Using Google Local to Leapfrog Past your Real Estate Competition

If you’re a small brokerage, team or individual real estate agent, coming up with a search engine marketing budget (or the know how) to compete with some of the larger players in your niche market is challenging. Luckily for you, there are local listings.

Very often you will see local listings appearing above organic search results, like in this Google search for Los Angeles Realtors. As you’ll notice with this set of “local business results”, there are several strange listings in here including Citadel Outlets (my wife loves shopping here), Crossroads of the World, Bradbury Building, Los Angeles Center Studios, and Essex—none of them being Realtors or even brokerages in the business of selling real estate.

So what I see here is a huge opportunity for multiple agents to leapfrog such powerhouses in these search results as:

• Realtor.com
• Trulia.com
• Losangeles.com
• TheMLS.com
• LAtimes.com

As Matthew Paul has done (sorry Matthew for blowing up your advertising advantage). If you take a look at Matthew’s actual website, you’ll see it’s a PageRank 1 and has little chance of ranking well against the lofty competition in his area. But not only is he getting traffic from this local listing when people search in Google, Matthew’s also getting all that map based search traffic from iPhones and other mobile devices.

Google, Yahoo and Bing require an local address to appear in local business listings, and this is something that you have that larger players like Trulia and Zillow don’t.

Once you’ve signed up for your listings, learn more about local search ranking factors and push yourself to the top of the results.