As a real estate agent, you’re probably concerned about your image and the way people see you, your brand, and your business (or at least, you should be).
After all, the way people see you, and the impression they have of you, will determine whether they reach out to you or not when they’re ready to buy or sell a home.
In the past, it was relatively simple to control this because there weren’t too many moving parts to manage.
A person either saw your print marketing or they were told about you, and it ended there. There weren’t a lot of other ways to learn more about you or to initially find out you exist.
But of course, that has drastically changed.
Nowadays, the first place a person will go to learn more about a real estate agent, or to discover one in the first place, is online.
How you appear online isn’t something that should be an afterthought; to be successful as a real estate agent, how you appear online deeply matters and can play a major role in whether you’ll be successful or not.
How you appear online, and the strategy you have in place to control it, is called: your online presence.
As an agent, if you don’t think about or care about your online presence at all, and you’re still successful right now, you won’t be in the future. Period.
Online presence is the future of real estate marketing; and so, building an online presence strategy is setting yourself up for success right now, and in the future. It’s an absolute must for a modern real estate agent.
There are 2 core components that make up a modern online presence strategy:
- Your Appearance Strategy: Understanding that people will research you online.
- Your Discovery Strategy: Understanding that people will discover you online.
And to be successful as a real estate agent now and into the future, you need to have both of those components thoroughly covered. Here’s what you need to put in place to cover both:
1. Your Appearance Strategy
To gauge the current appearance of your online presence strategy: do a Google search for yourself or your team, and have a look at the search results. Do they:
- Inspire trust?
- Show expertise?
- Display authority?
Basically, if you were looking for a real estate agent, and you Googled yourself, would you choose to work with you?
How you appear online to someone researching you is the appearance component of your online presence strategy.
Build an Appearance Strategy:
The main thing you’re trying to do as part of your appearance strategy is build trust with the people that are researching you, and a lot of that initially will be based on the experiences others have had working with you in the form of online reviews.
Your online review strategy is extremely important. Nowadays, you probably wouldn’t buy a new TV, check out a new restaurant, or stay at a hotel without at least checking out some reviews first; and choosing a real estate agent is no different.
What your online reviews say about you determines if someone will contact you when they’re looking for a real estate agent. If you don’t have plenty of strong, positive online reviews in place as part of your online presence strategy, you’re probably losing business, right now, without you even knowing it, when someone researches you prior to contacting you (which they absolutely will).
★ Want to learn a bit more about appearance strategy topics? Have a look at these posts:
- How Your Real Estate Referral Business is Tied to Your Online Presence.
- The Steps to Building a Trustworthy Personal Real Estate Brand
- Why Every Agent Needs an Online Review Strategy
When someone looks for you, one of the main places they’re going to check, after your online reviews, is your personal website.
Your website is a direct indicator of how you market you, yourself, and your business. You can’t always control all of the aspects of what someone sees when they research you, but the one place you can completely control it is your personal website, so it needs to be really good and reflective of the image you want to project.
To have a successful online presence strategy, it’s imperative that you have a personal website for your real estate business that showcases what you do, how you do it, in the way you want to present it.
If what someone finds online when they’re researching you, either in your online reviews, your website, or somewhere else, doesn’t resonate with them, they’ll simply move on to the next real estate agent they know about to begin researching them. After all, they have plenty of options to choose from, so your online presence strategy has to provide an image that makes them trust you, connect with you, and ultimately, want to work with you.
2. Your Discovery Strategy
To gauge the current discovery of your online presence strategy: do a Google search for search terms relevant to your business, your demographic, or the type of transactions you want to do, and have a look at the search results. Do you:
- Show up in the search results?
- Have an active strategy in place to show up?
- And if you do show up, do you like the way you and your business are projected?
Basically, if you were looking for a real estate agent, and you searched these terms, would you find you and choose to work with you?
How discoverable you are online to someone looking for an agent, or any related real estate term, is the discovery component of your online presence strategy.
Build a Discovery Strategy:
As part of your discovery strategy, there are a lot of different ways someone could initially find out about you online (like through social media, online advertising, etc), but one of the most powerful is through an organic Google search.
Your organic search strategy is extremely important. Nowadays, everyone turns to Google as the first place they go to look for something, or someone, to help them with a problem they’re having or to get a question answered.
The more opportunity you have to display in those search results, for the right audience, at the right time, to help them answer that question, the more opportunity you have to build authority, connect with them, and eventually, have them reach out to you.
If someone can’t find you online for any related searches, especially for easy ones like your name, team name, or business name, it’s basically like you don’t exist.
★ Want to learn a bit more about discovery strategy topics? Have a look at these posts:
- Optimizing Your Content for Humans (And Not Just for Search Engines)
- Writing Content for SEO as a Real Estate Agent
- Building a Well-Rounded SEO Search Strategy for Your Real Estate Website
- What To Do If You Have a Real Estate Lead Generation Problem
You Control Your Online Presence
When it comes to choosing a real estate agent, people have a lot of options about who to work with. By controlling your online presence strategy, you can put the foundation in place to make sure that they chose you, every time.
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