Drive More Traffic To Your Website With Google Local Business Centre Part 1

October 20, 2009

Google is the world’s most popular search engine, enjoying about 70% market share amongst internet search engines.  Considering about 80-90% of people search for homes using the internet, it’s critical your website and listings get ranked highly in Google.  Most real estate professionals find getting this high ranking daunting: they think SEO is too expensive and time consuming.  One of Google’s new sites makes SEO easy.  It’s called the Google Local Business Centre.  It can immediately put you at the top of Google rankings for your local area with little time and effort, drawing both buyers and sellers to you.  Best of all, it’s free!  This article is a primer on how to make Google Local Business Centre work for you and get a lot more prospects finding your listings.

In Google, you can specify what types of search results you want.  Aside from normal web page searches, you can search for images or videos and all search results displayed will be pictures or video stills with links to those images or videos.

The search by Map results in Google takes searches to a higher level of precision.  Google is the only major search engine which identifies your geographic location and tailors search results based on that location.  So someone searching for “Toronto real estate” located in North York will get different results than someone doing the same search who’s located in downtown Toronto.  Google’s automated bots who read and index new web pages 24/7 try identifying businesses by their geographic location.  However, Google recognizes these bots are not nearly as accurate at extracting this information as directories created by humans such as the Yellow Pages.

So Google created the Local Business Centre so businesses can accurately register their information and geographic location with Google and get properly indexed.  So when someone does a search by Map within Google, the site recognizes the searcher’s geographic location and displays results geographically closest to the searcher based on data from the Local Business Centre.

The Local Business Centre (LBC) works much like Google Adwords pay-per-click ads.  You select specific keywords describing your business and then create short ad(s) that will appear on search results pages near the sponsored ads section at the top and far right of the page.  Then people who search for those keywords using Google will see the ads you specify to be found for those keywords.

Filed under: Marketing Tips,Realtor Websites - Best Practices,SEO For Realtor Websites

Tags: advertising, branding, classified ads, marketing, prospect, prospecting, real estate internet marketing, real estate internet marketing tips, real estate internet training, real estate search engine ranking, real estate search engine training, real estate training, Search Engine Optimization, SEO