your real estate website visitors to listings they are looking for. Even more valuable is that these listing pages are search engine friendly which is what I will talk about next.
All of your IDX pages that a platform provides are SEO friendly and are indexed by Google, Bing, and all other major search engines. This means all the listing pages within the IDX system are indexed by Google and is an excellent source of organic leads. For example, for one of our clients, we created an IDX page that displays homes for sale in the school district of Squires Elementary.
