Inman

Real Geeks new website builder is real fast, SEO-first

Craig C. Rowe; Canva

Show us your tech! This December, our theme is Top Tech for the New Year, and we’ll be talking about the best technology now — from CRM platforms to the hottest 3D tours and everything in between. Plus, Inman tech reviewer Craig Rowe will work overtime to get you ready for the new year.

Whether integral to your web presence or merely a passive form of brand confirmation, search engine optimization should be a component of any agent’s effort to be relevant in their market, which is precisely what Real Geeks is addressing with its latest update, SEO Fast Track.

The new feature was conceptualized to help real estate agents, teams and brokerages publish heavily SEO-optimized websites fit to handle IDX data feeds wrapped around content targeting agents’ specific markets. The company announced SEO Fast Track in a press release exclusive to Inman. It has been in beta testing for a number of months, the company said.

“We interviewed all our customers who have created massive SEO-driven lead funnels to figure out what they did,” said Kevin McCarthy, CEO of Real Geeks, in the press release. “Universally, they created hundreds or thousands of content-rich area pages to attract long-tail traffic. We knew we could streamline this process with our extensive MLS integrations and the latest Large Language Model (LLM) technology.”

In essence, the websites are built for long-tail content queries, meaning consumers can enter very specific search terms that include bedroom count, street and community name and even desired features. It’s not a new tactic or technology, but it’s also not readily deployed industry-wide. The vast majority of IDX websites under brokerage brands use check-box filtering, a top-down elimination process that largely eschews consumer “wants” and, to no small extent, is responsible for fruitless home tours.

“Websites created using SEO Fast Track are built within minutes and launched as soon as MLS approval is received,“ the release stated.

Zillow only recently introduced long-tail search while some entrepreneurs, such as Texas agent Bobby Doss, have been deploying it for years for their own search products. Real Geeks’ use of it stands out because of the company’s broad reach and consistently well-regarded reputation, as well as for its ability to rapidly build websites able to respond to such search queries.

By LLM, McCarthy is referring to artificial intelligence, namely the type of model used by OpenAI, the makers of the highly popular AI software ChatGPT. These tools are able to absorb, or learn skills, from vast amounts of data in very little time, meaning Real Geeks can feed it all the MLS and market data it can handle in order to create websites deeply rich in the information consumers want to know about a home, its contents and its immediate surroundings. This is the type of content agents historically paid copywriters to create, and many still do.

Customers should know that most GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformers) learn from data found on the internet and thus demand thorough editing for accuracy and, above all else, fair housing compliance, a concern that isn’t new. Large language models can be taught FHA regulations rather easily, however.

Real Geeks is among the real estate industry’s most popular CRM solutions, joining Follow Up Boss, Cloze, Lofty (previously Chime) LionDesk, Market Leader and Inside Real Estate’s multiple offerings at the top of most-often recommended real estate-specific systems.

Email Craig Rowe