Your Google Profile, Local Business Center Listing, and You

Houston is fairly competitive market in the world of real estate related websites, so SEO and SEM in general become factors in a marketing campaign. I wanted to share with you some projects that I am working on to hopefully help you with promoting your own home inspection business. I am sure that you may have taken some of these steps, but you may not have taken a few further actions to help. I have been going through examining (inspecting) results in search engines, to find factors that would help have a site be noticed, so here they are.
    You may have seen that Google is moving moe into the social media world. One basic feature is the Google profile (if you search for Google profiles you will find them). At one point, the profile page was showing up if you searched for your name, but that is not always the case at the moment. However, do not discount the profile. You can add a good deal of information to help promote your business there, including linking to your websites. Here is the interesting thing: if you link to your profile from your blog or other sites, the profile gains authority, which then can be passed onto your site. You should be creating links to your website, but you should also build-up links to your profile. Here is an example of a home inspector profile ;)
    In Houston and San Diego, Google has rolled out a new feature to promote/highlight your Google local business center listing. For $25 per month, they add a litle highlight feature of your choosing, like a link to your site. (This is an advertising link, so it will not count towards linkjuice). Since this was rolled out, I wanted to see what is happening with these listings. These are the lisitngs that show up in the Ten-pack (the businesses listed next to a map in a search) and the business listing  in Google Maps. First, I discovered that most firms do not have a complete profile. When I filled in information to make my listing 100% complete, I found that it helped me move up this list. Next, your proximity to downtown is still a factor in who is placed on top, but not always. Reviews help move your site up. The review can be negative or positive. I was surprised by the fact that businesses did not respond to negative reviews. Google will pull information from many sites to add to your lisitng, which you will have no control over. One of the sites that Google will pull information from is your posts to ActiveRain's Localism, so if you have not posted there, you may want to do so. The other weird fact about these listings is that you may end up in places where you had not intended. A post that I wrote about foreclosures three years ago has been popular in Google for the specific topic. I have been called by Realtors from around the country for advice, and newspapers have interviewed me. Although I do not list foreclosures as one of my categories in the listing, Google rates me high in the Ten-Pack for many foreclosure terms. Here is an example of a home inspection business listing.
    About creating links to your site from Facebook and Twitter: officially these are nofollow links, which means that Google's bot will not go to your site. However, a test was run where it was discovered that Google does follow links from Twitter. If you want you post on ActiveRain or your personal blog to be indexed by Google quickly, then post a link on Twitter. As for Facebook, I have not seen any test proving that the same thing happens. Typically, Facebook is called a "walled garden", since profiles can be private. My Facebook account is public, so anyone can view it. What I have noticed is that posts from public accounts will be picked up on Google Alerts. If the Google bot has noticed the post for an alert, it may also have followed the link as it does with Twitter. I should mention that simply because you have a website/blog does not mean that Google knows about what you have done. You need to be indexed. Once in the index, your page/post can show up in the search results.
    One last tip. If you have an offline ad, be sure to put your website's address in the ad. Most people do not enter the url into the browser's address bar. What they do is type the address into Google. This tells Google that your site is desired, which means that they make it easier to find for the keywords that your are targeting.
    Happy Marketing. I hope that you all have a wonderful Easter (Oh, and not to forget, for those celebrating Passover, I hope that you have wonderful celebrations too).