March 11 2021
Much of our lives and work are on the internet, and Google is probably the entity that we interact with most. The real estate industry is more dependent on Google than ever. People search for properties and other real estate services. Realtors build their websites and marketing campaigns based on data and analytics offered by Google.
In this series, Google and Real Estate, we'll shed some light on different aspects of doing business with Google and their implications for real estate professionals.
Google is a technology company that was established in 1998 by two PhD students at Stanford University. It was founded primarily as a search engine, but today, it has gone well beyond search, and is now known as one of the most influential businesses in the history of mankind.
Google's top services that benefit real estate pros the most are:
And there are a dozen more features that we exploit in our businesses and personal lives on a daily basis.
In the first part of Google and Real Estate, we'll focus on two important features of Google—Search Console and Analytics, which are vital for the success of real estate professionals doing business online.
This is one of the most important toolkits provided by Google, and every real estate website should actively use it. Search Console helps you with the following:
To access the Search Console, you can visit Google Search Console. You will see the following screen. If you are working on your site, click on the left and enter the URL. The right part is when you want to access the console for a subdomain.
Then, you will need to verify your ownership of the URL. To do this, you must copy and paste the link given to you in the next section into your DNS configuration, as expressed in this following image:
Once you are set up, you can see the following homepage. I will describe the most important section in this image:
As suggested by the name, this is a tool that provides you with the most accurate analytics about your website performance across the web and search results. It provides the following information:
And dozens of other analytical information that help you be more efficient on the web. Click here to access Google Analytics.
There are so many sections and features in Google Analytics that are beyond the scope of this article. Nonetheless, I will provide a quick introduction to the main and most important elements that help you kickstart your analytics watch over your website.
Remember that Google often needs time to index information provided on your website and it might take days or months for changes to take effect. As a result, you don't have to monitor your analytics data everyday unless you have many active campaigns in place. For a typical real estate website, once or twice a week is the recommended routine.
This is the homepage of Google Analytics. In the following section, I will briefly highlight the sections you need to get started:
Now that you have familiarized yourself with these robust Google tools, it's time to take it a step further and aim at ranking higher on Google for your IDX website. In the next part of the series, we will focus on SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, and its implications for real state websites.
To view the original article, visit the Realtyna blog.