Showcase IDX Blog
Highlights and news from the Showcase IDX team.
Looking for information about our recent product changes? Check out our Changelog.
Showcase IDX has launched a fully updated (rebuilt from scratch) and significantly improved version of our automated IDX listing page XML Sitemaps for Google Search Console. This update is already live and there is nothing that you need to do to enable this new version.
We’re excited to welcome and introduce Showcase’s newest team member, Matt Booth. Matt will be joining Showcase as our new, and first, Director of Sales and Marketing! He will be the cornerstone of our our sales and marketing efforts, helping build new strategies and a team from scratch. He will also be working with future and existing reseller partners and agent, team and brokerage customers to make sure they get the most out of Showcase for their business and playing a key role in our product team as a customer advocate.
TLDR; Showcase IDX Listing Detail Pages and Hotsheets are pre-rendered on your WordPress server and the IDX content appears to search engines as native HTML content, because it is. The plugin also lets you customize all the things you’d expect to customize, like page titles, meta descriptions, and listing page URL structures. SEO is not an afterthought. When talking about SEO, we always like to start with our high-level approach, because these tenets are what we have built our SEO strategy around and underlie all of our SEO decisions. It’s valuable to get out of the weeds and look at what Google, in particular, is trying to achieve. Google is only valuable to users (and therefore profitable) if its users get the most relevant results using it. Everything we do in terms of SEO has to be looked at through this lens. What you show Google on your website has to…
In terms of real estate websites with IDX listing content, a 404 is most often seen when Google indexes a listing page and then tries to check/reindex that URL, and it is no longer in the active MLS feed. For most real estate website and IDX platforms, this means that the URL is no longer going to go to an active, valid listing page on your website. When this happens your server should respond with a 404 error code. This just means that your server is telling Google or a browser that this page no longer exists, nicely.
People looking for homes want a simple search experience. One that gives them what they’re looking for fast and without having to think too much. Now with Streamlined Search, you can provide your website visitors with a home search experience that rivals the large portals like no other IDX solution can. With Streamlined Search, we have solved some of the biggest IDX issues facing agents on their own websites: standardized data, mobile usability, and user experience. See Streamlined Search in action on a live real estate website, here. Standardized Data Streamlined Search uses a new proprietary set of MLS fields within Showcase IDX that standardizes feature fields from across all of our MLS partners, and makes it so these fields can be easily and accurately searched across multiple MLS’s. This data project is the foundation of our new search capabilities, allowing for complex searches to be performed quickly…
We’ve been looking at it for a while… and we have made some key improvements and simplifications today to our sign-up (and sign-in) form today that should positively impact lead registrations. These changes were based on a lot of customer feedback and end-user behavioral data that we’ve been analyzing for a while now since launching our 3.0 version last year. There are two things that aren’t readily obvious… we’ve made sure that if you want to hide the google sign in or email account form, you can do this easily with CSS. We have some customers who only want the facebook button option, so this is now very easy to make happen. Please let us know how these new changes work for you… we’ll be continuing to track the effectiveness of this change and overall lead conversion on our end.
We have made a change to how we handle the sending of recommended searches. previously, each and every agent-created recommended search had to be implicitly opted-into by the recipient. While this was following the letter of the law, this was causing a lot of hassles. We have relaxed these rules and now will send recommended search subscription emails to your signed up leads with no opt-in required. We are considering the lead sign-up as an agreement to receive and have updated our terms of use accordingly. If the recipient is not a current lead, they will still have to respond to the opt-in email. We are also working on a more comprehensive solution that will give agents more control over how these emails get sent out. If agents choose to spam recipients they will be hurting their own domain’s email spam reputation (not ours). This project involves making it so…
Firstly, just like every other online service, as it seems in the last week, we have updated our Privacy Policy into a new behemoth 8,500-word document that outlines how we deal with online privacy. Europeans are very concerned about online privacy. It’s not like we’re not concerned about it in the United States, but the new General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR) from the European Union is a new wide-reaching online privacy law. We talked about it in this recent blog post.
On May 25th, 2018, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will take effect. You might be thinking, “Why on Earth would I have to worry about that? I’m a Realtor in the USA”. The short answer is, that you do. The GDPR has a wide-ranging reach that could have a significant impact on websites and businesses outside of the EU. Yes, even yours in the United States.
Until now, the ability to set the number of results displayed in the search was restricted to the premium plan. This feature is now available on all plans. We have also opened up the ability to choose the pricing dropdown option to all plans as well. In looking at it, we just didn’t think those options were the best things to have on the premium plan and were hurting us and our customers more than helping add value to the premium plan/Showcase IDX.
