Google Brand Preference- Real Estate Industry
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So the changes in the Google algo over the last 2 months has ruined most real estate oriented SERPS. I used to rank very well for all of my chosen local real estate keywords. Google pretty much serves up Zillow, Realtor.com, Trulia, Remax(corporate), Century21(corporate), ERA(corporate), and Exit(corporate) for every high traffic real estate serp. It's pathetic. Literally useless to searchers.
Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor.com have always been contenders. Now they just dominate. They were always front page, now they are top three in every high volume real estate serp nation wide.
The truly disheartening thing about the update is that it's putting franchise websites in the top rankings that in many cases don't even have a local feed to real estate. So users cant even search properties, but Google's brand is putting them above all the local franchise offices. So if you are a Remax office, Remax's official site is beating you on your local real estate keywords. The corporate site doesn't even relate at all to the local search.
I described the issue. I could use the next five sentence to cry about my lack of faith in G anymore, but I won't.
How does one compete with brands like Zillow for local keywords. If anyone has a local realtor client that competes against Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com, I am willing to pay you for consultation.
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Hi Joseph,
I definitely feel you on this! I hope you'll hear back from someone who can show you measurable results of a small real estate agency managing to run with the big boys, but my take on this is that many of Google's local-oriented SERPs right now are very narrow in terms of brand diversity. Something I've been noticing for the past year or so is how dominant Yelp has become for practically any local search term relating to restaurants, hotels and a ton of other searches. Pretty much any search in these areas returns Yelp results, but few other directory-type results. There used to be more diversity, in my opinion, and it's almost as if Google had tightened their belts. I'm going to actively watch this thread to see if you get a response from someone who is specializing in real estate SEO in case they can provide some screenshots of their small business clients managing to outrank the giant/aggregate sites. Crossing my fingers for you!
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