If your website currently has MLS® Reciprocity, congratulations! Your SEO is being improved by the thousands of Listings full of keywords coming directly from the MLS®. This article will explore the consequences that come from disabling the reciprocity on your website if you already had it.
With MLS® Reciprocity & Key Cities Featured
- Google™️ sees your site with hundreds (if not THOUSANDS!) of webpages of listings, creating an organic keyword-dense snapshot of your website in relation to the cities you consider your niche.
- Your customers can scan through the cities you specialize in quickly, creating a mindful connection.
- You are delivering content that your customers appreciate! Displaying listings, even those that are not your own is creating great value and leveraging your site and your brand as informative and useful to visitors/potential customers. You can even create a custom MLS® search by filtering cities and prices and easily share it on Social Media networks to increase traffic - this way you are using the system to its full potential.
Visualizing the effects of enabling the MLS® to increase the number of pages with keywords Google™️ discovers
Without MLS®️ Reciprocity Enabled
- Google™️ only sees a handful (a few dozen at most, in many cases even less!) pages on your website.
- Your customers cannot see your niche areas, let alone look for new listings or open houses coming up.
- Visitors/Potential Customers may not spend much time on your site as there are not many pages that they may be interested in, without the MLS® listings, your own listings may be very limited for what visitors may want to see on a Real Estate website.
What happens if you remove the MLS® Reciprocity from a site that has it
- Your domain will suffer about 99% of content loss in the eyes of Google™️. All the listings with keywords related to your business will be gone with the MLS®, taking a heavy toll on your site's ranking.
- All future active/sold listings of your own must be manually entered from scratch (As you cannot auto-import from MLS® number), rather than enhanced after import.
- The listing subpages that denote your niche areas will also be removed from customers' eyes - which can take away from the impression you were a go-to website for every Real Estate need.
- Unless you are a specialized/veteran agent with decades worth of listings to show, your website will be content-poor, which directly affects how Google™ and most Search Engines rank your site.
In conclusion, MLS® reciprocity is an excellent tool to increase your site's ranking and elevate your brand in the eyes of visitors/potential customers. The advantages the system brings far outweigh the investment, and the consequences of removing it can be devastating to a site's ranking- therefore recommend strongly against removing it.
* These numbers assume that you have 30 or less active/sold listings of your own, and you have Vancouver West, East Vancouver, Burnaby North, Burnaby East, Burnaby South listings displayed on your website. As of 2019-10, there are X, XXX listings across these 5 cities. Individual numbers may vary slightly.