}
Jojo Furnival
April's webinar is a bag full of awesome for marketplace SEOs.
If you're responsible for SEO at a large marketplace, you already know the drill—it's complex, it's massive, and it changes quicker than Google's algorithm (ish).
April’s Marketplace SEO webinar, featuring Robyn Lodge, SEO Lead at Zoopla, and Zach Chahalis, VP of SEO at apartments.com, in conversation with our very own Patrick Hathaway, covered:
- Advanced crawling and indexing techniques for massive sites
- Strategies to handle the ever-changing nature of marketplace listings
- Leveraging structured data to stand out in the SERPs
- Optimizing internal linking at scale
- Localized content strategies that scale effortlessly
- How AI is reshaping SEO in the marketplace arena (and how you can keep up!)
Watch the webinar recording
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Webinar transcript
Patrick Hathaway:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to our webinar today. Thank you for joining us. We really appreciate you being here. My name is Patrick and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Sitebulb. We have a couple of incredible guests for you today, so please welcome Robyn Lodge and Zach Chahalis. We also have Sitebulb's marketing manager, Jojo, who in the chat, so please go ahead and say hi and tell us where you're joining us from today. So if you aren't familiar with Sitebulb already, let me tell you a little bit more about us. I'm going to just share my screen. There we go. I'll show you what Sitebulb is all about.
So Sitebulb is a website auditing and crawling tool which combines deep, technical, SEO insights with a user-friendly interface. We're the only SEO crawler on the market that can cater to everyone from freelance solo SEOs all the way up to global enterprise brands as we offer both a desktop crawler and a cloud crawler. Our desktop product is perfect for consultants, smaller in-house, or agency teams so if you want to check that out, please go ahead and download our free 14-day trial from the website.
And then we also have Sitebulb Cloud, which is our solution for larger in-house teams and enterprises, which starts quite small, but scales all the way up to enterprise. This is a great option if you've been using one of the big cloud crawlers and you've seen your price ratchet up year one year. We actually now have quite a number of large marketplaces running on Sitebulb Cloud so it's perfectly apt for today's discussion on marketplace SEO. So if you have any interest in Sitebulb Cloud, please feel free to book in a call with me. We can have a chat about your needs and help figure out if Sitebulb might be a good fit for you. So you can head over to our Booker demo page for that.
All right, let me stop sharing. So we've just got a final couple bits of housekeeping then we can crack on. So we are recording the webinar today and we'll be sending out the recording tomorrow, including all the links, so don't worry if you're not able to make it for the whole thing. And then we will also have time at the end of the webinar for your questions. Now very importantly, please put them in the Q&A bit, not the chat. The Q&A underneath the chat on the right-hand side, if you hover over it, it says "Q&A." It's got two little comment boxes. Put the questions in there, not in the chat. And if you haven't got any questions of your own, you can upvote other people's, and then we tend to focus most on the most upvoted questions so we'll work down from that. Yeah, if you can't think of any other questions, you can upvote other people's as well.
Right. Let me introduce our guests today. So we have Robyn Lodge, who's the SEO lead at Zoopla, which is one of the UK's leading online property marketplaces, which provides property listings, valuations, and market insights for people buying and selling houses. And as you might expect, the Zoopla website has many millions of pages and Robyn is responsible for shaping their SEO strategy and driving organic growth. Thank you for joining us, Robyn.
Robyn Lodge:
Hi. Thank you.
Patrick Hathaway:
And then next, I'd like to introduce Zach Chahalis. Zach is the vice president of SEO for Apartments.com and the Apartments network, which represent the most comprehensive online rental marketplace in the US. Zach leads the development and implementation of their SEO and content marketing strategy and is an active speaker across major global SEO conferences. Thank you for joining us today, Zach.
Zach Chahalis:
Thank you for having me.
Patrick Hathaway:
So yeah, please give a warm welcome in the chat to Robyn and Zach, and now we'll get on with our questions. So I just want to start off with a really simple definition. Basically, what does marketplace SEO mean to you? Zach, why don't you start us off with this one?
Zach Chahalis:
Yeah. So to me, marketplace SEO is essentially for those that think about the concept of enterprise SEO, so larger scale websites typically operating on a handful of page templates. But it's essentially a destination hub for, I'm going to say, third-party products in this sense. So in our particular case, the third party being real estate listings. But in general, the goal is more so optimising a little bit for commercial intent, although there's still room for informational intent opportunities.
Patrick Hathaway:
Robyn, anything to add or anything different?
Robyn Lodge:
Yeah, I totally agree. I think the things I'd add is, yeah, like we've mentioned kind of a little bit in the intros, scale, capacity to scale, capacity to be complex with that kind of, I guess, third-party, user-generated content kind of aspect to it. Yeah, the main thing, I guess, connecting buyers to sellers in that kind of concept.
Patrick Hathaway:
Okay. And so do either of you find that there are certain things that you would need to pay closer attention to from an SEO perspective than other sites of a similar scale? And if so, obviously both of the sites that you guys deal with are in the same vertical even though they were in different regions, would you say it's more in this specific vertical or actually do you think that would apply more generally when you talk about marketplace SEO?
Zach Chahalis:
I can jump in here. I mean, I think something that we deal with, at least on my side, is the idea of balancing both a B2B and a B2C customer journey on overall user experience, right? Because the way Apartments.com functions is we are getting advertised on by different apartment communities or independent operators of different sizes, and then we're trying to essentially get customers, renters to come into the site and look at those particular products. So we have to find that balance between focusing on a product-centric SEO strategy that kind of satisfies both sides of that equation and making sure that folks are kind of getting the best experience there.
Like I kind of mentioned, I guess, in my last answer, we tend to focus more on a commercial intent where I see a lot of other large sites have maybe a higher percentage of informational intent. It doesn't mean we don't. I mean, we are creating informational hubs and content that support the categories or regions or areas like that that we're serving, but I think you almost have to balance all of those things in this case. But there's a good amount of overlap, I would say, between a marketplace SEO and even maybe more of a generalised ecommerce SEO, but just with some minor nuances in terms of how you handle some of those things.
Patrick Hathaway:
Yeah, that B2B and B2C aspect. Is that the same for you, Robyn, then?
Robyn Lodge:
Yeah, similar for us. We have our B2B side of things which we focus on too. I was going to say the other thing that we probably, I think, pay more attention to is, I guess it's a bit more of a lack of less control over the content that goes onto our site. Agents write the content for their listings, not us. So again, it's that kind of slightly user-generated content side of things. How do you balance that with site quality, ensuring that what goes on there is good enough? Can we educate agents on the importance of good quality content, unique content within the listing template, making sure that there's minimum requirements for certain levels of detail, images, quality, things like that?
And obviously with that kind of site quality thing, you might also be looking at inventory and things like that and how that impacts low or no inventory categories, especially when we're looking at different locations and the granularity of locations. So when you're getting down from county to town or city to then street level, you're starting to get really long-tail, two-bedroom house for sale, street level, in location. Yeah, it has the capacity, again, to scale and quality then can become the issue, which I'd say, yeah, is the main thing.
Zach Chahalis:
Yeah. And even just to add more into that, we certainly deal with a lot of instances where we don't have enough inventory to support some of the particular areas, but of course we want to appear there. It's figuring out, "Okay, how can we best satisfy the need of the customer while still getting the visibility in that area?" At least certainly something that we deal with in the US real estate market, and Robyn I'm assuming it's probably the same for you as well, we receive a lot of the agent descriptions of a property or from a community website, PMC. It's the same description often that every other site that we're competing with is getting, right? So it becomes a case of, "Hey, how do we differentiate ourselves in the product feature offering or in other ways to provide something unique here, and that way search engines don't just see it as another duplicate website?"
Patrick Hathaway:
Yeah, it's almost the same problem that you get when you have products that are used in ecomm, right?
Zach Chahalis:
Exactly.
Patrick Hathaway:
[inaudible 00:09:42] and you end up using the same description all over the place. So your answer, Robyn, actually stole one of my questions I was going to ask later. So I'll ask you now to see because maybe there's nothing there with it because I don't really know what your answer is. But do you, as SEOs, get involved in that sort of partner relationship? I know it's slightly different the way in which houses are sort of bought and sold in the UK and the US, but in the UK, obviously, it's estate agents and I guess they're called realtors in the US, right? Are they the people who create the content? And if so, do you get to have a say? Do you get to instruct them and say, "No, this doesn't pass our quality bar"? Do you get to have input in this or not?
Robyn Lodge:
I guess from our side of things you mentioned do we have partner relationships with them? We do have quite a lot of opportunities. We have quarterly offsite marketing days where we invite local agents in to talk to them, find out their pain points, find out what it's like to be an agent and how they sell themselves and how we can help sell them. What things do they need us to do to help them promote their themselves and also their listings? So we do have those touch points. Yeah, I guess it's finding out with those interactions, educating them and giving that feedback, and that importance of helping them stand out in the crowd, I think.
It's interesting. We were speaking to an agent recently and they were kind of talking about how they're branching out more and more from portals into things like social media and things like that and how TikTok and things like that becoming much bigger places for them. I don't know whether that's standard in the US, but I think that's happening more and more in the UK. I know that in the US, there's a bit more focus on the agent themselves as a person and I think that's becoming more and more prevalent in the UK now. But yeah, I think it is that, that helping promote them. From our side, how can we help promote them?
Patrick Hathaway:
That's interesting. What about you, Zach?
Zach Chahalis:
Yeah. So the US is interesting in the market as a whole, but more so mainly on the sales side and even a little bit on the renter side, it's agents and brokers. So our Homes.com side of things deals extensively with them and trying to advertise to those agents and brokers to appear more readily there. On the Apartments side, we deal more directly with apartment communities, property management companies ...
Patrick Hathaway:
Okay.
Zach Chahalis:
Or what we call independent operators, meaning you own a property, you're renting it out, you want to get a renter in on your place. So we have a good relationship, at least on the rentals side, I'll speak specifically where I am, with those groups. So we heavily work with the different property management companies to get them to advertise on our site, promote certain communities. We give them feedback. We add in features and functionality that helps make them more visible. We launched property management company webpages last year that allows you to narrow in like, "Hey, I really love this company. Let me see other communities if I have to move," type of thing.
On the independent operator side, we've given a lot more feedback and tooling for them to be able to optimise their listing in a way that's a little bit more unique and more eye-catching. So we even offer features in our platform that allows them to write a custom description or leverage a little bit of AI that says, "Hey, let's digest what you have as a description. Let's digest some of your imagery. We can help provide a description that works for you, make you look a little bit better than some of the competition."
Patrick Hathaway:
Nice. Okay. Well, you've said AI. I don't really want to turn this into a big AI discussion necessarily, however this may go up. So a lot of the SEO we do now is still reasonably or very similar to the way it's been, certainly on the technical side, for the last five, 10 years. Is there anything that you are sort of excited about in 2025 that is a bit different to what we've been doing for the last few years? Robyn, you can start with this one. The answer can be no, right? We are doing the same stuff and it still works. It's all good.
Robyn Lodge:
No, I think maybe it's the expected answer, I don't know, but the evolution of search. Where are things going to go? What does it mean for us SEOs where Google AI tools, they're aggregating content, serving it less need for the user to go to the citation? Because I think it's like how will we adapt as SEOs? Things that we need to think about like how are we allowing or blocking AI bots to our site considering how we mark up our site, how we make sure that our content has the freshness, relevance, depth that LLMs want and need, and how do we help build entities that they understand and monitoring brand presence.
And I think, also, the interesting part is if we do start to see traffic from AI tools increasing substantially, what do we do with that information? If we're getting less traffic, how do we make the traffic we do get work harder? Do we need to, as SEOs, have a greater focus on conversion and user journeys? More like product focus rather than widening out how we're thinking about things rather than optimization, it's much more than that now. So yeah, I'm excited to see where all of that goes. I'm very interested. Yeah, that's mine.
Patrick Hathaway:
Two cents.
Zach Chahalis:
Yeah. At least from my perspective, I think it has shifted how we think about some elements of certain KPIs, right? So historically, we've leaned our advertising more towards getting the most amount of traffic. And in that case, we're still getting a fair amount of traffic, but less folks are searching in traditional search engines. They're asking more questions in these, I guess I'll call them, answer engines, like a ChatGPT type of experience, and they may not necessarily be coming through the site. We do see an uptick in LLM traffic, but it's nowhere near what Google's losing in that market share.
Now, even within Google on our side, the prevalence of AI overviews, at least in the US, has started to pick up more in commercial intent queries. I would say right now, the answers aren't very great. They basically kind of say like, "Hey, go check out a site like Apartments.com." Cool, appreciate that. But they're not exactly providing a tonne of value where things on the informational aspect, we have, for example, pages that talk about rent trends over time. So a query like, "What is the average rent in X, Y, and Z City?" we typically rank number one for a lot of those instances. But we've seen a little bit less volume there in terms of search volume, in terms of traffic coming in because they're getting that answer directly in the SERP and they don't need it anymore.
So what we're seeing is the higher-level intent folks are not necessarily coming into the site as much, but the ones that have more of that deeper down the funnel conversion intent, we're seeing more folks kind of come in that are higher-quality traffic. So they're converting better and they're working on the site more, they're spending more time looking at listings, but we're not necessarily seeing that higher-level funnel trickling as much as we used to.
Patrick Hathaway:
Could that get to the point where you go, "Actually, we don't bother with that content anymore"?
Zach Chahalis:
I don't see that anytime in the near future because my general perspective here is yes, we're offering listings. And I'm in Atlanta, for example. Let's say we're offering listings in Atlanta. But we want to be able to educate the consumer and also show search engines that we are a knowledgeable base for anything around that particular area. "Hey, you're looking to move to this area or move within this area. We've got everything you need to know about it and we can help you find the best place for you." If you start taking away that content, then you basically just become, I'll call it, an SEO play. What are you offering that's unique at that point?
Patrick Hathaway:
Yeah.
Zach Chahalis:
The great thing with Apartments.com, we're a child of CoStar Group. So CoStar Group being international, our core focus on that side is real estate data. So we're able to tap into all of the unique research data and everything like that that we have on our side to provide that experience and information to the user there. And we still see a large amount of interaction with that content, even if the initial entry point might be shifting more towards an answer engine.
Patrick Hathaway:
Nice. I like that. Cool. All right, so I'm going to ask you a question now about my favourite technical SEO topic, crawling. So obviously, Robyn, you've got one massive site and you've got, I guess, a range of massive sites. We're talking millions and millions of URLs, right? I think Chris Lee, in fact, in the chat has just posted about trying to scrape the right move site last year and giving up because the data set got too large. So what I want to know is what is your approach to crawling sites that are that big? Are you sampling heavily, are you trying to crawl as much as possible, or some combination of the two? Robyn, what's your approach? How do you go about it?
Robyn Lodge:
Yeah. I mean, yeah, our site is huge. I don't know. Yeah, Millions and millions and millions of pages. So yeah, I think before you kind of get started, I would say as part of setup, making sure you've got a crawler that can handle it, Sitebulb. Would highly recommend. But yeah, it will make things easier. But also testing and checking with engineers as you're setting things up to check because you want to crawl as fast as possible within the limits with a site. Otherwise, you could be crawling over the period of a month or something to try and crawl as much as possible if that's your strategy. And the site could be changing during that time, and so you're going to end up with mixed results from when you started the crawl to when it's finished. Yeah, one thing I would say, definitely test speed test with engineers. You don't want to be causing incidents and issues.
But yeah, we have regular scheduled crawls where we have regular, smaller crawls where we have top pages and a sample, but we also have a larger crawl where the strategy is crawl as much as possible and we leave it churning away, and we evaluate the data regularly so that we have that. And we have that on a monthly basis so we can see over time if we need to go back and see when something happened. We have as much data as we possibly can. Obviously, you can crawl with exclusions. If you know don't need the crawl data on a load of pages that are either low value or low quality, or don't really link out to many places or aren't useful for you to have that information in your data debt, then yeah, exclude them. Maybe you're excluding them already in robots.txt. I don't know. But if you're not, you can narrow down your crawl like that.
But again, the more you exclude, the less of the bigger picture you're going to get. And within things like internal linking, you are not getting that full picture. So that's one thing I would be wary of.
Patrick Hathaway:
Zach, go ahead.
Zach Chahalis:
Yeah. I mean, my perspective here, I 100% agree. I mean, if you're, "Hey, I'm crawling for the first time," especially with a brand new tool, you want to be able to test and make sure that you're getting through the site effectively. Are you blocking the user agent, the IP addresses, anything like that? The way that we're structured now is we function in an agile methodology, so we have sprints and release schedules. We will run a full-scale evaluation crawl of each of our sites after those sites launch when we go through a release schedule cadence. But with that, we also run smaller, I'm going to call them, sample set crawls just to make sure that we get enough of every page template in on at least a weekly basis, and that way we can see if something inadvertently breaks. I mean, sometimes bugs just randomly appear even if code didn't launch, which is always a fun time.
Patrick Hathaway:
Yeah.
Zach Chahalis:
In that case, it's kind of, "All right. Let's keep an eye on this sample set and make sure that everything's good to go there and that we don't have any issues." But then when something rolls out more at scale, we want to make sure, "All right. Did we inadvertently hurt our internal linking strategy? Did we introduce a bunch of redirected URLs, 404s, things like that?" Especially if there's a story related to changing something about the site architecture, we of course want to make sure we're looking at that more in depth. I want to back up to the testing and configuration component real quick though. I think that's major, especially when you're starting with a new tool. It's not an Apartments.com thing, but I worked with a client a couple of years ago where running a crawler through their site, and it was actually Sitebulb at the time and this is not a Sitebulb problem, but basically their CDN would shut down if you crawled more than 15 URLs in a minute and you just kind sit there going ...
Patrick Hathaway:
A minute?
Zach Chahalis:
Yes. So you have to look at that kind of going, "Hey, I have a lot of questions," but it's always good to make sure, "Hey, can we handle this?" In our particular case, we actually worked very closely with our DevOps team to say, "Hey, what is the scale that we can run this at? What is the speed?" And we've actually had them go at points like, "Crank it up to 100 and see what you do," and we're able to test it and see, "Hey, does this hurt anything? Does it hurt performance?" but we're able to work very closely with them on that right balance.
Patrick Hathaway:
It just reminded me of a story as you're talking there from a few years ago, from a well-known SEO who was using Sitebulb. This is pre-cloud when we only had the desktop version as well and she was crawling. I think either it was Etsy or it was a site like Etsy, another marketplace business. And the feedback that she was getting from the dev team was, "You're crawling too fast." "Oh, what are your crawl settings?" "One URL a second." She's like, "How do I slow this down even further?" We were trying to give her workarounds with increasing the render time and stuff and it was pretty wild that that was the extent of what she was even allowed to do.
Zach Chahalis:
Yeah. I mean, with my entire network, we're talking tens of millions of index pages, so imagine that at one URL per second. Now I've certainly, in prior lives, worked with sites that you do have to go down to that level or work very closely with security and DevOps to try and find some way to make that work. But I mean, otherwise, it still takes us a couple days to get through the site in entirety at a reasonable pace.
Patrick Hathaway:
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So how do you guys then handle the constant flux of listings pages? I know you mentioned it before. You sell all the houses or all of a sudden everything just disappears. Is it a little bit like the sort of out-of-stock issue with ecommerce where there's no active listings? How do you tackle this, Zach?
Zach Chahalis:
Yeah, so I think there's a couple things on my side there because we have multifamily and single-family listings. And when I say single-family, I mean a house, a condo, townhome, duplex-style experience.
Patrick Hathaway:
Right.
Zach Chahalis:
So those can come on and off the market on a regular basis. We do persist the listing in some form, but it becomes, I hate to say, more of an orphan page on the site. It's not something we heavily emphasise as much to search engines. It's not in site maps. It's not in internal linking. Now on the multifamily side, in theory these apartment communities are always looking for renters. They always exist. So generally, we keep those pages up in perpetuity unless the relationship ends or they no longer want to appear on the site, but we've worked extensively to try and figure out how do we prioritise the listings that need to be fresh? So we've looked at ways of prioritising new construction, new listings.
In some conversations I've had with Fabrice at Bing, we've started focusing extensively on things like IndexNow and a lot of sites, I think, have started to get on board with that as well. But some of the directive around like, "Hey, if a listing availability is changing, if price points are changing," that's interesting information, I think, to a search engine. So we've been working both with IndexNow, as well as the Google Index and APIs and things like that to say, "Hey, these are the listings that have changed recently. Come take a look at these," and we have site maps that back that up accordingly. So it's kind of focusing on what's new and then de-prioritising what exists until it comes back in a usable, live listing form.
Patrick Hathaway:
Interesting. Robyn, you, I suppose, don't have quite the same situation with the apartments.
Robyn Lodge:
Yeah, slightly different. I guess, yeah, a little bit like product pages on an ecommerce site in a way. Properties come and go. Properties come off the market or might be sold subject to contract. You could look at it in multiple ways of how you want to handle it. It depends how much value you feel the page has got when it's no longer for sale or it depends. But yeah, I think if there's still enough value for that page to still be live with 200, say a house has been sold and it's subject to contract, you might want to leave it still live. It is still active. It could go back on the market. It could all fall through. It goes back on the market. You've still got your index page. So I think you just want to tread carefully there in terms of losing indexation of pages that might need to come back.
You might have a use case where a property sells and you might still want to have a page there to show information about that property. You might have other information that you want to serve to the user about that address. But otherwise, if you know that the page isn't coming back, you don't want to serve that information anymore. You could either choose to redirect it if you've got a relevant journey. If someone's bookmarked it or sent it to somebody, that user then wants to go and find that content, it's no longer available. Where do you send them into the journey next? Do you send them back to the category landing page that's specific to the location to then let them choose a different property or show them what's available now? If you feel there's enough value in doing that and it meets the user's needs, you could do a delayed low index, like an out-of-stock kind of thing. There's lots of options available. Yeah. I'm trying not to say it depends.
Patrick Hathaway:
Just going around saying it, I love it.
Robyn Lodge:
It depends.
Patrick Hathaway:
How to avoid saying it.
Zach Chahalis:
I will say an interesting call-out maybe between the US market and kind of what you were talking about there is most of the marketplaces here persist, I'll say, off market listings, even a house that's sold, in perpetuity. And then they just kind of flip those listings back on and off because people like to look at them from a research data perspective. So even in some cases, the house I purchased three years ago is still alive on every one of these retail sites with the same property description that the agent used back when I bought the house. But that just seems to be a persistence thing here in the States.
Patrick Hathaway:
Interesting. So I guess that's quite a good way to segue into the next question because if you do have all of these pages that never go anywhere, they exist in perpetuity, how do you track which pages are being indexed and if they're the right ones? Or is this just not even feasible? How do you go about that? Zach, you can start this one.
Zach Chahalis:
Yeah. It depends on the page type. I hate to say it depends, but I think this is going to be the drinking word of the day. Our most valuable pages are our search result pages. That is where typically people enter in. But in theory, our value is the content we offer and the content in that case are listing LDP pages. How we've organised the site specifically, I'm going to use sitemaps as an example here, is we organise it by certain sections of the site or certain amenity types or filters, or we have sitemaps specifically dedicated towards listings and we segment them by brand new listings or trying to segment them by frequency of update.
And those are all getting pushed into the search engines that we can then go and look at something like a Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools and identify, "Hey, do we have gaps in these particular groupings? And if so, why?" combining that with we do fairly regular log file analysis of our data and just looking at, "Hey, are search engines hitting this page at all? Is there a reason why maybe this page isn't indexed?" and then trying to back into what might be going on there. A lot of it is trying to figure out ways to make our lives easier around the indexation side and just kind of looking at, "Okay, are these getting looked at? And if they are and they're not getting indexed, why? What's the issue or why is it not valuable enough?"
Patrick Hathaway:
Anything different with you, Robyn? Similar?
Robyn Lodge:
Not a huge amount to add to that. Totally agree with Zach. But yeah, in some cases we might create a separate property in Search Console for that specific page path. So for example, our details pages, which are listings pages. We have that it's its own property there so that we can dig into those specific pages further and get more data in Search Consoles. They're looking at, for example, what pages are being crawled, but not indexed, et cetera. Yeah. And again, why? What is the reason there? Yeah, making sure they're, I don't know, digging further. Are there any issues coming up in our crawls that are indicating why these pages aren't getting indexed or are they actually being added to our sitemaps as we think they are? And just double checking because sometimes [inaudible 00:34:56] sitemaps might not be created correctly. We just assume they work sometimes and maybe they're not, but then Sitebulb can actually help you identify that.
Patrick Hathaway:
Well, you do have a sitemap scroll as well, don't you?
Robyn Lodge:
Yeah.
Zach Chahalis:
Yeah. A big emphasis on the Google Search Console breakouts by directories, if you can. I'll say I have some sites where I can do that great and I have some sites where I can't do it as effectively. But especially if you're not pulling your data out of Search Console via the API, the sites tend to be so big that you're getting heavily sampled if you try and do any type of filtering within the performance reporting. I usually like to play with my data in some type of a warehouse and play with it through SQL database, but being able to see the performance at a directory basis, if you can do that, is extremely valuable.
Patrick Hathaway:
I bet. Cool. All right. So how about internal link optimization? So I don't think this is necessarily specific to marketplace SEO, but when you are talking about the scale that you guys are dealing with, you have powerful levers there. How do you think about it? Robyn, do you want to lead this one?
Robyn Lodge:
Yeah, so I think with any site, it's your good foundations. For start, your XML site maps, HTML site maps, breadcrumbs, decent global navigation, the website hierarchy, just normal things that you need to be doing as an SEO. But also, yeah, I think the scale element is having that level of automation behind it, especially when we're looking at location-based and having a model that knows the relationship of one location to other locations and being able to link down, link up, link across from different locations so that ... For example, on our search pages, you might have properties for sale in London. Where does that page link to? How do we understand which locations are either within London? And it can link to the "within" or "nearby to London." How does it understand what's relational? And making sure we're internally linking within categories like that, but also linking outside of categories.
So we might have our "Houses For Sale in London" page, but what might other people be interested in if they're looking at that? And then internally linking to say, "House Prices in London" page that we can internally link to other avenues to increase that depth of internal linking across the site. So yeah, I'd say that's the main thing. And I think when you are looking at scale, I think one of the things that you can do more easily as a smaller site is get one of those [inaudible 00:37:59] internal linking things that shows which links to where. How the hell would we do that on our site? It's just not possible.
Patrick Hathaway:
And we're not going to try building that for you. Don't ask for it.
Robyn Lodge:
I don't think I'd use it, to be fair. So yeah, I think that's one of the harder things that you can't really get a visualisation, but I think you can understand how different templates link to different templates and understanding crawl depth of different pages through crawling and just seeing what is so deep down in the architecture and how you can bring it higher.
Zach Chahalis:
Yeah, I echo all of that. I mean, we're kind of in the boat where in my head I can picture what that map would look like, but yeah. I mean, we can't effectively get to what that would be based on the sheer number of pages we look at. But we've extensively been working to try and bring our key content within two to three clicks of the homepage experience like, "Hey, how do I get down to these places? How do I then go out from there either to informational content or to a more specific result type?" So if you're trying to get from, let's say, our homepage to a city, there's plenty of ways to get into that easily throughout the site. But then once you get to that, making it easy for a customer to say, "Hey, I want to filter down to a property that has air conditioning or a balcony," or, "I want to see by price point," or, "I want to see a specific neighbourhood or a nearby city."
So we're trying to bring all that in higher up and we've defined a very complex entity-linking approach on our end that basically tries to tie together related entities within one another. And that way, it helps to kind of push the flow of internal page rank between those pages, especially trying to get it deeper down to some of those pages that would've probably normally been invisible without that.
Patrick Hathaway:
That's nice. Well, I think what's really interesting that you both shared there is the internal data model that is helping understand what is going on. Is there a world in which you're, in the future, building out your own sort of AI agents that you make use of your models, if you're allowed to share any of these things? Maybe you're not.
Robyn Lodge:
Can't say, sorry.
Patrick Hathaway:
I love it.
Zach Chahalis:
I can't go into depth, but let's say we're making agents that make ... So I have a full content team underneath me as well. A part of the effort is making agents more excessively pull in our data points that makes their life easier. So that way, they're spending less time having to do research or editing types of things and more time on writing the content and doing that type of approach. That's the most I can say there.
Patrick Hathaway:
Yeah, fair enough. So in terms of technical SEO, how do you track success?
Zach Chahalis:
Interesting question. So technical SEO, a lot of what we're looking at here is have we reduced the friction for crawlers and users to get through our site? Both in the sense of cleaning up any bad linking, dead linking, trying to improve the site load time and rendering time to be as efficient as we can with crawl budget and render budget. Really, it kind of comes down to making sure that the technical framework foundation of our site is not the thing that might be hindering our performance. So we work extensively and I think in every sprint we do, we're always looking at ways of improving site load time or our server-side rendering aspects of things, combined with, "All right. Hey, we see. We're launching this new page type. We need to be very cognizant of any internal linking that might get introduced here," or we're retiring something.
A good example being in New York City, there's a certain type of, I'm going to say, filter called "no broker fee." So anyone that lives in New York might be familiar with the concept of broker fees there, so there's a tonne of broker fees that get tied to apartments. There's a new act that, I think, it goes into effect in June in New York where that's, in theory, no longer a thing. So now we no longer need that type of filter for customers that are searching for places in New York. How do we properly degrade that functionality without introducing bad status codes into our crawl budget that's just wasting their time?
Patrick Hathaway:
Interesting.
Robyn Lodge:
Yeah, similarly, talking about crawl budget, if you're doing specific work to kind of try and optimise the crawl budget as such, you could use your server log to identify a reduction in crawler spending time on those areas of the site and then analyse. If you say lots of particular pages, what happens next? Do they spend more time on other pages that you were hoping they'd spend more time on instead of those other ones? Monitoring that and trying to find optimizations where you can continue to further do that if that's what you want to achieve. Yeah, I think that was it from my side.
Patrick Hathaway:
Awesome. All right, so let me just have a quick look at the Q&A. So we've got a few questions in there. I'll ask one more, but I will remind everyone watching. If you've got any questions for our panel today, go ahead and add them into the Q&A tab. So I'll do one more and then we'll move on to that. I want to just talk about content creation. So obviously, both of you, certainly some of your teams will be working on localised content. How do you do this in the scale you need to do it at so that it still resonates with your target audiences? Go ahead, Zach.
Zach Chahalis:
I'm going to say I have a slightly unfair advantage here because of CoStar Group as a whole and being essentially a sub-organisation of them. Their entire focus is on digitising the world's real estate. Part of that means we actually have individual research folks that are going to these areas that are doing all the research around the best places to go, the best places to eat, what exists to do in that area, getting photography, getting videos. So really, a big component for me and my team is, "Hey, how do we best take that data that exists over here and use it to factor into the content creation we're doing here and scale that down?" whether we're talking from a national level, we do have some pages that talk about entire countries, down to a specific neighbourhood that might exist in Atlanta, Georgia, for example, and knowing, "All right. What are the things that people care about here? What are the amenities that they want? What types of restaurants exist within this area? What types of buildings exist here?"
So we try and focus pretty extensively on providing the most relevant information, scaling down from top to bottom in terms of geography that we can from the user experience side and improving that.
Patrick Hathaway:
Oh, yeah.
Robyn Lodge:
Yeah. In terms of the location side of things, yeah, similarly. At Zoopla, we have a lot of internal data available at different levels of granularity of location. So I guess it's like how can we utilise that internal data and automate it alongside human-written content? Yeah. I think, again, it's going down to that level of granularity, what's adding value still and where to stop, especially if we're thinking about things like crawl budget, good quality versus low quality pages across the site and getting that balance, but also kind of satisfying long tail as well. So I think it's just that balance of where to stop.
Patrick Hathaway:
Awesome. Right. So I will move through to the audience questions. So if anyone's got any strong feelings about any of these, feel free to just jump in and start talking. So I'm just going to put them on screen and we'll go from there. So we've got one from Simon Cox, I believe. So, "Both Zoopla and Apartments.com," plural, Simon, "use JavaScript to varying degrees." Oh, this is good because we didn't talk about JavaScript. "AI services are fast becoming the start point for many. Are you concerned that the LLMs are not currently able to crawl JavaScript sites and provide their users with your content?"
Zach Chahalis:
So I'll say I'm very passionate about this area. JavaScript SEO is both probably the pain of my existence, but also something I truly enjoy working with. So Apartments.com, we focus extensively on server-side rendering, making sure that we are re-rendering all of that content as possible for both search engines and users so that way we're improving the site speed performance and everything on that side as well, but we don't want to waste render budget there. Now I'll say there are also sites within my network that are SPA on Angular, and that's a whole uphill battle around how you deal with that. But again, we've been working to extensively figure out how we server-side render and get things closer to the edge of the CDN serving so that way the information's delivered fast and readily and that way and pre-rendering the components that matter most for search engines as they come through and crawl. And I get to say that for answer engines too.
Patrick Hathaway:
And you're doing that for all your pages or only for certain pages?
Zach Chahalis:
I'll say a percentage of pages. We certainly have some that are less valuable. We think the search engines will handle caching in different ways and we might server-side render slightly less for them, but it depends on the site. Pretty much everything on Apartments.com is mostly server-side rendered. When you get down to some of those Angular sites, because in theory we have to keep re-caching these pages over and over again for freshness and having that available, there are some pages that get less priority based on how we see them being less prioritised within search engines and user bases.
Patrick Hathaway:
From your side, Robyn, on that, any concern about JavaScript or are you handling that differently?
Robyn Lodge:
Similarly, yeah. Our pages are largely server-side rendered too. So yeah, not much more to add on that, I'm afraid.
Patrick Hathaway:
No problem. Right, so let me go to the next question. So from Kevin here, "How important do you feel blog pages, area guides, and market news to be for your site?" Obviously, we talked about that a little bit already. "And how do you find those types of pages support the user journey and are you associating them to improve conversions?"
Robyn Lodge:
I can jump in here with this one. Yeah, I think really important for our site. Being there at the top of the funnel, it could be the beginning of somebody's journey, market news or area guides. A lot of people don't know where they want to move to next and being part of that research journey is good not only for brand positioning, but they come, they learn from our sites, they go away. They may come back when they're ready, but we were that first touch point. So I think very important, but also making sure that in those user journeys like area guides and things like that, we have places for the user to go off to.
If I'm looking at a particular area, where might I want to go next? Do I want to look at house prices in that area? Do I want to look at some kind of the actual properties that might be available at certain budgets or does it have touch points where I might be able to look at areas nearby? So maybe that area isn't quite right for me. Maybe I want to actually look at the area in the next town along. What other data points can I get relating to that area? So yeah, I think really, really important.
Patrick Hathaway:
And then there's the second part of Kevin's question. So do you find that if you have areas that don't have so much support in content, that they do have worse conversions and generally it does improve conversions to have them?
Robyn Lodge:
I'm not sure on that one. Can you repeat the question for me? Sorry.
Patrick Hathaway:
So do you find that these pages actually do support the conversion rate of the areas that they're supporting or regions?
Robyn Lodge:
I mean, we have area guides on our site. We do see people enter there, go on, but yeah. I'd say at this point of the journey, if someone's looking for an area, they're probably not going to be at the point of conversion. They're too high up in the funnel. I think it is that brand positioning thing. We're there at the beginning, they go away, they come back. They might also go to an area of our site. We're known for our instant online valuations at Zoopla so they might go get an instant valuation of their property that they have at the moment. And then maybe they go down to the agent valuation route, they find out how much our instant valuation is for their property. They then actually decide, "Okay, that's pretty good. Maybe I'll get an actual agent around." The agent comes around and that's the conversion in itself, rather than thinking that the conversion might necessarily be just a lead to view a property. It's also the conversion to send an agent the instruction to value a property.
Patrick Hathaway:
Yeah. So I think I already know your answer to this question then, Zach, based on what you said before. I guess, do you have anything to add in terms of how it works for you guys?
Zach Chahalis:
Yeah. I mean, from our side we have tonnes of supporting content both in the forms of data-driven pages to help navigate an area, but also blog content, both blog content supporting the B2C customer and the B2B customer. And I'll say it definitely does help conversion rate depending on what type of consumer you're talking about and where they are in the journey. I agree entirely with what Robyn was saying there. Someone that's entering into our local guide to learn more about a specific neighbourhood, probably pretty high up the funnel and not necessarily converting as much. But we have blogs dedicated towards independent operators, "Hey, if you're renting with us," rentals with us type of thing. And we see that contribute in to lead value, so we're basically able to say directly how much organic has driven in terms of lead submissions for that type of component.
Patrick Hathaway:
Awesome. All right, let me get to the next one. So, "What other commonalities are there between marketplace and ecommerce SEO and how do you manage them?"
Zach Chahalis:
I would say there's a large amount of overlap between the two. I mean, you're essentially trying to do the same thing, right? You are trying to sell a product. You might be trying to sell someone else's product. That's where I see a lot of overlap between marketplace. So for those in the US, I used to work with GameStop, for example. In that case, we're not really selling our own products, we're selling products that a third party sells to us at wholesale and then we sell it to someone else with some markup on it. A lot of functionality is similar there. We're getting blanket copy from whoever the seller is. We have to figure out how we make ourselves unique and have a good experience there that helps to take that to the next level.
A lot of that is similar on the marketplace side of things. I think where there's a little bit of a difference is something like product feed optimization and how you try and get into some of the ecommerce placements that exist within SERPs, but there's a lot of overlap with something like ... Structured data is still equally important. Product markup even in a real estate case is still a big key component of how you look at some of the structured data side.
Patrick Hathaway:
Anything to add there, Robyn?
Robyn Lodge:
Yeah. I was just going to say, yeah, I totally agree with that. One of the things, I think commonality is often messiness sometimes of busted navs and things like that. The ability to filter, the effects that that can have on crawl and indexation really, and how it can get kind of wildly out of control if you're not careful. Yeah, a lot of commonalities, but also a few differences.
Patrick Hathaway:
Cool. Right. So I've got one more question, which I'm not expecting us to have a hugely helpful answer for, but maybe something to do with the search properties. Anyway, "Do you have any advice on increasing the Search Console URL Inspection API limits? The 2,000-per-day quota is practically useless for your scale." Now Chris has requested higher limits for client sites in the past, but those appeals have gone answered. There is ways of doing it with your properties, but have you guys got any other tricks?
Zach Chahalis:
So this one is interesting. I guess I'll look at it from two perspectives. On the Bing side, they've just kind of started to naturally scale your IndexNow ratios as they start to look at your site and see the value that's coming into it, or I've had various conversations with folks on the Bing side around adjusting scale. Google Search Console pushes are a little bit more of an uphill battle. I would say they basically only allow two types of limit increases. I believe it's for job postings and events. Events I might be misspeaking, but job postings is one of them. If you can find a way of tying into that, then that might be an opportunity of saying, "Hey, my site as a whole needs more limit because I'm serving these types of functions."
Patrick Hathaway:
So I do actually have ... There's a tool out there which is quite new called Indexing Insight. Basically, the guy that runs it, a guy called Adam, has sort of figured out how to work the GSC API so that he can check indexing up to a million pages. So I'm going to put the link in the chat. It has, just in the last month or so, been released. It's designed, I think, mainly for in-house teams. Yeah, they have plans for 100,000, 500,000, and a million URLs. So that might help you there, Chris, and maybe anybody else watching if you want to check specifically at that sort of scale. Awesome.
Well, we are pretty much at time so thank you, everyone, for watching and for your fantastic questions. Huge thanks, of course, go to Zach and Robyn for so generously giving up their time and expertise. We will be emailing the recording tomorrow to everyone who registered so don't worry if you missed the beginning. And then our next webinar is on another Wednesday, the 21st of May. We'll be talking about the intersection of AI and SEO. I'm not calling it GEO.
Zach Chahalis:
Thank you.
