Before 2006, when you were looking in Google for information related to real estate and a specific area, the results pages were dominated by individual real estate websites, and the occasional brokerage website. The past 4 years have completely changed the landscape of internet marketing for individual agents, pitting the truly small business operators in a desperate spot, made even more difficult against the backdrop of a recession and real estate market meltdown.
What Changed?: Search Results
There have been several evolving changes that have slowly eroded the dominance of individual Realtors. The first is a change that came from Google itself, and that’s the rise of Universal Search Results. Based on the type of question you type, instead of just web results, you’ll get a mix of Google Places, Images, Videos, and News articles that match what Google actually thinks you’re trying to locate. Bing and Yahoo have similar changes made to their results as well. The biggest impact is the role of Google Places, and the map result that now makes up searches like [Riverside Realtor], or[ Riverside Real Estate Agent]. This means that for an entire segment of search you must be able to compete as an actual physical location or as being relevant to a specific location. This is completely contrary to most Realtors wishes, who often don’t even put their office address for fear of being “pigeon holed” to that location. The problem being that they so avoid this to the point of now losing out to brokerages who are unafraid of competing locally.
What Changed?: The Competition
Now going back to 2006, there were sites like Realtor.com and Homes.com, but they didn’t have as much clout. Now Trulia, Zillow and Yahoo Real estate have joined the fray and between all them they are drawing out millions of clicks through the search engines. While a number of those are for searches of specific properties, a good percentage of that traffic is people who would have been clicking and accessing IDX (property ) searching through a specific Realtor’s website.
How Should Real Estate Agent Websites Adapt?
Real estate websites for individual realtors need to understand the change in the game, and embrace these changes. They need add themselves to Google Places, as individual agents at their brokerage. I encourage checking with the broker on advertising rules, but you should use your office address(ask if you can have a suite or office number), but NOT your office Phone number in your listing, use your own unique number to avoid a painful process of merging that can happen if all your business info matches another listing. Then you need to take the time to enter yourself as a business at the same places Google/Yahoo/Bing go to verify a local business: local search and yellowpage websites. Yelp, Yellowpages, Local.com etc.
Next these sites need to embrace your local advantage, national based sites may have more “authority” that helps them rank for those searches, but they cannot compete with actual local pictures, or locally focused video! The reality is that reputation and area of service are the 2 key differentiators in Real Estate, so if you’re trying to rank for Riverside Real Estate thenyou need to be locally specific with your content and also show you’re a trusted resource!
