Drive More Traffic To Your Listings With Google Local Business Centre Part 2

October 21, 2009

With Google Adwords, you need to be discriminating on which keywords you choose because the more popular keywords will have lots of your competitors using them, and since the highest bidder per click gets the highest positioning, it can be fairly expensive per click to get good positioning.  But the Local Business Centre is currently free and there is no limit to the number of keyword searches you can be found under.  So you definitely want to brainstorm on what keywords to use.  

But first, you should research what the most popular keyword searches are for real estate in your local area.  You can use the Google Adwords tracking tool for this.  This tool tells you how many searches were made for specific keywords and keyword phrases in the past month.  You’ll find the most popular searches for real estate are very generic phrases.  For instance, for Toronto phrases such as these are popular:

“Toronto real estate”
“Toronto homes”
“Toronto condos”
“Toronto properties”

However, you’ll probably soon find competitors under these types of keyword phrases with the LBC, so think about keywords more pertinent to your farm area.  For instance, Toronto real estate professionals would want to be found for neighborhoods searches or even streets.

A great way of boosting your page rankings within the normal Web search results in Google is by adding other media to your LBC ads.  That way, your ads can get indexed in Google under image or video searches so that people searching by those means can also see your ads.  Google gives lots of SEO ‘brownie points’ to ads with multi-media, especially videos hosted on YouTube, as Google owns YouTube and wants to promote YouTube videos in their search results as much as possible anyway.

Even if you don’t have any listings currently, you can should still have pictures and videos in your LBC ads.  Use a picture of your office or yourself, and do a video tour of your office or your local neighborhood.  Make some of your LBCs ad about you.

If you have listings, you’ll want to take a different approach with your LBC ads.  Make your LBCs ad all about your listings.  When you state the geographic location, make it the property’s location, not your brokerage.  Include pictures and video/virtual tours with your LBC ad as well.

You should also have squeeze pages for the geographic areas you sell real estate in and want to find prospects in, regardless of whether you have any current listings or not.  Squeeze pages are pages whose sole purpose is getting visitors to give their email address in exchange for something you offer them.  In the page, tell the visitor they can receive updates on the local real estate market (new listings, sold listings, market analysis) if they provide their email address.  So make as many different squeeze pages and LBC ads for as many geographic areas as you want to be known for.  This will do wonders for growing your prospect database.

Learn more about effective advertising strategies on the web by taking my course Building Your Ecommerce Business.  This course has been approved by the Registrar, REBBA 2002 for 6 continuing education credits.

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