Google Yourself Now, or Your Referrals Will Die

Real estate agents need to wake up and manage their online reputation. If you don’t think that prospective clients Google you, you are surely mistaken. When you do, you may be amazed at what you find (or don’t find).

What you may find is that your name does not necessarily reflect you. You may share a name with a bunch of people all with the same name. This is a problem that you need to focus on fixing. Having lots of social network accounts and pointing them all to your agent or broker or MLS profile will help with this. Ideally, you would buy the domain name of yourname.com – That works really well.

You may also find that many third party websites like Realtor.com, Zillow, Trulia, and others have profile pages configured for you if you ever had a listing published there. Be sure to read them and make sure that they are accurate – especially your contact information. If you have switched brokerages lately, there may be a lot of information about your old company, and they are getting calls when people are looking for you.

Once you get control over your name, you may want to reach out beyond that to focus on key words that may drive customers to you. We recently chatted about this with the good folks at ReachFactor. They provide a service to REALTORS® for local key phrases that consumers search when they are looking for agents – examples like top sunset Utah REALTOR®.

Here is an article written by one of our premium vendors, ReachFactor; it talks about their service and the strategies behind it.

Thousands of people go online daily to find a neighborhood REALTOR®. They ask the opinions of others in social networks and type agent-related phrases into Google. Ninety-five percent of them don’t go beyond the first page of search results. To be known as the top real estate agent in your neighborhood you must appear on the first page for phrases related to people looking for an agent. This is not easy.

Why is it so hard to get a website to appear in Google?

A primary ranking factor for Google is topic precision. In other words, Google determines how precisely relevant your website is for the topics being searched. Typical real estate offices and agents are at a disadvantage. Their websites are usually very small, have very little unique content, and very few links from other sites. Not exactly great candidates for a first page rank. An agent could spend a lot of time, money, and effort writing content and fetching links – OR – leverage a service like ReachFactor to get in the Top 10 without much expense or effort. How is that possible?

Let’s start with the precision of our mission. ReachFactor wants to help people connect with great agents in their neighborhood. To accomplish this goal we have to make it easy for people to virtually experience what’s it’s like to use a particular agent. Among other things, we’ve designed a system that makes it extremely easy for any agent to collect reviews from past clients and publish them all across the Web.

Here’s a real world example

Lori is a real estate agent in Sunset, Utah who’s been using ReachFactor a few weeks. Her ReachFactor profile shows up on page 1 in Google for many key phrases now, including:

Why does Lori’s ReachFactor profile show up even though Lori’s own website doesn’t?

1. As ReachFactor’s directory grows it’s considered a trusted source of content for this topic by search engines. This makes it easy for our real estate agent profile pages to be found.

2. We automatically insert the proper meta data on every page in our directory to help search engines index the content.

3. We have a growing syndication partner network for real estate agent reviews that helps our agent profiles and content get out there.

4. Most important As Lori collects reviews from her clients she’s automatically publishing more and more user-generated-content to her agent profile page. This is great content she didn’t have to write herself (she spent almost no time on this)! She’s collected some amazing reviews that include words like “recommend” “the best” and “top agent.” Not only is this very compelling material that will surely influence new prospects who read it, but it’s very precise content for phrases that are highly demanded by consumers, hence search engines crave it.

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The value of all this great Google positioning should be crystal clear. Lori is starting to control market share and mind share for topics like ‘top agent,’ ‘top realtor,’ ‘recommended agent,’ ‘REALTOR® reviews,’ ‘real estate agent reviews’ in her city, Sunset, Utah. If you were looking for a Sunset, Utah real estate agent to list your home, wouldn’t you wonder how Lori’s name always appears in Google’s results? When you click through and read her reviews and see her current activity, you might feel compelled to immediately put her on your short list.

Save time, sell more

I think the best thing about all this is that agents don’t need to spend a lot of money or energy on technology to get noticed anymore, and highly targeted prospects can peek into an agent’s past performance with just a few clicks. This makes for great matches. Services like ReachFactor exist for almost every topic and industry. To save time & sell more just seek out those directories, portals, or website and leverage them to grow.

Are you a real estate agent or office that’s consistently provided great service to your clients? Maybe it’s time you asked them for a review and became known as the ‘top real estate agent or office’ in your neighborhood!

To learn more about ReachFactor, please click here.

To read the original blog post by ReachFactor, please click here.

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