How to lose clients without knowing it – part 1

Have you Googled yourself recently? 

Do you check out vendors, companies or services before you do business with them?

For sure that's what your potential clients are doing!  Think about it, where do you go to find stuff? 

Google! 

That's right, Google.  We all begin with Google! 

A friend recommends you to one of their friends, classic word of mouth referral, but did they contact you? 

Maybe – Or Maybe Not.

You can be pretty sure that they Googled you to see what they can learn about you and your real estate marketing.

Did you lose that referral and not know about it?

What have you done to build your brand equity?  When your potential client Googles your name, do they find you, do they find your website, blog, social media links?  Or do they have to search for you on your Brokers  company site? 

Statistics show that buyers and sellers tend to work with the first Realtor they communicate with, so why take the chance that they may find another Realtor on your company site to work with?

So, I want to try an important experiment with you ….

Let's imagine for a moment that you are thinking of selling your condo in your town and a good friend has told you about a great Realtor that he thinks could help you.

So open up a new tab in your web browser and go to Google right now – type in the real estate agents name in parenthesis like this “Joe Blogs” (use your name) and hit the search button.

TIP. Web savy searchers will use parenthasis to control the search results (it's more relevant) but try it without as well because not everyone uses them and the results will be a little different.

What did you find?

Were there multiple search results with your website, blogs, social networking links, links to comments you've made on other peoples blogs, photograph collections? Were there any negative comments? Any links that you might be uncomfortable with a potential client clicking on?

Lets say you do the same search with the name of the Realtor but you added your neighborhood or town that you live in to find out how active this realtor is in your local market – “Joe Blogs" your town (use "your name" your town).

Now what you find?

Would the search results and the links that you click on convince you to do business with this real estate agent? In practice this is a very real scenario and if you don't get this part right you can be certain that you are losing business and you don't even know it.

There have been a number of real estate related ratings sites that have been trying to gain traction in the marketplace including Homethinking.com, AgentScoreBoard.com, RatemyAgent.com and numerous others – in the near future review sites like these will have an increasingly presence in these search results – so be warned (Joel Burslem has more to say about this here: Are you happy with what you find).

It is possible to control what a potential real estate client …

… will see on the search results page. Negative comments or reviews can be pushed down the search results if you have enough of your own content that is well optimized to appear near the top of the search results page.

Monitoring your site analytics will show you what search terms consumers are using to search for you, one agent we are currently mentoring was totally shocked when we showed her that people were searching for her online and how often! (see How to use Google Analytics on how to get set up for free).

So just how do I do control what potential real estate clients will see?

This series of posts:

How to lose clients without knowing it – part 1

How to lose clients – part 2

How to lose clients – part 3

How to lose clients part 4 – the nasty version

How to lose clients – or not! Part 5

.