Many homeowners still go to Google first, when they’re ready for their perfect home to be listed on the market, when they’re going to start looking at real estate agents and begin to negotiate a sale price.

The fact that so many homeowners use Google each month to look for agents in the area can mean thousands if not millions of homeowners depending on your location.

In a number of studies, it has been shown that the Google search results that appear within the first three organic results receive 75% of all the clicks possible when someone performs a search.

Even though the ads appear at the top of the screen when a Google search is conducted, the organic search results that appear underneath may actually perform better than the ads at the top.

A high ranking in Google search results for phrases such as “real estate agents your suburb>” can mean a steady flow of leads for your real estate business, as ‘ready to sell’ vendors choose top-ranking websites.

In contrast, ranking poorly means homeowners are going to your competitors or to third-party lead generator sites that sell you those leads.

Although you should have your web developer apply some technical elements to your website, there are steps you can take without paying thousands for SEO consultants to do it for you.

Give your website a greater chance of ranking in Google by remembering these tips;

Get reviews (and respond)

There have been numerous findings about how important it is to collect Google reviews over any other review platform if you want your reviews to be seen by as many people as possible.

Reviews are widely known to play a crucial role in the decision-making process of a consumer, as well as nurturing trust in the company, but they also play an important role in local search engine optimization as well.

Basically, your ranking on Google is influenced by the number of reviews you have on your website.

With the addition of fresh new reviews (together with your response) you are ticking a number of boxes for Google, providing it with both fresh content as well as crowdsourced opinions regarding your business’s trustworthiness, prominence, and credibility.

While it has not yet been conclusively proven that responding to reviews has any impact on your Google rankings, it does play a very important role in establishing your brand as one that cares about its customers.

You should publicly thank someone if they have taken the time out of their day to leave you a review.

It is also important to add a name and title to your reply instead of simply writing “From the Marketing Team”.

Your replies show that you care about your customers when they “Google” your name and read your reviews (which they will do!). Adding a name to your brand also adds an element of humanism to it.

Add your services to Google My Business

Let’s assume you have a Google My Business profile. You should if you don’t!

Go to the ‘Info’ section of your Google My Business profile. Include all suburbs you serve.

In order to cover a larger area, we recommend expanding the existing suburbs to cover a larger area. You are limited to 20 suburbs, so we recommend expanding the existing suburbs to cover more areas if needed.

By specifying these areas, your Google My Business listing can be more accurate and more likely to rank for potential clients farther away from the physical address of your business, while still being covered in the general business zone of Google Maps and the local search results of Google.

It allows you to tell Google that, even though you are not located in a searched location, you are able to serve the local search area within the radius or proximity your povided, making you visible to that potential client as part of your Google My Business listing.

Website suburb profiles

There is nothing that Google loves more than fresh, hyper-local content. Those businesses who publish this content on their websites will be rewarded with improved rankings as a result of this.

A regularly updated suburb profile on your real estate website, along with adding your service areas to Google My Business, serves as a signal to Google that you are a real estate expert in the specific suburbs in which you work.

Google bots are crawling your website and storing everything it can find on your website on its servers as it crawls it. It is important to note that suburb profiles can have a significant impact on your Google rankings in every suburb you serve if they are done correctly and when people are searching for “real estate agents in your suburb <insert_your_suburb_here>”.

The suburb profile, however, is not the same for all suburbs.

It isn’t enough to post just a short blurb about the area, a video and some photographs – especially in metropolitan areas of Australia where there are multiple agencies that service the suburbs in question.

You should write more detailed suburb profiles for each of your suburbs that provide multiple references to the area, your business, your listings, and property details about each suburb.

To ensure the data is relevant and up-to-date, these pages must be updated on a regular basis to ensure the data is up-to-date.

Your web developers will probably need to assist you in some of the more technical aspects of setting up your suburb profiles – just to get them up and running first; including your listings, title tags, meta titles, meta descriptions and keywords.

In addition, if you are looking to integrate with a third-party data provider in the manner shown in the example above, your developer will need to be familiar with how to integrate APIs into the site that you are building.

Conclusion

The importance of ranking highly on Google has never been greater, and as a realtor in a particular area of the country, you can easily win the game by ranking high on Google for terms with “real estate agents in your region” against those leading portals and large third-party websites about real estate in your area.

There is no doubt that the sooner you start optimising your Google rankings, the sooner you will start receiving leads – and these leads will continue to come.