Introduction to Google

Don’t be fooled into thinking Rightmove is the be all and end all when it comes to marketing your business. Yes it’s important, but it’s only part of the jigsaw. Given people sell their house only once every few years, the typical vendor doesn’t go straight to Rightmove: Google is often the first port of call, which can lead them directly to you.

The job of the search engine is to read and understand every single web page available, then when someone runs a search, the search engine has to do two things: firstly, it has to scour its massive index of web pages to identify pages that are relevant to the user’s search; and secondly, it has to rank them in order of usefulness.   Given there are many billions of web pages, and even in the UK there are many thousands of estate agency and property websites, this is a monumental task!

Some searchers may look for your agency specifically, which makes the job easier for the search engine; but if they don’t, you need to try to ensure that your agency appears high in the listings on Google if you’re going to raise your profile. The search engines use complex algorithms to decide which sites appear in search results, and how they are ranked, though in many ways they are trying to think like an intelligent person: when asked a specific question, they want to send the searcher to the most appropriate and highest quality website available.

You don’t have to be a large agency with a big marketing budget to secure a good position on Google, but you do need to engage in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). This is the process of ensuring Google can find, read and rank your website, so it can decide whether to list your site in the results when someone runs a relevant search. We have a basic guide to SEO and many more in depth articles, to help you work on improving your rankings, and these will explain why you require some of these basic foundations:

• A well structured website on a sound technical platform, that Google can read and understand

• A fast-loading website – speed matters to SEO

• Great content that portrays your personality, including information about your branches, the staff in them and useful local information

• Your social media activity integrated into your website

• Plenty of links from relevant websites

• And the easiest tip in the book is just to sort out your Google+ page, and your Google reviews.

As well as reading our guides on how to improve your SEO, please contact us if you’d like to discuss how this can help your agency to win more business.