Use Universal Search to Rocket Your Real Estate Business to the Front Page of Search Engines

Universal search, also known as blended search, was first announced by Google way back in 2007. They said that, in addition to text-based results, Google would integrate other kinds of results including video, images, news, social networks, real-time updates (Twitter-late 2009), and more in their search results. This is an important factor in being found online that few Realtors have capitalized on. I want to tell you exactly what the implications of Universal Search are for your business and how to use it to rocket your business to the front page of search results. This means more website traffic, more buyers and sellers, and therefore, more business for you. Let’s take a look.

A Brave New World for Real Estate Online

The front page of results in search engines like Google used to contain ten web pages… period. Now they usually contain between 6 and 7 web pages. That means that it is 30-40% more difficult to get listed for a given keyword on the first page. Or is it? Those other results are things like videos and images that pertain to the keyword that was put in by the searcher. These different types of media have separate search algorithms from those of webpages, possibly making it easier for your video, image, or tweet to get indexed on the front page of the search results. So what?

Differentiate Yourself

Use social networks like YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin, and others to push your website onto the front page of the search results. You should be creating marketing videos of yourself, tweet about your business, and have a business profile on Linkedin. They allow you a much lower barrier to entry to show up on search results than a traditional web page.

Best Practices

YouTube

Tag your videos with the keywords you want to show up for in the search engines. Make sure those keywords are highly focused on what they video is about. If no one watches your video it probably won’t show up very high in search results unless it’s highly targeted. Videos with comments, annotations, and other kinds of interactions get more credit on searches.

A basic Linkedin profile will show up very high in search results. You’re leveraging the power of the site to make your profile stand out when people search. Even if you never use it… keep it up to date and link your other social network updates to update your status within Linkedin. You can do that with a service like Ping.FM.

Twitter

Factors that search engines consider when listing status updates:

Followers – The number of followers is a factor in determining the importance and relevancy of a tweet.
Frequency – How often do you update and what kind of updates are they.
ReTweets – Do people retweet your updates? Do you get very many direct messages or @replies?

These are all factors for search engines in determining the relevancy of a tweet to a search term.

Conversion is the Key

There are a few smart ways to increase the conversion of traffic into prospects and clients. You’ve got to make it compelling and easy to contact you. If you can make it personal, so much the better.

Include your contact information (there’s an obvious one)
Include your logo, picture, or website branding
Include links to your website
Now include specific la
nding pages those links go to so that specific types of visitors to be spoken to… specifically.

This means creating a page on your site that is only for YouTube visitors… start by greeting them with a VIDEO. That’s kind of what they expect right? The same thing goes for visitors of Twitter… give them 140 characters about yourself and then explain what you tweet about and why you’re a cool cat to follow… oh, by the way, here’s some other great information. Get the idea?

Speak to people as they would expect to be spoken to instead of sending them to a generic landing page and you’ll increase your website conversions from .1% to 10% or 15%… seriously.

Remember that every change has a flip side. While websites may be tougher to get ranked in the first page of search engines with Universal Search, now there are opportunities for agents with a minor web presence to play with the big boys.