Want to be known as the ‘top real estate agent’ in your neighborhood? You can.
by Alan Meadows on Dec 27, 2010
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. 95% 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.
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! Get started for free today.
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