The “Google Effect” on the Real Estate Agent, (part 1)

Years ago life was very different for real estate agents, listing agents would put a sign in the yard, list the property in the MLS book!, take out a few print ads, talk to some of their peers and eventually your clients house would sell. Buyers agent would interview a prospective home buyer to discover exactly what they were looking for in a home, pour over the available listings and information, mostly available to agents not consumers, pick 7-10 homes and make an appointment to take the prospect out to view these homes, ultimately ending in an offer if all went well. Agents promoted themselves through word of mouth, the yellow pages, print ads with their listings, flyers and post cards in their "farm" neighborhoods, and other low or no-tech advertising vehicles. Today however, times have seriously changed for both the real estate agent and the consumer as, according the NAR, 80% of home buyers are using the internet to find a home.

As I think about how my own behavior has changed because of the internet and broadband connections, I notice things like; I no longer use the yellow pages, EVER, I no longer call 411 for a missing phone number, I pay far less attention to ads because I know that when I am looking for a product or service in my area, all I have to do is Google my request and a qualifying response will come up in seconds, I no longer ask for directions as now I simply map quest everything, I communicate with a lot more people that I might not otherwise because of the ease and speed of email, and on and on and on... No doubt about it, we live in a different world today. So the question for real estate agents is "how am I going to adapt to these changes in order to continue to grow my real estate business and not become a dinosaur?" And one of the most relevant answers to this question lies in search engines.

What conversation about search engines would be complete if we didn't talk about Google? Sure there are other search engines and it IS important to have a strategy to be found in those as well (yahoo, msn, ask, etc.) but the bottom line is that most of the buzz about search and finding what you want leads back to Google. So the trick for a real estate agent or any one else trying to grow their business on the net is getting indexed and found on Google. And all wise discussions about search engine marketing must begin with the topic of keyword research. This is the art and science of determining what people are already typing into the search engines and how these searches relate to you, your company, and your industry. Search engine marketing is then finding ways to make us and our site come up first for those queries. Notice I included the word US.

More and more people are remembering our names but for getting our contact info or loosing our business cards (how many business cards do you have sitting on your desk or in a draw right now that you are planning to organize some day) So what does a person do when they remember the name of their realtor from 5 yeas ago but have thrown away their business card (and that clever post card that you send them every month.) It's simple, they Google your name!

In today's world, if a person thinks they are in business for themselves, realtor, cpa, lawyer, mortgage, mechanics, etc. and they don't come up in a search for their own name on Google, they got a problem. As the founder of Agentopolis, a database/directory to over 1.3 million real estate agents, I can tell you, from pouring over reams of analytical data about how people find real estate agents on Agentopolis, that there is a growing trend of consumers typing in the name of their past agent, or an agent whose name was given to them by their friend, into Google as a search phrase.

Check it out, you'll be surprised by which pages you show up on and which pages you don't. Notice also that the search results for your name are different across the different search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc) This is why it is critically important for real estate agents to make sure their name and their property listings appear on a number of different real estate web sites. If you want to be found on the first page of the biggest search engines more often then not, you must be on many different sites and places where you can be found.

And before you stop me and tell me that you already come up first on Google by your name, understand this, the algorithms the search engines use to determine who ranks where in the search results can and will change without warning. Company after company who was dependent on a first page listing on one search engine for the bulk their business has seen their fortunes change as a result of a slight change in a search engines algorithm which resulted in them now appearing on the 7th page of the search results. Don't let this happen to you. Make sure your name, listings and contact info are on as many sites as possible and be glad that many of these sites like Activerain and Agentopolis are free.

Blogging in-and-of-itself is not that great of an activity unless you simply love to write. Google has changed all that. In part two we will look at how Google has made blogging so important to real estate agents.