Help Google Find You and Your Listings

In our webinar, Need More Exposure?, we highlighted how we can help you maximize your brand and listing exposure to garner more leads and close more deals.

The good news is that there are several simple things that you can do to start this process and give yourself an advantage. The key concept is that you want to create as much content as possible for search engines to index. 

 

What Can You Do to Convince Google You Are the Real Deal? 

Search engines love content, especially content that identifies you as an expert that is authoritative and trustworthy.

The first step you should take is to fully develop your QuantumListing profile. It does not take long, but it is important. Next time you log in to your QuantumLIsting account, check for the following and edit your profile if you need to improve it:

-First look at your name. Did you spell it correctly? Did you use capital letters at the start of your first and last name?

-Have you added a profile picture and/or a company logo? You don’t need a professional headshot, but make sure the picture is well lit and not blurry.

-Have you added your bio? You can copy and paste what is on your company profile, or write something new about yourself, including any professional designations you’ve earned.

-Have you added a link to your company’s website? You can link to the website’s landing page or your bio page on the website.

-Have you added links to your professional social media accounts, especially, LinkedIn. Why LinkedIn? It’s the largest network of commercial real estate professionals and your target market is likely to be represented there as well.

-Now, take a look at your profile from the perspective of a potential customer or client. Does the information you have provided, including the images, convey the message that you are the professional that will help the deal cross the finish line?

-Next, check the links to make sure they work. Search engines do not like broken links and neither do your customers. You don’t want to frustrate a potential client or customer who wants to learn more about you.

 

Not Only Is It Nice to Share, It’s Smart

After you have crafted the best profile possible, share it to your professional social media accounts. Underneath your name, you’ll see the sharing icon. It is three dots connected by two lines, so it looks like a megaphone or an incomplete triangle. Once you click on the sharing icon, click on the LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook button. It will open up a post with a link to your profile. Complete it with some great text and post it. 

You never know who will see your profile on your social media and when, so consider putting a reminder on your calendar to repost it every 2 to 4 weeks. Furthermore, sharing your profile and listings on social media creates backlinks to you, giving you more search authority and will likely improve your ranking in search results.

 

Look at Your Listings from a Customer’s Point of View

Once you’ve finished with your profile, if you have already added listings, take a critical look at them. Start with the title you’ve given your listing. You have sixty characters to convince someone to click. If you are going to use our marketing center to advertise your listing on the Google Display Network, Google only displays 30 characters. Make them count! 

After you are satisfied with your title, look at the pictures you’ve added. The first image is the featured image. That is the one that shows up on the listing card and is the default picture a visitor will see when they click through to the listing detail page. Make sure it is well lit, in focus, and tells the visual story of what your listing is about. 

Look at all of the additional photos. You want them to be well lit and in focus too, and to give the details of your listing. For our members that are syndicating listings from Buildout to QuantumListing, make it a habit to check that your images are arriving with the rest of the listing information. 

If they are not, go to Buildout and go through the listings that do not have their pictures syndicating and check the box to indicate that you have the rights to them and want to syndicate them. Remember, if the photos are not showing on QuantumListing, they are not likely not showing on any other sites to which you are syndicating your listing.

 

How to Put Your Listing to Work Finding Customers

The featured image is also the one that shows up on your Google Display ad. For each $25 you spend, more than 20,000 people in your market will see that image served with your ad on the websites they are already surfing. By some estimates, Google Display Network ads show on more than 90% of websites that have ads, so it is a very effective way to get your listing in front of your potential customers. With the Google Display Network ads, your listing finds the customer instead of your customer finding the listing. 

Having a great featured picture is just as important as having a great title to get someone to click on your ad.

 

Don’t Just Take Our Word for It

Our customers that try our Google Display Network feature use it again and again because it works. Here’s what broker and marketing professional Bekah Carlson of Carlson Integrated has to say about it.

“While there has been a proliferation of listing sites over the last few years, I am personally partial to a company called QuantumListing. In addition to absolutely loving their leadership and their platform, they have a Google Ad Integration that is staggering. It’s literally a couple of clicks, crazy easy. And you can start an ad campaign for a property. 

I ran two of these last week and I could not believe the results. I did one for my property in Geneva and I spent the 25 bucks (just base rate), and it came in at like 36,000 views on Google and 17 click throughs. So people use that to get to the site and learn about the property. And I actually had a showing yesterday from this. That is the only way they could’ve found me. 

It was a residential broker out in Geneva. There’s no way they could have found me otherwise. I was very excited and I’ve done the Google ads before and they are incredibly complex. Even as a marketer, I can’t stand them. The fact that you’ve already set all of this up is like the best thing in the whole wide world. So, this is genius, thank you!

I’ve never had that much exposure from an ad. And I didn’t have to learn Google ads in order to do it.”

 

Make Your Description Work for You

Once you have checked on your listing images, review your listing descriptions. You can write sentences and paragraphs or bullet points or a combination of the two. Whatever you do, make the first sentence or bullet point in your description grab a visitor’s attention. Hardly anyone reads the descriptions of a whale’s anatomy in Moby Dick, but everyone knows that first memorable line, “Call me Ishmael.”

Take the time to point out the most significant characteristics of the property. Remember that search engines love content, and your written words count as content.

QuantumListing only requires a handful of inputs before you post your listing, but the description and additional parameters section give you an opportunity to make your listing more robust to search engines and more importantly, to your listings’ visitors.

 

I Know This Is Important, But I Don’t Have the Time. Please Help Me.

If you are a solo practitioner or in a small boutique firm that does not have dedicated marketing staff, you may understand the importance of having a complete profile and listings, but feel you don’t have time to deal with it. We can help you out with our White Glove service. Here’s what our member, Justine Snyder of Fine Properties in Shrewsbury, MA has to say about it:

“Quantum's White Glove service is just what I need to assist running my small boutique commercial brokerage in Massachusetts. For just a fraction above the yearly membership, all I have to do is send over my new listing and Quantum's staff will upload all the photos and information for me. 

I can't tell you how much time it saves me and the relief I get from knowing that it is all ‘taken care of,’ so that I can go out and get new business, which is a far better use of my time.  Quantum's customer care is an integral part of helping my Commercial business run smoothly.“

 

Together We Can Do So Much

All in all, we want to help your listings be seen in as many places as possible. While this starts on our site, it does not stop there. We also want to increase your exposure on Google. Not only that, but we want to ensure that this content looks the best that it can.