When Web Design & Corporate Structure Impact Backlinks
Your web design and corporate structure can impact your ability to earn backlinks and influence your public portrayal. Getting listed on public directories, or your capacity to control your listing on those directories may hang in the balance of your choices.
Some things are beyond your control. If you are a new real estate agent for instance, you will not own your own brokerage, or even a professional corporation. This will limit your access to some directories. Learn more about this later in the blog.
Other things are within your control, but cost a little extra- or maybe a lot extra.
Build Site Authority By Celebrating Your Victories Online
One of the best ways to build backlinks, get engagement and potentially earn reviews is to celebrate your victories and successes publicly on social media and websites.
How Champion Gets More 5 Star Reviews & Why Google Cares
Respond to Reviews On Your Website Or Google My Business.
If the review is positive thank them using their first name, tell them you also had a great experience as a service professional, then mention the product, or another product they may like. This gives search engines some material to work with.
If the review is negative, try to assist them with fixing the issue, or connecting them to someone who can. If they do work through the issue, ensure you follow up to ask them to change the review to something more positive about the customer assistance.
Of course, you could always buy a bunch of custom t-shirts and create an incentive program like Champion has- but it is not needed. Simply asking happy customers to review your business on Google and following up with a thank you there will have a big impact.
For real estate professionals that may look like following up after move in day with an email, asking how things went, and including a link to the google reviews area.
Business that sell products may likewise send an email to purchasers after delivery asking for a product review. A request could also be included inside every shipping box with the shipping information.
Do I Need A Website For My Real Estate Business?
Take a look at your marketplace. Are you in an urban centre with lots of other established realtors with social media followings & big name brands? If so, it would be difficult to create a website that functions to drive you prospects.
Small Business Websites Thrive From Local Engagement On Social Media
Google Search results rank websites based on various metrics including on page SEO, domain authority, and other factors external to the website like social media.
Google reads the incoming and outgoing backlinks for your website, including to and from social media accounts. Google also knows how many different IP addresses are sharing a particular page on their social media.
Some links to your website directly provide or detract from your domain authority through link juice. Social media posts do not provide link juice, however they do ‘vote’ for the sites popularity. Popularity signals that google has found a good result.
Google Rank 1st Page, Get Leads With A Real Estate Website in Canada & Get Accountability From Your Site Managers
This tool will show you many points of analysis, most important are the SEO Scores, where 80+ is a very competitive score and the external factors area. The SEO Score and the Keyword SEO Score are the most important SEO scores. You can find an example portion of that report reproduced below for a website I developed for an agent client of mine, who agreed to let me use his info.