Craigslist.org (CL) is the epitome of an easy to use message board for the masses. Since most services are free, it is a great place to find tickets, buy a house or car, or get a date. But many ads are not given the 3 additional minutes (or less) of optimization.
The CL search engine is one of simplicity. As long as text is displayed within the ad, matching the search query, then your ad will appear in chronological order by which is was submitted.
If you were advertising commercial space and did not include the word “parking,” “dental office,” or “East Village” in the ad, then your ad would not show up in a search for those terms. And if you did include the word your ad would show…pretty easy.
What other words could you use? Your ad for commercial space, might include words related to professions, major highways, popular boulevards, nearby neighborhoods…and even common misspellings.
The time is Sunday, 8pm on the east coast, and PICTURED is a Craigslist drill down search for the NYC > Manhattan area for “Office & Commercial.” There are 246 ads posted today so far.
Once the word “Elevator” is used in the search, only 24 ads from today appear. That’s just over 10% of the ads still showing!!
By simply including the word elevator in the ad itself these listings are being returned. But since Craigslist uses simple search technology, you could actually have a long list of related words at the bottom of the ad and not be faced with spam penalties that major search engines enforce. For those that are frequent CL posters, this text would not have to be written new each time, but could be copied and pasted from another document. Notepad is for PC users and comes standard, and some Mac users suggest Textwrangler.
Have a question or need some direction? If you use Craigslist frequently, particularly if you use it in your business, feel free to message us below for tips to improving your Craigslist success.
Here is the first one – Even if what you are offering doesn’t need to have a picture, use a picture whenever possible. Picture tagged ads on Craigslist always get clicked more often than ones without.
Do you feel as though craigslist is a good source for businesses in the service industry? I’ve thought about a CL campaign but it is a tough one to maintain and I’m leary about becoming one of the many CL business spammers that seem to increase daily. Also, how long do you expect that CL will keep its spam friendly format before it becomes a mess of wasted bandwidth?
Thanks for the info!
It’s funny, Craigslist must be one of the only free places that I would recommend using to get new business. It seems there is always a catch with others but I haven’t come across one yet w/ CL. CL does take some time on your part, but because there is a lack of spam and duplicate content rules you can use the system more efficiently. They filter their results not by relevancy, but by timeliness; you have to be active to be on top. And if you do word (and keyword) your ad correctly, it will appear when more advanced CL users use the search function. Not sure how long the spam friendly format will stick around, the beauty of the CL model is that it does require near-daily maintenance to be used effectively. I’d like to think that most spammers are lazy, or develop technology to do the job for them, so who knows how long it could last. I’ll ask around.
Since working in legal research and dabbling in property management, I find craigslist to be a good source best source for advertising. To be more proactive in a small business though, I think having an SEO provider is much more efficient to keep you on top, don’t you?
It may not be cost effective for you to use an SEO professional, since there is no software and specialty knowledge needed to stay atop craigslist. To win at criagslist requires work everyday, and that work usually takes place as a first post at 6am, maybe followed by a few more throughout the day.
I post on the job boards in the East coast, I have found they are flagged often. How do I compose an ad that will not be flagged?