Google uses digital cameras as their example in this video, but the same principles can be applied to text-based campaigns for real estate. This is what Google’s advice boils down to:

- Imagine what your audience is searching for, then use those words in your ad text. It helps to be more specific than “real estate [location]“. Even using the words “Buying a home in [location]?”, for example, tells people more about what you’re offering.

- What makes you stand out? Do you focus on a particular area, or have detailed knowledge of the local market? Mention your unique value proposition to give users a reason to click.

- Include a strong call to action in your text. Click here for a closer look at how calls to action work.

- Give people what they’re looking for after they click. If your ad is for homes for sale in a certain neighbourhood, link it to a section of your website that covers that neighbourhood. Similarly, if the ad is about you as an agent, link to a page that describes you and includes your contact details.

If you’ve never used AdWords before, spend some time on Google searching as if you were looking for real estate in your area. You’ll soon have plenty more ideas about which ads are enticing, and how you can make yours stand out from the competition.

If you’ve been running a website long enough, chances are you’ve had an email that reads something like this: “I just visited your website and think your content is excellent. I feel a link exchange between our websites would be mutually beneficial.”

It all sounds convincing at first, but on closer inspection you find the request is from a website that has no connection to real estate whatsoever. So why on earth are these people getting in touch? Chances are, they’re still convinced that link volume is the key to great search engine rankings.

In a way, they’re right. It’s generally agreed that the higher the number of legitimate links to your website, the higher it will rank in search engine results. But the key word these days is “legitimate”. As searchenginewatch.com pointed out back in 2002, search engines have evolved to recognise artificial link building strategies.

Today, good link building means you need to plan rather than spam. Some tried and tested strategies – recommended by SEO experts time and again – include:

1. Great content. In a perfect world, your website would be so interesting and informative that other people would have no choice but to link to it. In this case, all you’ve done is put the effort into making great content, which we’ve discussed in depth here.

2. Guest posts. Ok, so perhaps your website isn’t so perfect that you can simply sit back and let the links roll in. But another way to get relevant websites to link back to you is to offer to write guest posts. As long as what you’re offering is relevant and well written, this should be a win-win situation: less work for them, more links for you.

3. Ask, but do it with care. The link exchange request described above is a bad example of a reasonable strategy. So how do make it work? Rather than sending the same hopeful email to a hundred websites, start by doing your research and find those that at least have a section dedicated to links.

Next, place a link to that website on your links page (as long as it’s actually relevant to your readership). Once you’ve done that, contact the webmaster to let them know you’ve already linked to them, and explain exactly where you’d like your link to be placed. You can even go as far as providing them with the html, making their job as simple as cutting and pasting.

Needless to say, those three tips only scratch the surface of link building. If you’re keen to dive deeper into the topic, we suggest you start with searchengineland.com’s Link Week series, which offers plenty of wisdom and a bit of tough love to those in the link building business.

In another upgrade aimed at local business owners, Google has now added information about local businesses to Street View.

This means that as people use Street View to take virtual strolls, the names of nearby businesses will pop up. They can then access more detailed information, such as opening hours and reviews, by clicking the icon for that business. At this stage, these “local business annotations” seem to be limited to the US version of Google Maps.

“For now, browsing a location in Street View will show the top listings for that immediate area,” explains the Google Lat Long Blog. “We will be extending this coverage soon to include more businesses and also transit locations.”

So what do agents need to do to take advantage of this latest Google Maps upgrade? Simply make sure all the information Google has about your business is up-to-date. A quick search in Street View should show you what potential customers are finding, and whether you need to make any changes.

If you’re not happy with the results, head to Google Places – the recently renamed Google Local Business Centre – and plug in the information you want Street View users to see. If the marker for your business is in the wrong spot, Google outlines how you can fix that here.

Over the past few months, it’s become clear that Google Maps isn’t just about directions. With the release of Place Pages, the Favourite Places program, and a set of tools aimed specifically at real estate agents, we now know Google Maps wants to become as important to businesses as it is to people figuring out how to get from A to B.

So it should come as no surprise that Google Maps is now giving businesses the option of adding their logo to their location, making it visible to users as they zoom in. Of course, Australian real estate agency chain and Google Maps partner LJ Hooker is on board.

But the scheme isn’t as straightforward as it might first appear. According to a report from The Sydney Morning Herald, this isn’t just a matter of a business paying to see their logo on Google Maps. Google must first determine if the business is “relevant” to Maps users, and the logo will only remain on Maps if enough people are clicking on it for more information.

“[J]ust because a particular business has paid for their location, it doesn’t mean it will necessarily show,” Google product manager Matt Leske told digital-media.net.au. “If a bank wants to put a logo on all its ATM locations, those inside a shopping centre won’t show because the shopping centre is more prominent on the Map. Though a brand will only be charged for the logos displayed.”

So far, the logos are only available in Australia and New Zealand, but digital-media.net.au reports there are plans to offer the option in other markets in future.

Google Street View has been added to so many real estate websites by now that it’s almost an expected part of the listing landscape. But there could be a change on the Street View horizon.

A report from cnet.com explains that Google previously floated the idea of ads appearing in Street View that are tied to the listings in its Local Business Centre and Favourite Places program (click here for a full run-down of those Google offerings).

What makes it seem like more than an idea is Google’s recent filing of a patent application titled “Claiming Real Estate in Panoramic or 3D Mapping Environments for Advertising”. In other words, we could soon see something akin to virtual billboards appearing in a Street View image as users browse through an area.

Of course, this might sound like an extremely bad idea – a sure-fire way to turn people off Street View altogether. But searchengineland.com’s Greg Sterling remains optimistic. “Google will very carefully align what it perceives to be relevant ads with consumer queries and interests,” he says.

In the world of online advertising, this could open up a huge new advertising space. Much like the Augmented Reality applications developed by websites such as trulia.com, Street View could become a source of leads in itself. But exactly how this will all play out remains to be seen.

Ever heard of the Google Local Business Centre? No? It could be worth investigating. For one US broker, listing his business with Google paid off in a big way.

about.com real estate blogger James Kimmons explains: since his “tiny” real estate brokerage was listed on Google’s Local Business Centre, he was included amongst around 100,000 businesses across around 5,000 US locations amed one of Google’s Favourite Places.

Kimmons was then sent a window decal to promote his business, which included a customised QR code – a barcode that can be scanned by smart phones – to give passers-by instant access to information about his business.

Google outlines how the process works in this video:

Google chose these Favourite Places from businesses that were regularly found and queried on Google Maps. “Content, lots of video, and hundreds of images all on my blog-based website is what I attribute it to, as my brokerage is one of the smallest in the area,” says Kimmons.

Since the first round of window decals has already been sent out, local businesses have some time to update and promote their Business Centre listings before more are released. Google says they haven’t yet decided whether they will expand Favourite Places beyond the US, but there are advantages to listing on the Local Business Centre even if your business isn’t US-based.

The reasoning is simple: this is another way to get your business noticed, especially as many people now use Google Maps as something of a Yellow Pages replacement. The process of listing is also straightforward. Businesses create a free profile on the Local Business Centre that shows everything from their opening hours to the types of credit cards they accept. As this video explains, traffic to your listing can also be analysed to help you target your advertising:

So what’s motivating Google to focus on smaller businesses? cnet.com’s Tom Krazit explains:

“Much has been made of Google’s interest in courting the big-name advertisers of the corporate world, but the company is also very interested in the mom-and-pop stores of the world, which fit nicely into its strategy of delivering targeted advertising to specific niches.”

If you’re an agent with a Google Local Business Centre listing, let us know whether it has been beneficial to you.

Technology news websites are currently saturated with talk of Google’s latest releases, which range from a real-time search innovation to something called “Google Goggles”. According to cnn.com, Google has actually introduced 33 different search innovations in the past 67 days.

Most of these releases have been met with the usual mix of excitement and scepticism, so it’s not always easy to decode exactly what effect they might have. Over the next few days, propertyadguru.com will take a preliminary look at a few of Google’s new offerings and ponder what they could mean for the world of online advertising.

Real-Time Search: The Quick and the Dead?

On Monday, Google announced its new real-time search option, which involves adding a continuously updated “latest results” box to the main search results page. Google explains it like this:

“Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we’ll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.”

The video below shows these real-time results in action:

For those working in real estate, this innovation could be both a positive and a negative. On the one hand, real-time results could be another way to attract buyers and sellers, providing your latest status update or website addition promotes you as a go-to agent for your area. Real-time results could also be another way to find up-to-the-minute leads, which the NAR’s recent survey has shown can be an important factor in gaining clients.

At the same time, an aggregated source of real-time results has the potential to cut agents out of the picture. As agentgenius.com’s Lani Rosales wrote last month when Google was testing out its Social Search option, “What can be scary about all of this is the prospect of buyers and sellers connecting organically”.

As some pointed out at the time, buyers and sellers already have plenty of opportunities to connect with each other online, even without Google’s Social Search. But Google’s real-time search, highlighted as it is at the top of the results page, may make this even more likely.

Of course, it’s still very early to be speculating on how real-time search might change things for real estate professionals, but propertyadguru.com will be monitoring its effects with interest. As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts in our comments.

Tune in next time for a look at Google’s new personalised search, announced last Friday, which will reportedly affect even those without Google accounts.

This new search option comes after Google Maps added a real estate option to the “more” menu, allowing users to view a layer displaying listings, earlier this month.

Google Maps has also added in Place Pages for each listing:

This means that clicking the “more info” link next to a listing takes users to what is described as “a faster, easier-to-read page that gives you all of the information we have about a listing: photos, inspection times, videos, details, a Street View preview and nearby public transit information if available, allowing you to quickly find the listing you want and click through to the sources of the listing.”

The Google Maps Australia blog post does not say whether the new search functionality and Place Page option have been added to all locations, and the official Google Earth and Maps blog is currently quiet on the subject, however a search for “real estate” on maps.google.com and maps.google.co.uk presents the same listing results as on maps.google.com.au.

Google added property listings to Google Maps in July this year and now includes them in the US, Australia, New Zealand and India. propertyportalwatch.com has previously pointed out the challenges Google will need to overcome before its real estate search will impact on property portals, including building a comprehensive database of active listings. The addition of rental properties in the US is another step towards achieving this goal.

Google’s new Comparison Ads tool, launched in a select number of US states last week, prompts users to compare the sponsored advertisements that appear at the top of a search results page. Mortgages are the first product to be covered, but the Google AdWords announcement explains that more categories will be included in future.



The Google Maps blog post does not give any clues as to what future upgrades to its real estate search might be, but it seems safe to assume Google’s interest in real estate will only increase as time goes on.

Google Adwords going mobile is good news for everyone who uses this tool (read our article about how to use it here), but what exactly are reply.com’s Enhanced Clicks?

reply.com is an online marketing company who want to make online advertising available to any business – no matter how big or small, so they are an interesting prospect for real estate agents to consider.

The company say Enhanced Clicks are a way for “advertisers to gain access to their target audience without the complexity of traditional online cost-per-click advertising, significantly simplifying the profitable acquisition of locally-targeted customers”.

“Using the Reply.com Marketplace, there are no keywords to manage, no bid-management software to implement, and no need to outsource online customer acquisition to 3rd parties,” says Reply.com chairman and CEO Payam Zamani. “Instead, there are controls that allow advertisers of any size to access consumers who are looking for a particular product or service, select desirable locations, throttle volume, and dynamically set their desired price-per-click. The system automatically delivers the specified traffic, based on the advertiser’s budget.”

“Until now, only the most sophisticated businesses-with significant investments in Internet marketing-have been able to access online consumers profitably.” says Zamani. “We are on a mission to make Internet marketing available to businesses of any size by making it easy and profitable to generate locally-targeted and category-specific traffic.”

Coinciding with the announcement on Tuesday 2 December RAIN Radio hosted a show with guests from Reply.com. You can listen to CEO Payam Zamani, CMO Brian Bowman, and Manager of Online Marketing, Tom Young, discuss reply.com and answer questions online.

Or you can have a look at the online slideshow for some more information from the reply.com team on how to get started, and what it is all about.