Search your own name and you are first. Search “homes for sale in your town” and you are on page four behind Zillow, Realtor.com, Redfin and your own brokerage.
That gap is not a mistake anybody made. Those searches were lost before you started, and there are two other kinds you can win.
Why can an agent not win the listing searches?
The portals own them, and they own them with money and data you do not have.
Zillow and Realtor.com have every listing in the country, millions of pages, and enormous budgets. An individual agent with one site cannot outrank them on “homes for sale” in any market.
Your brokerage often outranks you too, using the same listing feed you use. So the search you most want is contested by four national companies and your own employer.
What can an agent win instead?
Two things, and both are things the portals do badly.
Questions about the process. What closing costs look like in your county, and how long a sale takes locally. What happens at inspection here, and what the transfer tax is where you work.
Portals write these for the whole country in one voice. You can write them for one county, with the numbers that apply there, and that beats a national page for a local reader.
The neighbourhood itself, and not the listings in it. Which schools feed which, what the commute is, what a street floods like, what the HOA does and does not cover.
Why does the neighbourhood page work?
Because somebody moving into an area reads about it for weeks before they contact anybody.
They are not searching for a house yet. They are searching whether they want to live there, and the portals have almost nothing to say about that.
An agent who has sold thirty homes on those streets has more to say than any national site. Write what you would tell a friend over coffee.
What about your Google profile?
Set it up properly, because most agents leave it half done.
An agent profile is a service area business, so no street address shows. Set your service area to the towns you work, list your services, and use photos of yourself instead of a logo.
Reviews here do heavy work. A buyer picking between three agents reads the recent ones, and one from last month beats twelve from 2022.
Does your brokerage site count as yours?
No, and this is the expensive lesson in the trade.
Every review, every page and every link on a brokerage profile belongs to the brokerage. Change firms and it is gone, and you begin again from nothing.
Own your domain. Use the brokerage site as well if you want, and do not make it the only thing with your name on it.
What about video and social?
Both are useful and neither replaces the search work.
A walkthrough video is a good way to be remembered by somebody already thinking about you. Search is how somebody who has never heard of you arrives at all.
Agents who only do social have a strong month whenever they post and a dead month whenever they stop.
Where to begin
Pick the two neighbourhoods you sell in most and write a page for each, about the place and not the listings. Then write the three process questions your clients ask you every single time.
That is five pages, it takes a month of evenings, and it is the whole foundation.
If you want somebody to build it while you sell, that is our real estate marketing work.
Want to see which searches in your area an agent can win? Book a call and we will look at them together.