Google Yourself: How to Use Local SEO and Google My Business to Attract New Leads

Have you Googled yourself lately? Do it today, and take a look at what people see when they search for you by name. Because they will. If a potential buyer or seller gets your name from a friend, but doesn’t know anything about you, they’ll go to Google and see what they can learn. And what they see on page one of the search results for your name might decide whether they call you or someone else.

On this week’s episode of The Walkthrough, we’re diving deep into local SEO and Google My Business — the two ways real estate agents can start to control what shows up on page one when someone Googles your name. Local SEO veteran David Mihm walks us through how to claim and optimize your Google My Business profile, the specific factors that influence how agents are ranked in Google’s “map pack,” and more. Grab your marketing person/team if you have one, or just listen in yourself and get ready to take some notes. You can do this!

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If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe to get future episodes delivered automatically: Apple Podcasts/iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher | YouTube

Links and Show Notes

• David Mihm
• ThriveHive
• LocalU
• Tidings
• Mike Blumenthal: “Google is your new homepage”
• Google My Business – claim/update your profile here
• HomeLight’s Agent Resource Center
• Subscribe and listen to The Walkthrough: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

Full Transcript

(SPEAKER: Matt McGee, Host) Have you Googled yourself lately? If you have, what did you see on page one? If you haven’t, you really should, and not just once — you should Google yourself on a regular basis, like once a month at minimum. And here’s why. When someone you know gives out your name and recommends you to one of their friends or coworkers, guess what that new person, the person who has no idea who you are, is going to do? They’re going to Google you. And what they find on page one is going to go a long way toward deciding if they accept that recommendation and give you a call.

Now, SEO is a deep and complicated topic. I get it. I know. I started doing SEO in 1999 and spent most of the past 20 years doing SEO and writing about SEO. So I know we’re not going to solve all your SEO challenges or teach everything there is to know about SEO in just one podcast. But we can show you how to control what page one looks like when someone searches for you by name.

This is The Walkthrough.

(INTRO MUSIC)

Hi, everybody. I’m Matt McGee, and on this show, you’ll learn what’s working right now from the best real estate agents in the country. The Walkthrough is part of HomeLight’s Agent Resource Center, which we created help agents like you grow your business from good to great to amazing. At HomeLight we believe in real estate agents. And we believe that by helping agents like you be more productive, more efficient, and more successful, the entire industry improves.

If you’d like to reach me with feedback, ideas, or questions about this show, just send an email to walkthrough [at] homelight.com. In fact, we’re going to be reading and sharing some of those incoming emails on future shows. So if you have a question that you want to ask other agents, any question at all, send us an email. If you have a follow up question specifically for today’s guests, send us an email. Again, the email address to use is walkthrough [at] homelight.com.

Agents, let’s talk about SEO. And let’s be realistic about it. For most solo agents, for most teams and even most brokerages, you’re going to struggle to compete against the big guys on a lot of keywords. So, if you type homes for sale and your city name into Google, you’re probably going to find Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor.com, and maybe the local offices of national franchises like C21 or RE/MAX ranking on that page. They have enormous marketing budgets and huge SEO teams, and they are creating content that’s going to rank for a lot of common keywords like Portland real estate or Portland homes for sale, and it’ll probably be the same no matter what city you’re in, you know, Topeka real estate or Akron homes for sale, and so on and so on.

But you can control, to a large degree, what shows up when someone searches for you by name, and they will if they don’t know who you are. So when that happens, you want page one to look as great as possible. Google My Business, or GMB as we refer to it throughout this show, is how you do that. It’s a free tool that Google uses in two ways. First, to show your business information to searchers who are looking for you. Second, to show your business information in that three-pack of local businesses that often appears in search results. You’ve probably seen it — do a search like Portland real estate agents, and Google will show a map with usually three matching businesses. That business info comes from Google My Business.

On today’s show, I’m bringing in one of my longtime friends in the SEO industry, a guy named David Mihm. Today, he’s the Vice President of Product Strategy at a company called ThriveHive. But I’ve known David for more than a decade. He founded a company called GetListed.org, which helps small business owners with local SEO. He sold that company to Moz in 2012 and became Moz’s director of local search strategy. David and I were also co-founders of a company called Local U, which put on marketing workshops around the country for small businesses. David also founded and runs a company called Tidings, which offers an easy to use email newsletter platform for small businesses. He’s done consulting work and counted real estate agents among his clients. He’s just a really smart guy.

I asked David to come on The Walkthrough and do a deep dive with me about Google My Business. So today, you will learn

• why and how to claim your GMB profile
• how to optimize it with the kind of content that Google will want to show in search results
• the specific factors that influence rankings in that three-pack or map pack, and
• what it takes to rank in the local results for nearby cities

Agents, this is an episode that you should also share with your marketing person or team. It’s not another surface-level SEO conversation. We do take our time to explain the concepts that matter so we can make sure we’re not leaving any listeners behind. But, as the conversation progresses, we do get into the specifics of local rankings and how Google My Business impacts rankings. Then when I come back at the end of the conversation, I promise I’ll do my best to sum it all up to make sure you don’t miss anything.

All right, let’s get started. David and I spoke at a small business local SEO workshop last summer. It was just about a month before I joined HomeLight, and David walked the audience through the Google My Business platform. He told the crowd that they should optimize their GMB profiles before their websites. So my first question to David was, “Why did you say that?”

(BEGIN CONVERSATION)

David: Real estate agents, you know, know their markets. They know how to build relationships. They shouldn’t necessarily be experts at building a website. And I think, from that standpoint, Google My Business is much, much easier to edit, to add content, to tell your story, to showcase the great clients that you’ve worked with. It’s just a much easier interface to update.

And the second piece of it is, increasingly, it’s actually in many cases more visible than your website is. You’ve probably seen these kinds of results when you’re doing searches, either for yourself or for you just kind of see what’s happening in your community. And there are two sort of elements to a search result now in Google. There’s a map and then three business listings, typically three business listings. That’s coming from a second sort of algorithm that is largely driven by Google My Business. Those listings are usually at the top of the page. And then website results, traditionally the kinds of things where there’s a blue link and a little snippet about what the page is about, those website results are actually further down the page now for a whole host of searches.

So I think Google My Business is generally an easier thing to update for most small business owners. And it’s increasingly more visible than website results for a lot of searches. So I think those two factors certainly play a role in my perspective on terms of why you should sort of focus on GMB first. Not to say that your website isn’t important. I’m sure we’ll talk about how all of your website content can kind of reinforce your overall presence. But I think GMB is just a more natural place to start.

Matt: When I have spoken to real estate agents on this topic, a lot of real estate agents get a lot of business through referrals. So you might be looking to buy a house, you don’t have an agent. So you go and you ask maybe a coworker or a family member, your cousin, your uncle, whatever, “Do you have a recommendation for a real estate agent?” They give you a name, and you get the name. What’s the first thing you’re going to do at that point? You’re going to go to Google and type in that agent’s name. So the other area, I would say, where Google My Business really, really is important.

David: Definitely. Our mutual friend, Mike Blumenthal, has said now for the last three or four years, “Google is your new homepage.” And so what he means by that is just what you were saying, even if you’re not “ranking” for any keywords that people might be searching for, you are going to rank for your own name when somebody hears about you through word of mouth. And increasingly, people are not going to type in your website into a browser, they’re just going to search for you in Google.

And what shows up on that page makes a huge difference in terms of whether you even have a chance to win that client. So if they see a blank profile with no photos, or in some cases, if a user, another Google searcher, has uploaded a sort of unflattering photo, that might be what they see. If they see two out of five stars with five or six reviews, that’s not a particularly compelling story to tell about yourself.

So really, you need to pay attention to what people see when they search for you by name on Google. And that really should be the first step before you even think about doing what you and I sort of historically would probably consider “SEO,” just being aware of what’s showing up for your own name and putting your best foot forward on your own Google search result.

Matt: And I think, too, those of us that have been doing local SEO for as long as you have and as long as I have, like Google My Business has really evolved over the years. And in a lot of cases, it has, depending upon the industry obviously, you’re going to have different features that you might want on your website. But Google My Business has like almost everything thing that a typical small business might put on its website.

David: Yeah, it seems like they’re adding new features every single month. One of our mutual colleagues, Joy Hawkins, has almost an entire business built around just tracking the changes within Google My Business, right? So it’s the kind of thing — if you went and claimed your profile, claimed your listing four or five, six years ago, you’ve probably entered your business name, entered your address, chose real estate agent as your category. And that might have been all that was available to you. And Google has just added so much especially in the last three or four years. So you can now upload photos and videos and even tell Google the type of photo that it represents. So is it your logo? Is it the interior of your office? Is it a photo of your team members or an individual team member? So you can tag sort of what the photo is of. And increasingly we’re seeing photos that business owners are uploading to Google My Business getting more views than ever before. So those photos are certainly something that your customers, your clients are going to be interested in seeing.

There are certainly probably the most from an optimization standpoint, the most important thing that Google has added in the last…this is probably more like five or six years, but the ability for your customers to leave you reviews. So reviews matter a lot in terms of who ranks in these GMB results. And they also matter a lot to customers when they’re making a decision about what agent to hire or what agency to go and talk to. They’re hugely important for informing consumer opinion about you. So I would say those two things, in particular, the photos sort of related feature, now videos, as well as reviews, those are kind of the biggest things that I would say most agents should focus on.

Matt: And we should make the point, too, that this is all free. It’s business.google.com and put your name in, your business name, your team name, if you have a team, whatever it might be, and just see if they already have information about you, claim the profile, and if not, then create it, is basically the steps.

David: And really importantly, individual agents are completely eligible for these profiles. In our world they’re called practitioner listings. So just because the agency that you’re affiliated with has a listing already, which is likely to be the case, you can also add your own listing for yourself. So keep that in mind that just because you see the office that you work out of already listed, you should still go ahead and add a practitioner listing for yourself if there isn’t on already.

Matt: All right, exactly. And it’s okay that you have the same address as, you know, the other 20, 40, 60, 100 agents in the office. That’s fine. That doesn’t cause any issues, right?

David: It doesn’t cause any issue. It’s not against Google’s guidelines by any stretch. Agents that work out of the same office may have a harder time showing up for more competitive keywords. But for most folks just getting started out, again, I would encourage and I think, you know, you would agree, really focus on what’s showing up for your own name first before you think about expanding the universe of keywords that you’re trying to show up for.

Matt: Okay, that makes sense. Now, so we talked you want to claim and complete your GMB profile because the first step is you want to have good search results when somebody types your name into the Google search box. And so that’s certainly the first step, the first key. And I would say also, once you get your profile claimed, start looking at how it looks like when somebody searches your name and then adjust accordingly.

But then there’s also the second element that you mentioned when we first started talking, that the GMB profile will also come into play when that three-pack or map-pack shows up. So somebody does a search maybe for you’re in Portland, so somebody does a search for Portland real estate or Hillsboro real estate or Portland real estate agent, something like that. Chances are you’re going to see a three-pack of businesses with the map. What are the factors from your Google My Business profile, what are the factors that influence ranking there?

David: So the first one is not really anything you can do much about. It’s how close is the location that your address essentially that you’ve given in Google My Business? How close is that address to where the searcher is? So makes total sense on a phone. Obviously pretty easy to understand that Google knows exactly where you are because of GPS on Google Maps — that sort of thing. Also true on desktop, though. So Google has, through legal and also surreptitious means, collected a whole bunch of Wi-Fi network data over the last couple of decades. And they have a pretty good idea of where even desktop searchers are performing these searches from. So how close that address is to where the person is conducting the search matters a great deal in terms of who ranks for those keywords. Not something you can really do much about. And again, the main thing is you want to make sure you’re looking good if you happen to show up or if somebody is doing a search nearby your location.

The next factors that really play a big role from Google — unfortunately, if you have the word real estate or realtor in your business name, that probably will help you rank better in the Google My Business algorithm. You and I have both, I think, expected this factor to sort of fall away over the years. And it has sort of ebbed and flowed. Right now it appears to be flowing. So if you are just starting out your business or just starting a new agency or something like that, I would probably include the words real estate as part of your business there.

Matt: Yes, absolutely.

David: It might also be a best practice just as far as people knowing what you do as opposed to just using your last name or something like that or some such and such properties. That’s probably not as good a name as real estate or the kind of real estate that you sell.

Matt: Like if you’re like just like forming a team, for example, you don’t just call yourself the Jones Group, call yourself the Jones Real Estate Group. It’s better for local SEO.

David: Perfect example. Your category will also make a difference. So I haven’t looked recently but historically there have been about eight or nine categories related to real estate, including appraisals and consultants and agents, obviously. There’s residential and commercial designations in Google’s category system. So making sure that you’re in the right category and not just choosing one category. If there’s more than one that applies to you, for example, if you do appraisals in addition to sort of traditional residential real estate, I would definitely add as many secondary categories as applied to your business that are relevant. So you don’t want to necessarily fill those out. You don’t want to represent yourself as a mortgage broker if that’s not something that your agency also handles. But you want to include as many relevant secondary categories as you can.

Matt: Is there any limit to the number of categories?

David: Somebody posted about this the other day. I want to say it’s over a dozen.

Matt: Oh, my gosh.

David: And I don’t think there are more than a dozen real estate related categories. So it shouldn’t apply to this audience. Yeah.

Matt: Gotcha. All right.

David: I’m sure the shady digital marketing firms have figured out a way to maximize their category list, but probably not something real estate agents need to think about yourself.

Matt: All right. So location matters for ranking. You said the business name, the category, anything else?

David: Yeah. So I mentioned this really early on in our conversation today, but reviews. So it’s the number of reviews, it’s the rating that people are giving you when they leave a review. It’s the keywords that they use in their review about you, like if they’re talking about a specific neighborhood or a specific type of house like a craftsman house or urban condo or something like that. And then the sort of consistency of your stream of reviews. So if you get 50 reviews tomorrow — A, that’s going to look like spam to Google. I wouldn’t advise that. Or let’s say you get 50 reviews in a given month and then none for the rest of the year, that’s probably not as good as a steady stream of 4 or 5 reviews a month. So Google likes to see sort of a consistent trend of sort of ongoing engagement with your business with respect to reviews.

So as far as Google My Business specific factors, keyword in business name, definitely important. Location, we mentioned what you can’t really doing about choosing the right category. And reviews, I would say those are the most important factors.

Increasingly, we are seeing photos play a larger role. So Google has got all this really impressive artificial intelligence and machine learning that they are doing around photography and images generally. And we’re seeing images now starting to show up in these three-pack results and these map pack results. I would not ignore. I would pay very close attention, in fact, to the photos that I was uploading to Google. Make sure they’re really high quality, make sure they’re not stock photos, which are obviously really easy to spot with one of these machine learning algorithms. So do a really good job of presenting yourself visually, not as big a ranking factor right now as anything else that you and I were just talking about, but I think moving forward is going to become more important.

Matt: Okay, that all makes sense. I love that. And I do think…I don’t know if you’d call it like a ranking factor. But do you think it’s safe to say that given the choice between two real estate profiles in Google My Business, one that is frequently updated, has current information, has photos, videos, whatever it may be, versus one that maybe hasn’t been touched in a year or two? I mean, am I going too far to think that the one that’s being updated more often is going to get like a little more love from Google?

David: Yes and no. I think that it’s probably not the activity itself that Google is concerned with, but what is the outcome of that activity. So, again, if you’re…let’s say you’re posting on a weekly or bi weekly basis, you’re more likely to get those posts showing up as highlights on your listing. That’s going to get more people to engage with your listing, click to make a phone call and connect with you, those kinds of activities. I would argue that is probably more likely that activities that your clients are doing — so how many times they’re looking you up by name. I mentioned like, are they clicking to call you? Are they clicking for driving directions to your office? Are they clicking through to your website? All of those kinds of customer activities I think are probably more important in in Google’s eyes, but you may not get as much of that customer activity if your profile is kind of dead and if it’s not updated on a regular basis. So it may be an indirect ranking factor, but I think consumer activity is probably more important to Google than business activity.

Matt: Okay, that makes sense. That’s awesome for people to understand. One last question, one last sort of deep dive on the ranking thing. You’ve talked about location. And as you said, that’s not really something that an agent can do or can control much. Your location, your office location is where it is. The office location is what you need to put into your GMB profile. You really can’t control where the searcher is. They might be looking for homes anywhere around town.

So the geographic question is, can you rank in a city or nearby city that you’re not located in? So like in your area, for example, if I understand Portland geography correctly — there’s Portland city proper, and then about like 20 minutes west is Hillsboro, maybe 30 minutes west, whatever. Can a Hillsboro agent who maybe does a lot of business in the city of Portland, can that agent have the GMB profile show up if somebody searches for Portland realtor or Portland realtor near me, something like that?

David: Yeah, it’s really unlikely, I would say. I think your best shot at doing that as if you have a lot of Portland customers or clients leaving reviews for you and mentioning the fact that you did a great job for them in the house that they bought in northeast Portland or something like that. But I would say it’s pretty unlikely to rank outside the town that you predominantly do most of your listings. And so I think that’s, again, unlikely.

The caveat to that is that you can be anywhere and your website can have content about the city that you’re interested in ranking in. And that website, that web page can rank in the organic results. And we haven’t really talked much about websites in this podcast. It’s probably a good topic for a future episode, but the kind of content that you have on your website can also really have a big impact on how well you rank in these backpacks.

So if this is truly your goal, if you don’t think you’ll survive unless you can rank in Portland despite being an agent located in Hillsboro, you need a website with a lot of Portland-based content that Google can say, “Oh, even though this agent is located out in Hillsboro, they are clearly an expert about this much larger city. And we might decide to show them a little bit more often or maybe a little bit farther out from Hillsboro than we might otherwise.” So I would say content is really the the biggest thing that you can invest in on your website, if you’re trying to rank outside the sort of very small geography where you’re located.

Matt: Okay. I mean, that’s a super important point. Let me make sure that I understood that and that listeners understood that. So if you are in Hillsboro, your Google My Business profile is in all likelihood only going to have a shot at ranking for Hillsboro related search terms and searches. It’s going to be really tough for your GMB profile to rank for another city, especially a bigger one like Portland. But you’re saying that if you have a great website and you have lots of content about Portland, links into your website that are perhaps from Portland businesses, Portland organizations, that sort of stuff — content, links, reviews, as you said, reviews that talk about buying a house in Portland, even though the agent’s in Hillsboro. So the website then becomes the main opportunity to rank for terms that are not where you’re located.

David: That’s right. Also helps to have customers who are leaving reviews about where they purchased the house or where you helped them sell their house, or whatever, in terms of stuff that you can control and influence. Having that content on your website is the most natural spot.

Matt: Gotcha. Okay, and one last thing on the deeper dive on these ranking factors, you talked about reviews. Should an agent reply to every review and does that impact ranking at all or is that just a good customer service kind of thing?

David: Sure. So I don’t necessarily think it impacts ranking. But I see it as a way to continue to build a deeper relationship with that client that you just did a great job for. So Google is going to notify the client when you reply to the review. So I think at least acknowledging, thanking them for the time that they spent to leave the review, saying what a pleasure it was to work with them as a client, those kinds of things. It’s a way to build a deeper relationship with, again, the client who just left you that review. And it’s also something that future clients are going to see. Replies to reviews are becoming more visible on profiles, and it will say from the business owner and it will have the little snippet that you write back with. So I think it’s a good practice to reply to every review in the real estate industry, specifically. There may be others like restaurants probably get 10 times the number of reviews that a real estate agent does. It’s probably impractical reply to every single one of those, but in your specific industry, which is so focused on relationships, I probably would make it a goal to reply to every review.

Matt: Yeah. I think that’s smart too. And, yeah, I love what you said about how the reply is as much for future clients as it is for the one that actually left you the review.

David: Which is even more important if the review wasn’t that positive. So don’t get into an argument with somebody who’s left you a bad review. You need to try to own the problem as best you can, empathize with that client. And if there’s a way for you to make it up to them somehow, I would acknowledge that in the reply as well.

Matt: Yeah. Which kind of jogs my memory that we should probably do a deeper dive on a future episode just about reviews and testimonials and how real estate agents can use them. So making a note to myself to do that.

David, this has been awesome. Let’s do some like to-do items, takeaway type things for the real estate agent. Somebody that’s been listening to this, super successful real estate agent, they’re doing 30, 40, 50, 100 transactions a year with their team, whatever it might be, but they’ve not focused a lot on SEO, they’ve not focused a lot on Google My Business in particular, where do they start? What do they need to do first?

David: Sure. So the first thing I would do is honestly I would Google myself or I would google the name of my team. If there is a Google My Business record for your business — especially if you’re a team or an agency, it’s highly likely that Google will have a record of you already in this GMB system. And you want to make sure that you are claiming the record that they already have for you, as opposed to creating another one. That can really cause confusion among both existing clients and prospective clients. So the first thing I would do is I would Google myself for the name of my business and see if a business profile shows up. If it does, Google will probably have a link that says either…one link I know they’ll have unfortunately is “suggest an edit,”” and then the other one is something like “Own this business?”, or “Represent this business?”, something like that. And that’s the link that you want to click to get taken into the Google My Business claiming process.

If nothing shows up for the business name that you type in, at that point, that’s when I would just go to business.google.com. And Google will sort of walk you through the verification process. Really the only requirement that you need is a Google account. So if you already have a Gmail account, great, or you can also create a Google account at another email address. It’s probably a good idea to use a…rather than using your personal email address, use an account that you don’t mind sharing with employees or other team members because it’s likely you’ll want to delegate access to this profile to other folks in the future. So that’s really the only sort of caveat when you’re going through and claiming this listing, is personally I would advise people to choose a Google account that they can share with others.

Matt: Gotcha. That makes sense. So once you get this claimed, whether it was existing or not existing, then it’s just a matter of going through all those things that we talked about before, right? The business name, the hours, the photos, the videos, and just build that out as much as you can?

David: Yep, exactly. And I think you got to start somewhere. So usually I think most businesses can probably go through and put together a pretty complete profile in an hour or 90 minutes, that’s assuming that you’ve got sort of photos at the ready and you’re already using a business description maybe on your Facebook page or something like that, but it’s not a particularly cumbersome process. Again, as we said at the top of the conversation today, it’s not a technical process at all. It should be pretty straightforward to fill that out.

And then in terms of ongoing engagement, yeah, I think it’s great. If you have the time and the energy to kind of do a post a week or even a couple of posts a month, that’s awesome. I think staying on top of replying to folks who have left few reviews.

Matt: Yeah, that makes sense. And then I would say, I’ll just toss this into, it’s like the flip side, the other side of the coin of GMB, too, because we talked again at the beginning about how you want that search results page — when somebody puts your name into Google, you want that search results page to be as great as possible. So the Google My Business profile will cover you for that aspect of it. But then probably in all likelihood, there’s going to be your Zillow profile, your Realtor.com profile, maybe your Facebook page, your Yelp profile, if you have one. I would say it’s also smart for the agent to go and do similar stuff with all those profiles as well and just make sure that that first page of Google search results for your name is as great as it can be. Control the stuff you can control.

David: Yep. Nothing to add. Couldn’t agree more.

(Speaker: Matt McGee, Host) How was that, agents? I hope it was the right combination of deep dive info about local SEO but not so technical that we lost anyone along the way. Let me recap what I think are the key takeaways.

Number one, “Google is your new homepage.” David quoted a friend of ours named Mike Blumenthal, has been saying that for years, “Google is your new homepage.” The idea is that when someone searches your business name, your Google My Business profile often tells that person everything they’d find on your website. Your address, phone, hours, driving directions, customer reviews, and more. It doesn’t mean your website is unimportant. It just means Google wants to show your business info to searchers before they get to your website.

Takeaway number two, your GMB profile is a factor not only when someone searches you by name, but also in the three-pack or map pack of results. That’s where Google shows usually three businesses and includes a map with their locations.

Takeaway number three in that three-pack, the ranking factors include location, as in your location and the location of the person doing the search. You can’t do much about that. Also includes keyword in your business name. It’s better to be Jones Real Estate Group than just Jones Group. Your business category is a ranking factor. Make sure you put yourself in all relevant categories. Real estate agents and real estate consultant are two obvious ones to be in. There might be others that are appropriate depending on the nature of your business. And another ranking factor, reviews. Not only how many, but the consistency of how often you get new reviews. And if you suddenly get a bunch of new reviews on the same day, that’s a red flag to Google. So do it consistently over time.

Takeaway number four, to get started with creating and/or optimizing your Google My Business profile, here’s what to do. First, Google yourself and see what comes up. If Google has a business profile for you, look for a link that says something like “Own this business?” and use that to claim your listing. If Google does not have a profile for you, create one at business.google.com. David recommended using a Google account that you can share with others in case you eventually want to delegate the management of your profile.

Lastly, fill out your profile as completely as you can, and then plan on keeping it updated with new photos, posts, new reviews, and so forth. It may sound complicated, but as David said, it should only take an hour or so to get started. SEO is difficult. I know it is, but this is a great first step toward controlling what buyers and sellers see when they Google your name.

Okay, questions for David, questions for me or HomeLight, feedback, ideas, email us, walkthrough [at] homelight.com. In fact, I have an offer. Send me an email with your biggest win of the week or month. We’re going to have a podcast segment called “HomeLight Home Run,” and we’d love to include your success stories. Could be as simple as getting leads from a new postcard you sent or as complicated as a difficult transaction that you went above and beyond to serve your client and get it closed.

Whatever it is, we’d love to share your success stories as a future “HomeLight Home Run.” Again, the email address is walkthrough [at] homelight.com.

That’s all for this week. Thanks to David Mihm for joining us to talk about local SEO and Google My Business. Thank you for listening. Go out and sell some homes and we’ll talk to you again next week. Goodbye.

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