How to Diversify Your Online Presence: A Guide for Agents
If you (like me) are tired of hitting “refresh” on your MLS in anxious anticipation of new inventory to show and sell, there are lots of things to do to fill these long winter days.
For example: Beefing up your online testimonials. Reviews and testimonials are important for many reasons, and especially because so many potential clients use them as they decide on a realtor. They also serve as powerful collateral to validate or promote your value and experience and are a key content marketing tool. Personally, I find that it’s much easier to share a glowing review from a client than to boast about a recent win.
Over the past few months, I’ve slowly but surely worked on building out and diversifying my online presence. For several years I trusted a single site to warehouse my reviews, profile, and past sales. After I realized in 2021 that our paths weren’t aligned, I made it a point to find other online sites and portals that could support my career as a real estate agent in a highly competitive market.
Here are a few of the spots that I’ve found that have helped boost my presence online and in search rankings. I find that it’s best to choose two or three core platforms and I ask my clients to write one review, then cut and paste them into each portal. (If you’d like a copy of the email request I currently send to clients, you can reach me at meg.mullin@cbmoves.com.)
Google My Business and Google Screened: These are (currently) free services offered through the world’s busiest and most-used search engine. If you haven’t established a site for your business on Google, or started the process of getting screened, I would highly recommend that you make it a priority. Why struggle for search engine rankings when you can embed yourself directly within the site?
Please note that Google My Business and Google Screened are two separate and different offerings from the search engine. Google My Business operates as sort of a front page for your real estate business with details that include contact information, website, operating hours, and reviews. Google Screened takes this to the next level by ensuring real estate professionals have passed “extensive background and license checks conducted by Local Services Ads, Google’s partners, and state and/or regulatory bodies,” per the site.
Testimonial Tree: This site isn’t free, but it is robust and it offers one thing I honestly haven’t been able to find anywhere else: the ability to export reviews out of Zillow and into Realtor.com. This was key for me and worth the $30/month spend. Because of this integration, I was able to export dozens of great client reviews out of Zillow.com and into Realtor.com. While they appear as “recommendations” and not “reviews,” they are still displayed rather prominently on the site. This was important to me because I didn’t want to ask 50 or so past clients to re-submit their reviews through a new portal.
Realtor.com: Realtor.com has enhanced its presence as a powerful search portal in residential real estate (it’s currently ranked number two in its category, after Zillow), and the site has introduced more sophisticated review tools that agents can use to collect and share testimonials. This is why it was so important to me to take advantage of the product integration from Testimonial Tree, and I plan to ask clients to begin leaving reviews there in 2022.
Rate My Agent: This site bills itself as the “fastest growing review platform in the United States,” and their marketing team is doing an awesome job of encouraging agents to collect reviews via the site. It has an robust social media integration that will push testimonials (complete with attractive graphics) out to your social media sites including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and even publishes to your Google My Business page, which has proved to be a big time-saver for me. The basic version of the site is free; for a subscription, it’s currently $49 per month.
Facebook: If you and your clients spend a lot of time on Facebook, it might make sense to add the site to your arsenal of testimonials.
Zillow: Because Zillow serves as a primary search resource for so many homeowners and homebuyers, I still ask my clients to leave reviews there.
In addition to the sites I’ve mentioned, it’s also important to explore where your clients and potential clients are doing their research on real estate agents. For example, when I lived in Washington, DC, Yelp was the go-to resource for any type of review. It’s used less frequently here in the suburbs of New Jersey, so I choose not to use it at this point in time.
Most importantly — it’s so very important to make the process easy on your clients so you can actually collect reviews and use them in your marketing. As I mentioned before, I ask my clients to write one review, and provide direct links that they can easily click on and drop their review copy.
What sites have I missed? What do you find is most important when you collect reviews and testimonials? Please contact me at meg.mullin@cbmoves.com with suggestions for awesome sites for realtors to get “found” — or yes, sites to avoid.
Meg Mullin is a real estate agent with Coldwell Banker in Madison, NJ. She helps people buy and sell homes in communities that have easy access to NYC, great schools and charming downtowns.
