Those of you in the market to sell and buy your home who have tried to search the internet to find a local real estate agent know this:

It’s easy to find general information on buying and selling real estate, but it’s much more difficult to locate real agents in your location.

Now why is this?

=> It all comes down to referrals

Since the birth of this industry, real estate agents have been connecting with client referrals for new business.

Most of the time these are word-of-mouth referrals from past clients, and many times the recommendations come from yard signage with the realtor’s name on it.

Before, if you didn’t get referrals, you couldn’t continue your business.

This is still true today, however the landscape has developed substantially with the advent of the Internet.

=> Google is hands down the biggest and best referral source on the planet

These days when websites are listed in order of importance with the most likely first.

Google (or whatever search engine is being used) calculated that the websites in the top list are the most important sites relative to the search terms that were entered.

Most people tend to go with the result at the top of the page, with the top website listed getting the most interest.

=> What does this mean for agents?

In the offline world, the real estate agent who gets the most client referrals is likely to be the most connected, experienced, skilled, and productive agent in town. It would be unusual for a newbie to the program to be inundated with more customer referrals than a very experienced veteran.

However, in the online world, the real estate agent who gets the most client referrals is the professional who has marketed their online presence most efficiently.

It doesn’t matter how long you have been acting on behalf of clients or how effective you are as an agent.

The reality is that where your website ranks on Google definitely depends on how you have marketed your website.

=> It is not enough to have only one website

Even if you are not that computer or Internet savvy, it is not possible to ignore the dominant role that the world wide web is playing in today’s society.

Chances are, at some point you said, “Okay, I give up. I’ll have a website, since that seems to be what everyone is doing nowadays.”

So, you’ve built a website (or more likely paid someone to do it for you), and you thought to yourself that the problem was solved.

Well, I have some news for you: it’s simply not enough to have just one website. Building a website will not always bring your business additional referrals or more exposure.

The fact is that unless you market your website, you will remain in relative obscurity and no prospect will find you unless you meet them face to face and give them your site address. This is not the way you want things to be.

What you really want to happen is for anyone in the area to be able to search for ‘real estate agent’ + the city and then your website will show up high in the results list, hopefully in the #1 position.

This is the ideal way to get a steady influx of customer referrals for your business.

No matter how experienced you are as an agent, your offline connected referral network can’t match the extraordinary power of a search engine like Google.

=> Free internet marketing advice for real estate agents

If you haven’t already, you really need to create a website for your business. If you can’t complete this task yourself, it’s worth every penny to pay a professional to do it for you. The web does not have to be striking, the simpler the better. Then promote your site.

By far the most effective and simple online promotion tool is article marketing. You don’t need to know anything technical to make use of this powerful tool; all you have to do is produce articles on your particular niche topic, submit them regularly, and do it for the long haul.

Do you have any questions about marketing a real estate site? When will you set aside time this week to create and submit your first article?