There's a fact that is worth considering: 80% of home buyers search online while researching for a real estate and that more than 95% of them are looking for local property agents. There's been a multifold increase in Google searches in past 5 years pertaining to this sector. In other words, you can't afford not to be visible locally as these are your real consumers thus, making it imperative to take advantage of powerful Google Places. Today businesses spend tremendous amount of resources in terms of time and dollars to gain marketing advancement on real estate website design, paid search and organic search strategies while, overlooking and often underestimating Google Places.
Google Places was launched in 2009 as a free online yellow pages to facilitate businesses to create online office addresses in their native places of operation to be found on Google Maps. Using Google Places, businesses in a particular area will be ranked to appear in search results if the user is in the same general area searches for specific keywords. If a business has registered on Places with their relevant information, it will appear as a pointer when a relevant search query is entered in Google Maps.
Following are the ways to use Google Places for your real estate business:
Listing your Real Estate business: The initial step is to create your listing and presence on Google Places. This is fairly simple: Log on to Google Places with your Google account, submit pertinent information about your real estate business, facilitate the required documents to verify your business identity (like website, business card etc.), and then Google will take some time to review and approve your listing.
Optimization of your listing: Content that you write while listing your business is an important aspect and must be dealt strategically. You have to make sure that you make it relevant and use appropriate keywords. This effort will come handy to improvise on the organic search rankings for your real estate business.
Business Images: Images are very important aspect of a business listing as it adds to the business credibility, help business target right audience, gain interest of online browsers and make listing relevant. Therefore, wisely choose your business images with plenty of photographs and videos, describing your real estate business.
Reviews Matter: As you are aware that positive customer experience and reviews is the best thing that can happen to any business and such experience can't be generated only from your real estate website design. Clients usually build an opinion about a business online and hence customer reviews are a great way to promote your business. Your Google Places listing allows for your customers to write and post reviews to your space therefore, use this wisely to create a healthy environment for your real estate business.
Small Things Matter: While setting up your listing, fill out the each minute detail including company phone number, business categories, hours of operation etc. Therefore, 100% completed profile gives you added advantage and goes a long way to complement your overall marketing campaign.
