Real estate is one of the most competitive industries in the search engines.  Maybe it’s time for a different approach?  When people are shopping for real estate, they’re not just looking for a house, they are looking for a lifestyle – and that requires a lot of information from schools, to recreational activities, to average neighborhood incomes, and so much more. 

Want some examples, check out these successful real estate websites that are really bringing in the traffic and generating buzz for their usefulness. 

There are two ways to accomplish this.  You can hire a team of people to research and update information and post it on the site.  Or you can pull the information in dynamically with a custom software application. 

Trulia for example uses custom programming to scrape real estate sites and brings all of the information into one place in a way that is extremely useful.  Almost all of these sites incorporate Google maps in their searches to give users a perspective of where exactly homes are located.  Zillow even offers satellite images of the neighborhood right on the search page.   

While smaller real estate agencies may not be able to, nor have the desire to, compete with these big competitors, adding useful web applications to local real estate sites can certainly help them gain the lead over local competition.

What are your customers really looking for when shopping for a home?  How can you provide it in a way that is informative and fun to use?  If you can imagine it, there is most likely a way to make it happen. 

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In my previous post, I talked about how sociability was likely to be one of the reasons that the online ecommerce shoe store Zappos was a success. This got me thinking about ecommerce sites that have been popular among search engines and visitors by implementing features like user comments, reviews, and other user generated content.

Ecommerce stores, especially resellers, typically have a difficult time gaining search engine ranking. Why? Because often the products and the product descriptions are the same as the 999 other sites out there that are selling the same thing.

This duplicate content can kill a site in the search engine rankings. Also, when there is nothing different between one ecommerce site and another that is selling the same product, winning customers becomes all about offering the lowest price.

Adding some custom modules to your website that allow for sociability can make a huge difference in your search engine visibility and in your ability to attract and retain customers.

Need some ideas about how to make this work? Here’s a list of some highly successful ecommerce sites that win customers and rankings through user generated content:

Think Geek – (One of my favorites!) The customer comments and photos of customers enjoying the products are fun and way more interesting, enlightening, and addicting to read than the stock product info.

Trip Advisor – Every hotel looks awesome in the pictures and the descriptions sound luxurious. But what’s it really like? Customer ratings and reviews tell all.

Amazon – When I look for anything on Amazon, I scroll right past the publisher’s or manufacture’s description on down to the customer reviews – what about you? Other site’s may have cheaper prices (which they reveal), but I always buy from Amazon because by the time I’m ready to buy, I’ve invested so much time there and already have things added to my cart, that I might as well!

Threadless – This is cool – Users vote on designs and decide what gets printed. So much fun, you’ll forget that it’s an ecommerce site.

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Social media is the big buzzword on the internet today.  Not just because it’s the latest “fad,” but because it taps into the one of the core purpose of the internet itself, connecting with other people. 

Social networking sites have seen a 47% growth over the past year, the leader being MySpace with a 367% increase.  I don’t know about you, but just about everyone I know has a MySpace profile, including my friend’s 80-something year old grandmother. 

Sociability is not just for blogs and dating sites.  Adding social elements like blogs and comments and shared profiles can really bring a website to life, boost its popularity, and grow a fan base. 

I spoke with the owner of an online shoe sales company once who wanted to find out why his competitor Zappos ranked so well in the search engines. 

Comparing the two sites, his was a basic e-commerce site with the same stock content as every competing shoe store on the internet.  Zappos on the other hand, was loaded with user generated comments – the kind of unique content that search engines love.

These comments also offered an interesting read and kept me browsing around the site for quite some time.  Reading about other people’s experience with a product you’re thinking about buying really cuts down on the anxiety of buying online. 

After the analysis, we suggested a custom comments module and a few other changes to make the site livelier and search engine friendly.  We didn’t do the job because of the company’s budget constraints, but I did find Zappos – my new store of choice to buy shoes online!   

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An interesting post on the Tectonic blog tells supports something that we’ve known for quite some time. Prepackaged software is not in high demand in the marketplace.

The post quotes Rishab Ayer Ghosh, a free software researcher at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, who says that prepackaged software accounts for 16% of software sold while custom software accounts for between 40% and 50% of software purchases.

The reason? From what we’ve seen from our customers, some prepackaged software is great to keep a business running. But when it comes to standing apart from the competition and really managing internal business in a way that is unique to each company, requires a custom solution.

Cookie cutter solutions return cookie cutter results. Even though businesses can normally customize how prepackaged software works, it still forces everyone to operate within certain boundaries. Sometimes, the ‘boundaries’ of the software we use each day starts to become perceived limitations. Users begin to work within the limitations of the software rather than ask – what would be the best way to do accomplish this?

Custom software eliminates those imaginary boundaries and makes it possible to achieve truly unique results than everyone else. It’s nice to a post that affirms that most businesses see the value in thinking ‘outside the box!”

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Word broke on Tuesday that Google had purchased Tonic Systems, a software company with an online web app similar in functionality to PowerPoint. Google execs say that the new spreadsheet application will join the Google Docs & Spreadsheets suite this summer.

Google’s Mike Schmitt says that he “doesn’t think” their goal is to kill Microsoft Office, all logic points to the contrary. Whether or not it happens remains to be seen, but it does seem that this is the goal Google is trying to achieve.

Google is the first to admit that the slideshow application, just like its Word-type and Excel-type applications are not equal in functionality to that of Microsoft’s similar applications. As someone who has used both, I can certainly vouch for this. The applications are slow and only offer basic features—at least for now.

Google’s dabbling in traditionally desktop applications makes me wonder if they will face a similar fate as when Microsoft tried to move into search. Microsoft, the once technology giant, fell flat when it attempted to move into new turf and many would say has been on a downward spiral ever since. But so far, Google has a history of having a Midas touch and succeeding in just about everything it tries.

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