Optimizing Real Estate Agents

[joegrape]

Does anyone have advice or links to resources that cover the specific issues for real estate agents and local seo? I’m trying to get a handle on what, if anything, is unique to real estate agents when doing local seo for them.

Thanks in advance!
Richard

 

[JoyHawkins]

@Colan Nielsen is currently working on a series that is going to be covering this. I think it's going to publish in a couple of months. I'll try and post back here when it is.

 

[joegrape]

Thanks Joy. Definitely interested reading that series.

In particular, I'm curious if a real estate agent who has a practitioner profile could ever outrank the profile of his or her's brokerage, assuming the realtor has a separate website.

Richard

 

[JoyHawkins]

In particular, I'm curious if a real estate agent who has a practitioner profile could ever outrank the profile of his or her's brokerage, assuming the realtor has a separate website.

Yes, defitinely. We see this all the time in realtor audits we do. In one case I looked at, there were over 90 realtor listings at the same address for a large brokerage. The majority of the agents were getting filtered and there were only about 2-3 of the 90 that were ranking anywhere.

 

[joegrape]

Interesting. I would have assumed that Google sees the agent's profiles as subordinate to the brokerage's profile. But that is clearly the wrong way to think about it. A better analogy is to think if it in terms of a website - the brokerage's profile is like the main page and the individual agents profiles are like subpages. And subpages outranking the main page is the norm in the web world.

Incidentally, I also posted this question to Dani Owens of Bring Home the Bacon (not affiliated, just a happy customer) and she pointed me towards this helpful article, which you actually wrote:

How-to Handle Practitioner Listings in GMB and Your Citations

What is the ideal situation for creating a GMB listing and citations for a practitioner based business? Learn how to optimize practitioner listings and how to avoid competing with your main practice.

whitespark.ca

One thing I got from the article (and I hope I interpreted this correctly) is that the key to this all is who actually has direct control over the realtor's profile. If the brokerage set everything up for its agents, then while it cannot delete the profile if an agent leaves, it can still minimize the profile's future effects.

Conversely, if the realtor is in control of the GMB profile then everything is really golden. He or she has a chance to outrank the brokerage through optimization and gets to take all the Google juice generated if he or she ever leaves.

One issue that would be good to tackle in your series, if you haven't thought if it yet, is what do you do if you are the real estate agent in this dynamic. I could see how brokerages might verify all their agents' profiles in an attempt to keep some control over them.

Richard

 

[JoyHawkins]

One thing I got from the article (and I hope I interpreted this correctly) is that the key to this all is who actually has direct control over the realtor's profile. If the brokerage set everything up for its agents, then while it cannot delete the profile if an agent leaves, it can still minimize the profile's future effects.

So this has changed actually. In most cases now you can actually get the profile deleted if you are the one that controls it. You would need to delete it from the GMB dashboard and if that doesn't delete the listing you can contact GMB support and they should be able to remove it.

 

[mattstephenskc]

I've encountered this issue with the multi-office law firm whose digital presence I manage. The firm has recruited/merged with solo attorneys and tiny (like, 2 attorney) firms, and I've had to figure out what to do about the old GBP profiles. For ones that were never associated with our firm, I simply gained access to the old account from the attorney and closed it down. Others had been associated with our firm but at an old office address, and still others had what you've described here as practitioner listings. I deactivated all of them. None of the attorneys wanted to manage their profiles independently. Was there a better way to go about this?

 

[JoyHawkins]

The only thing I might have done differently is if it's an attorney that currently works there but the address is old, if you mark it as permanently closed, it might make their existing clients think they're no longer there because they search on Google and get a closed listing. I would have updated the address and left the listing live.