If you’re a real estate agent, local search engine optimization is an important part of the future of your local real estate business. Getting consistent reviews and citations are some of the best ways to ensure you reach the top of local search results. Citations are when someone mentions your company name and address on other web pages, even if there is no link to your website. Reviews are when someone posts a comment about you or your business in different places on the web. In this article, I’ll give you a couple of key ideas to use when getting citations and reviews.
Local websites and blogs
All you have to do to get a quote or a link from these local websites or blogs is to do a search using the name of your city and the word blog or website. The blogs or sites that appear are indexed as blogs/websites found in your area. So when you get a link or a quote from them, you’re telling Google and the other search engines that you’re a trusted source of information in your city.
Local search engines and data providers
Different local search engines often reference each other to correct and conform business information. The reason why it is important to register your business on so many different local search engines like Google Places, Bing, Yahoo business is because the more the search engines can validate that you are, the more trust they will have in you. The more trustworthy your business is, the more likely it is to rank at the top of local search engines.
Make it easy for your customer to give you a review
Most of your customers will have smartphones. What this means for you is that when you are driving with them in your car on the way to showing a house, you can ask them to leave a positive review for you.
If they don’t have a smartphone, get out the laptop. A great place to do this is at the closing table. As long as your customers have had a great experience, chances are they will leave you a great review.
It’s okay to get multiple reviews. If you spend a lot of time with a client, it’s okay to get multiple reviews on different sites like Google Places, Yelp, etc. I like to think of it as a way that they can help me a little more, since I’m helping them a little more.
