Helping your website to be competitive with the ever-increasing amount of huge, well-funded players entering the space is getting more and more difficult. Most brokerages or MLSs do not have millions dedicated to promoting traffic to their site.

I just saw a demo of something that is affordable but has been proven to drive up site traffic by as much as 20%. And it does not require any site re-design or major overhaul!

The solution is offered by a smart, young AI company called Restb.ai.

They are a “computer vision” company that has deep expertise in using artificial intelligence to increase traffic and engagement for your website.

Restb.ai has built a computer vision solution that “reads” all the elements in property images. Based on the contents of each photo, their AI provides a full sentence or caption featuring one of 40+ room types and a description of the key features (ex: kitchen island, vaulted ceiling, etc.) in each photo. These descriptions are then automatically assigned to the “Alt-Text” of each image on your site, which has an instant impact on your traffic.

Today, the images on the listings on your site are being used by hundreds if not thousands of IDX sites in your market and on national portals. Without differentiating your images with a description, Google thinks the images on your site are the same as the hundreds of others and does not give you any credit for providing valuable, and unique content. By adding unique descriptions to each image’s alt-text, Google and other search engines will favor your site over others and move you up in each search engine’s rankings.

While nobody will ever SEE the descriptions when they view your site, the alt text allows Google to treat each of your photos as “new content” which makes your site more popular.

From what we have seen, no major real estate website in the U.S. has gone all the way to adding full image descriptions like the type that the Restb.ai solution can provide. Many of the websites we looked at do not have any description at all for each image’s alt text. Then, even when descriptions are present, sites are often just adding the MLS ID or Street Address. By adding a full description with relevant keywords, each image has more context and much stronger indexing on Google.

Makes your Site More ADA Compliant

More importantly, adding a full description of each image also makes your site more ADA compliant and more helpful for those with visual impairments. Users of screen readers will hear the descriptions read aloud as they browse your site, and they will get a more thorough and informative description of the properties they are viewing.

Here is an example of the type of photo descriptions that the computer reads and automatically adds to each image.

Adding rich and descriptive captions in your alt text may be a quiet, but powerful way to get a leg up on your competition and the large 3rd party sites by generating more traffic with the added benefit of helping you be ADA compliant.

Talk to your website vendor about this and see if they can help you gain a competitive advantage with Restb.ai’s computer vision.