How, and Why, to Prove Your Experience to AI, LLMs, and Search Engines
Having a well-rounded, effective search strategy that gets results is never done. To see continued results, you must continually review, change, and adapt your strategy, especially right now – in the ever-evolving world of search engine optimization and AI visibility, it seems like the goalposts are constantly moving.
That means it’s no longer enough to simply plan for traditional search results using a handful of keywords and keyphrases (although, you absolutely still should do that).
To truly future-proof your real estate search strategy, you must continually work to be found in the places where people are looking for answers today, whether that’s in traditional search results, AI search results, or LLM answers (like ChatGPT and Google Gemini).
And at the heart of any good, successful, results-driven search strategy is a solid understanding, and demonstration of, EEAT.
So what is EEAT?
EEAT stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust, and while all of those pillars are important, the first E is critical when it comes to building a search strategy that shows you as being a trusted, knowledgable real estate agent that’s worth reaching out to for help with someone’s next home sale or purchase.
Experience is what separates a professional, established, niche-focused agent from an agent without any direction. It’s the proof that you’ve been-there-and-done-that, and it’s one of the primary signals that tells AI and LLMs (and human leads alike) that you’re the right choice to be recommended for their next transaction.
★ Want to learn more about building AI visibility? Have a look at these posts:
- How Unlinked Brand Mentions Help Your AI Visibility Strategy
- Why You Can’t Build an AI Visibility Strategy Without a Website
- Creating an AI Visibility Strategy for Your Real Estate Brand
- Pivoting Your Website Content Strategy to See More Success in AI Search Results
Proving Your Experience Online
Before Google’s helpful content update, which is when the E for Experience was added to EEAT, search engines primarily focused on the second E: Expertise, but for search engines to truly show the best results in search, that wasn’t enough because while expertise is about what you know, experience is how you know it, which is much more important.
Want to prove your experience to search engines, AIs, and LLMs (and your target audience)? There are a few ways to do that:
1. Leverage Your Own, Personal Website
When it comes to demonstrating your experience, having a well-built, well-defined, well-targeted personal website is one of the most important marketing tools an agent has for proving their experience – both to their target audience and to LLMs alike.
That’s because your website is the only place online where you have complete and total control over how you, your brand, and your business’s experience is represented; and it’s also the primary place that LLMs source the information about you, your brand, and how experienced you are.
Without a modern website that clearly outlines your experience, you aren’t creating a large enough footprint for LLMs to find you and learn about who you are, what you do, and how long you’ve been doing it for.
★ Want to learn more about this? Have a look at this post called: Why You Can’t Build an AI Visibility Strategy Without a Website.
2. Build Your Content Strategy Around Topic Ownership
If you want LLMs to know that you have a strong background and a lot of experience in a particular location or transactional situation, you have to prove it.
And one of the ways to do that is through topic ownership.
Topic ownership is where you purposely position content strategy to show you as the expert and online authority for a specific topic by producing a large amount of strategic content about that specific topic and consistently showing up in a wide amount of search results (rather than focusing on showing up for a few specific keywords or keyphrases) .
And ideally, your topic ownership strategy should be built around the topics and situations that you provide the most value in. For example, you could produce a large series of strategic content about:
- Everything senior citizens need to know when they’re thinking about or are ready to downsize,
- Everything first-time homebuyers need to know about buying their first home,
- Everything a young, growing family needs to know when they’re ready to upsize their home,
- and anything other situation you have a lot of experience in.
Topic ownership helps you dominate a specific topic so LLMs know who you are, who you’ve helped, and who you should be recommended to.
★ Want to learn more about this? Have a look at this post called: Switching Your SEO Strategy from Keyword Matching to Topic Ownership to Get Better Leads.
3. Build Off-Page Brand Mentions
Beyond your own personal website, proving your experience to LLMs also has a lot to do with how other people, brands, and businesses view (and cite) your experience.
That’s where off-page brand mentions come in.
Off-page brand mentions are are when an authoritative website (other than your own), news source, blog or other online source mentions you, your brand, or your business, and specifically calls out your experience in a particular situation or location.
Much like traditional search results, LLMs are simply looking to provide the best possible answer to what they’re being asked, and to do that, they’re looking for sincere, true, authoritative signals of your brand’s online reputation.
Essentially, the more that authoritative online sources mention you, your brand, and your experience, the more that LLMs will also mention and recommend you.
★ Want to learn more about this? Have a look at this post called: How Unlinked Brand Mentions Help Your AI Visibility Strategy.
Showing Experience and Building Trust Go Hand-in-Hand
At the end of the day, proving your experience to LLMs and AI models is key when it comes to building trust with LLMs and AI models – and getting recommended by them.
And while showing and demonstrating EEAT is one of the most effective ways to do that, the first E is the most critical to focus on as part of a modern, results-driven search strategy.
Want to integrate AI into your long-term marketing strategy? Download our Artificial Intelligence in Marketing Planning Guide for Real Estate Agents. It has key insights into how you can plan for using AI in your marketing strategy to better set you and your business up for long-term digital success.
