On this episode, we talk to Jason Pantana, coach and trainer at Ferry International, about how to build location authority on Google and capture search traffic.
We discuss:
- Google My Business pages and how to direct people to them via relevant search terms
- what location authority is and how to build it
- how location authority leads to… leads
- why you need to lock in your N-A-P – name, address and phone number – so Google has confidence in who you are
- why it’s critical to keep your social media profiles updated and accurate
- how to ensure that your website is helping with your SEO
- how to get good reviews
- how photos help build location authority
- common mistakes agents make with Google
Links Mentioned:
You can listen to this episode here, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Gayle Weiswasser:
Welcome To the Homesnap Snapshot, a podcast about digital marketing for real estate agents. I’m Gayle, the host of the show. In each episode, we talk to agents just like you who are successfully using some type of digital marketing to build their brands. When it’s over, you’ll walk away with concrete ideas that you can use in your own marketing to help grow your business. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe using whatever app or platform you use to listen to podcasts. And I’d really appreciate it if you’d take a minute to rate and review the show – it helps us get new listeners. Now, let’s get to today’s guest.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Today’s guest on the Snapshot is Jason Pantana, who is coach and trainer at Ferry International. Jason, welcome to the show.
Jason Pantana:
Thank you so much for having me, I’m really excited to be here.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Oh, we’re excited to have you. My UberConference platform is identifying you as being in Nashville. Is that correct?
Jason Pantana:
That is correct. Look at it track my location.
Gayle Weiswasser:
That’s a fun place to be.
Jason Pantana:
It is, we love it here. I moved here when I was just barely an adult and I’ve been here pretty much mostly ever since. I did a little time away when I worked for Realogy outside of New York and Jersey. But other than that, I’ve been here.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Nice. Okay. Well, that sounds like a fun place to spend time. So why don’t we start out, introduce yourself, and tell us a little bit about what you do and your connection to real estate and how you got into the industry.
Jason Pantana:
Yeah, I’d love to, thank you. I got licensed, it’s just been about 11 years ago, it was 2010. It was a drizzly Tuesday. Nah, just kidding. Actually, I got into real estate, kind of by haphazard. I moved to Nashville to try to be a rock star, initially. I was waiting tables, I dropped out of college, I started going back to college because I was going nowhere quickly. I remember I’d have tables at the restaurant who would say to me all the time, “You’d make a really great realtor,” which I always got kind of annoyed at. I’d be, “No, my fallback career is an astronaut,” or I would be kind of smart lipped with them when I reply.
Jason Pantana:
Anyways, Nashville underwent a really, really devastating flood in 2010 that destroyed the restaurant I was working at. Within a series of a week, the restaurant, I lost my job because of the restaurant. I graduated with my degree, which was in marketing. I tried to get a job in marketing in 2010, which was tough to do back then. I had no options so I said to my wife, “What would you think about me actually taking all those tables up on their advice and getting licensed?” I tried to convince a broker to pay for me to get licensed. I managed to succeed, don’t know how. I had somebody, an amazing broker who was a mentor in my life and she invested in my career, got me licensed back in 2010, and I started selling. I was rookie of the year and I really loved the experience of selling houses, working with customers directly. I’ll spare you all the details, but within about a year to a year and a half, I found myself training at boards of realtors, things of that effect.
Jason Pantana:
About a year and a half in, another mentor of mine just threw an opportunity my way to do some work with the National Association of Realtors. It was kind of a traveling road show and I did that for about a year or so, which led to a booking agent, which led to getting hired by Realogy, which led to meeting Tom Ferry and speaking. Anyways, here I am 11 years removed and I’ve spent most of my career on the business development side, working with agents and teams directly, really helping them from a marketing standpoint, helping them from a business growth standpoint, just implementing strategies to grow their businesses. Currently, I am – and have been for the past five years – a business coach and trainer with Tom Ferry international. I personally coach about 40 clients and I also lead our marketing training functions. My forte, my focus, my passion is on helping agents really grow their footprints.
Jason Pantana:
When I got into coaching, I had a mission. I was tired of seeing who I thought were the best agents – amazing individuals who were serving customers at a high level – but they were struggling when it came to the running of their business. They didn’t really know how to grow it, so it’s been my goal and my mission to really figure out, “How can I help those people advance their careers because they’re helping the consumer advance that much further?” Those are the people I care the most about. They’re my spending of yarn about my life.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Okay, good. All right. Today we’re going to talk about Google. We’ve done some recent shows on TikTok on Clubhouse and all these shiny objects and fun platforms, but Google is really the workhorse of digital marketing. When you think about how we live today and how, whenever we have a question of any sort, the first thing that we do is we turn to Google and search for it. It’s unsurprising that Google is so powerful in helping audiences find content.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Today we’re going to talk about Google and how agents should be using it and things that maybe they’re not doing that they really need to be doing, some basic stuff that agents should be doing to capture that online interest in traffic. Let’s first talk about location authority, which I know is something that you’ve written about and talked about before on your blog and in other places. Why don’t you give us a level set here? What is location authority?
Jason Pantana:
I will, and if I could, can I go back one layer? Just comment on what you were saying about in the world of TikTok and Clubhouse and new social platforms, why Google? I would add some context to it. One, it’s like you said, it’s the top search engine on the planet. They’re also very well positioned for video, they own YouTube. As we see more video-powered SEO – search engine optimization – rolling out, they’re in a great spot to dominate there, also. So there is a little bit of a- it’s not a shiny penny, but it’s not as if there isn’t video being integrated into this.
Jason Pantana:
The other thing I would say is we’re in a world where we’re seeing internet privacy changes all over the place, which is making social media algorithmically more difficult to be heard and reach audiences and so forth. And yet, Google is really skating where the puck is going to be and where the puck is going to be is consumers coming, looking for what they want. It has been for a while. Social media lives in a world where the algorithms show you what they think you want to see next. Google lives in a world where it shows you what you asked for, and that world is a good space to be, which is why I think location authority is a local SEO term. I do talk about it pretty often. Anybody who’s listening and they run their own business – they’re an agent, they’re on a team, maybe they have a brokerage firm, something to that effect – they should have a Google My Business listing or a Google My Business profile set up. That Google My Business profile is sort of the gateway into your local SEO play.
Jason Pantana:
Google is putting a lot of effort right now into really optimizing their search engine and Google Maps to really cater to local intent searches. You might have wondered, “Hey, how come when I Google my name, my Google My Business doesn’t always show up? But if I Google my name, comma Nashville, or some location identifier, boom! I can trigger that profile to show up.” Well, that’s really a product of, your name doesn’t have enough location authority attached to it. It takes an actual location like Nashville or Albuquerque or something like that for Google Search to really say, “They want something local.” Yet, it should be that when they search your name, your business is so ingrained into the local community of your marketplace that Google just automatically in first, “They want this local agent, plain and simple, period.” So it triggers showing your Google My Business. A Google My Business, it shows in two cases: they show up with somebody whenever Google thinks the searcher wants something local, it will show a Google My Business listing and/or on Google Maps, which on Google Maps, of course, they always want something local.
Jason Pantana:
Those are the two spots where your profile can show up. It’s where you can read your reviews and all that kind of stuff. What we’re talking about today with location authority is, “What are the actions you can take to really optimize your Google My Business listing so that it really has a low threshold to showing your profile whenever it thinks it’s appropriate?” Sometimes a business – if their location authority is so low that somebody can search your name, comma, a city, and they still can’t trigger it – you can test that by actually going physically to the place where you listed as your business address, like you’re standing in your office and you turn the location settings on – location tracking on your device on – and then you try searching and chances are, it will show it.
Jason Pantana:
What that tells you is the location authority is so weak that, unless a person is physically standing in your office directly, Google does not have enough confidence to rank your business listing, which is clearly the opposite of where we want this to go. So building location authority is to say, building SEO, local SEO, locally optimized content for search. Is that too much or does that make sense?
Gayle Weiswasser:
Yeah, that makes sense. You said something so interesting before, about how with Google, you are in control of what you’re searching for and what you’re seeing, that the content that appears to you is directed by you and what you’ve put into it. Whereas with so many of the other platforms – TikTok comes to mind first – TikTok is telling you what they think you want, and you are a passive participant in that process as you scroll your For You page based on an algorithm that you have little control over and/or insight into. Facebook is obviously the same thing.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Whereas here, you’ve got very self-directed people who know exactly what they’re searching for and exactly what they want, and you are doing your best to appear in what they’re seeing. I hadn’t really ever thought about it that way, but that’s so interesting. It’s such a contrast of Google Search and some of those other platforms, even Instagram.
Jason Pantana:
It’s not a clean line. There’s an algorithm involved with Google Search but it is different, it’s more self-directed. But I usually joke that scanning through your feeds on social is basically listening to the radio – the DJ spins the tunes and you’re just listening. Of course, it’s based upon historical interactions and there are some intense signals in there that it ranks on that kind of stuff. Like you said, it’s a much higher intent action when you go searching for something on Google then when you casually stumble upon it on social.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Yeah, that’s really true. Okay, let’s talk very concretely about ways that agents can build location authority so they reap the benefits of those leads. You talked about the problem, that you don’t want to be sitting someplace and Googling yourself and then you’re not showing up. How do you safeguard against that situation?
Jason Pantana:
Yeah. The first thing is – this is a great question – the first thing is you’ve got to really lock in your NAP, your N-A-P. It’s NAP, it’s an acronym that stands for your name, address, and phone number. One of the challenges a lot of agents will have is they’re doing business out of the same office address as dozens of other agents, presumably. The office itself might have its own Google My Business. Actually, back in 2016, in an older version of Google Search, there was an issue where it was commingling reviews – reviews on somebody else’s listing would show up in somebody else’s because they had the same address and it got confused. They fixed that, but Google has to have a lot of confidence in who you are.
Jason Pantana:
The first thing I’m saying is your name. Google has specific best practices, which you can Google, on naming convention. For example, let’s just pretend Homesnap was a brokerage. I would be Jason Pantana and Homesnap Realty. Just for instance, that “and” is the marker that Google looks for to say, “This is an agent who’s operating out of that office location.” So just really understanding how they’re interpreting that, “You’re a unique business versus somebody else or the dozens of other agents.” It’s the name, your business name.
Jason Pantana:
It’s also the address you use. Whatever address you use, it needs to be, character for character, the same on every other profile. That means if I see your address on realtor.com or if I see your address on your actual website, if you spell out the word “avenue,” spell it out every time. If you spell out the word “suite,” spell it out every time and/or don’t, if you don’t do it every time. It just needs to be- make it dumb and easy for Google to say, “This is definitely the same person.” As far as your naming convention goes, I would argue to do your best, also, that it matches up across your social profiles. You want to make it easy for Google to associate you with all your other accounts. That’s going to build your location authority.
Jason Pantana:
The last piece of NAP is your phone number. You need a local unique phone number. I would not recommend using an attributed tracking phone number or a fake phone number. I would use a real local phone number, and it needs to be unique. Do not use your office’s phone number or it will think you are your office and your business will probably get rejected or deactivated or something like that, so that’s the first thing. There’s a lot of commentary. I know Moz has done a lot of research on lots of businesses operating on the same address, which is a common tale in our industry. What I told you should take care of most of those instances, just name, address, phone number. But I would also say it’s the same as with any other profile – fill it out completely. That means adding lots of photos, adding videos, getting and generating reviews. That means using their Google posts, their products. It just means filling out the profile as much as you can. It means listing out the categories that you serve, such as real estate agencies, real estate agents, real estate consultants.
Jason Pantana:
What you’re going to want to do is, when you’re logged in your Google My Business – it’s business.google.com – click on the info section and literally field for field, fill that profile out to the best of your ability. The more you fill it out, the greater confidence Google places on you to rank your profile and local search. I can talk about it, I can keep on going. It’s kind of the setup stuff: name, address, phone number, fill out the profile. But there’s also some ongoing things you can do to really build your location authority and I’m happy to jump over there if you want me to go that deep, that quickly.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Well, I think we’ll get to that. I wanted to mention that Homesnap does offer some services to agents that can help with the process you just described. One of the things we offer as part of our Homesnap Pro+ product – which is a premium paid version of Homesnap Pro on top of regular Homesnap Pro, which is what is provided for free through the MLS – is we can help agents with the process of filling out that Google business profile. We can verify who they are with Google so they don’t have to do that themselves. We can populate some of those fields you talked about so we’ve got the information about where they are and their website and all of that. But then, we can also help with getting reviews and populating pictures of listings and recent transactions and things like that.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Homesnap really is one of the few, maybe one of the only, products out there that really does help you get some of that basic profile information in there, get you verified, and also, we maintain it so you don’t even have to really think about it. Once it’s done, Homesnap goes from there and you don’t have to constantly remind yourself, “I need to add this profile or review or I need to talk about this recent transaction.” That can be done for you through Homesnap.
Gayle Weiswasser:
So we’ve talked about GMB and we’ve talked about how to get the basics of that presence there. Are there other sites outside of Google that an agent needs to be on top of to ensure that location authority is working in their favor? Other things that they need to monitor and make sure are current?
Jason Pantana:
Great question. Your Google My Business listing is a weird profile in that you can’t, like I just said, fill it out completely. But there are some things that you can’t fill out. There are some things that it’s going to either aggregate as it scans the web and makes associations with other pages or it won’t. For example, social media. It will or won’t determine this YouTube channel, this Twitter, this LinkedIn, this Facebook, this Instagram. Those are the five platforms that it services. Sometimes you’ll notice that certain profiles have profile links where they link out – They have the little icons of those platforms – out to other channels, sometimes they don’t. There’s limited control you have in being able to do that for Google. Google has to do it on its own, which is why you want to link back and forth between those accounts as much as possible.
Jason Pantana:
Again, on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, the major platforms that are out there, I would just be very conscientious of your naming structure. I know that some of you might have common last names or common names, and it’s hard to get a unique profile, for instance. I would really advise you that the display name is going to be important, too. For an Instagram, for instance, you get a username and a display name. If you can’t get the username, that’s the most matchy-matchy with all your other profiles, then look at that display name as a spot where you can grab hold of your naming convention across the web. Your social profiles, they have major SEO. Those are critical that they’re updated and accurate.
Jason Pantana:
Beyond that, I would say that your actual website, your domain, is really still the nucleus of all your SEO. So whatever is on it, does it link to your social profiles? Is the language, does it mention your name? Is it matching up with what you see in your Google My Business? Is it linked to from your Google My Business? Your website is going to be critical.
Jason Pantana:
I would also look at some of the major search portals – obviously Zillow, Realtor, Trulia, Homes.com – platforms like that. I’d be looking at Yelp. I would Google your name and any page that shows up. Let me go back, I would open up an incognito tab on your browser. That way, your historical searches aren’t factoring in, and then I would Google your name and whatever pages show up, those are the pages that you want to own the most because whatever’s on the top page – the first page of Google – is what matters the most.
Jason Pantana:
So yes. Yelp, Zillow, Trulia, realtor.com, those types of platforms. It could even be agent directory sites. In some cases, maybe My Agent Finder or those types of sites. Anywhere your name already populates, you need to make sure it’s populating the way you want it to.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Let’s talk a little bit about Yelp. Unlike some of these other platforms, Yelp is one that you really can’t control what people put there and what they say. How can you harness the power of Yelp and the benefit of Yelp without letting Yelp have too much control?
Jason Pantana:
Yelp is tricky because it’s hard to get your reviews published there. Yelp is highly protective of, “We don’t want rogue reviewers coming up and leaving the first review.” Then it seems like it was a biased, cherry picked review. They want to have what they would deem as authentic reviews and stuff. There are some techniques and tricks, which is if you have really raving fans – your best fans, the people who are the biggest supporters of your business – you can ask them, would they review some other businesses first and then, once those reviews get published, would they come back and review yours? That’s kind of tedious, but it can be worth it because the other thing about Yelp is Yelp powers a lot of voice searches.
Jason Pantana:
With the exception of Google, Yelp powers Siri. If you search for something on Siri – I’m going to be careful not to say that too many times or my computer’s going to start listening to me – but if you use that voice assistant for asking for best agents nearby or whatever it might be, Yelp powers that. Yelp powers Alexa, too. If you have an Alexa, and I don’t want to trigger one of those to go off either, but it’s powered by those types of searches. So Yelp matters an awful lot. You can get reviews on it, you just need to ask your best people and really prioritize them to Yelp because they’re the most likely to take the steps it would take to get it published.
Jason Pantana:
Beyond that, you can still update your business profile and stuff like that to some degree, so you do have some control. I know they try to sell a lot of their ad products and their SEO really is strong. With Yelp, I guess I would look at it like this: be better off than your competition on Yelp. That would be my best hope. I know that’s kind of a cynical point of view, but be better off than the local competition. And the enemy of the best is good enough, so be good enough on Yelp and then, look at the other platforms where you can influence the most control. I hope that answer is sufficient.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Yeah. No, definitely. Those are some tricks I hadn’t even thought of and I liked that, how to just be better than everyone else. How about getting reviews? Some people find that uncomfortable, going to ask clients, ask former clients, “Go on and leave a review.” They feel like it’s intrusive or annoying. What are some best practices to help agents get the content they need without worrying about burning bridges?
Jason Pantana:
Absolutely. Well, if I could just offer a different perspective on whether or not that might feel invasive or intrusive, back when I was selling, I used to always tell folks – because reviews were actually a huge source of how I got business. Actually, believe it or not, it was Yelp and it was voice searches because I was the only agent getting Yelp reviews in my entire market, so I was cleaning up on those opportunities – but I used to say to folks, “Hey, you found me or you were influenced to decide to work with me based upon reading what my past customers had said about me in my reviews. It would mean a lot to me, and I suspect to future clients of mine, if you could give a comment about your experience in working with me, too.” In that particular script, I’m actually appealing to a sense of reciprocity that they almost are obligated to it because they benefited from it and therefore, they should fulfill it on their end.
Jason Pantana:
I know it’s a little meta, but it was effective. And it’s the truth, too. Because you’re doing a favor to me, but you’re also doing a favor to future folks who don’t know me and need the confidence that I am or am not the right agent to be hired for their buying, their selling, whatever they’re trying to do. The first thing I’d say is, “A point of view is it’s the world we live in.” We live in a peer review. We live in a world where we’re given feedback and deciding who we do or don’t work with.
Jason Pantana:
Number two, I would basically create a checklist of the wins. When is somebody the most excited about the prospect of leaving you a review? Well, if you just went through and beat out 22 other multiple offers, that’s a great opportunity to get a review. I think we oftentimes hold that, “I can’t ask for a review until they’ve already closed.” What if they don’t close? But we didn’t say it’s a past transaction review – it’s a client review, and a client review can happen at any point in the process. I was strategically asked early. That way, you have multiple attempts of asking again and again until you get it. This is like anything else. Persistence pays off.
Jason Pantana:
You may have to ask somebody more than once. I don’t know if this is considered taboo – I have plenty of clients who are willing to pay Starbucks gift cards. Of course, under the legal limit. They’re not going to violate kickback laws or anything like that, so make sure you don’t go crossing RESPA. But I have plenty of clients who are, “Hey, would you like a $10 Starbucks card? Leave us a review, please.” I have some clients who just flat out send the Starbucks gift card and they say, “It would mean a lot to us if you left us a review.” Once again, they’re invoking a sense of reciprocity: “You gave me the Starbucks card. Therefore, I’ll give the review.” And the reviews are worth it. Every review, every five-star review, is worth it.
Jason Pantana:
Those clients I’m thinking of, I think they picked up their last five or six listings off of people who just straight up called them off of their Google My Business listings. They literally say things like, “Hey, we’re thinking about selling. We read the reviews and it looks like you do a lot of business with other folks who are selling their homes. You’d be a good fit for us, too.” I also tell folks to really double down on getting seller reviews and we call them seller stories where they tell the story about working with you.
Jason Pantana:
Asking early, asking often, asking around the wins is a good way to do it, and I would also try to make it easy. Giving somebody the link to go review me on Google, what if your location authority’s lousy? “Hey, just go Google my name and then leave me a review.” Well, what if your profile doesn’t pop up? Well, believe it or not – not believe it or not – but when you log into the backend of your Google My Business – business.google.com – there is a review form where it’s a direct, deep link that goes straight to somebody leaving you a review. What a lot of our clients do is they’re actually buying other domains like reviewjason.com and it automatically forwards to that review intake form. That way, it’s easy to drive somebody to give me reviews. I don’t have to say, go to g.http.this.onetwothree._.whatever it is. I can have a very simple domain. You could also do a sub domain, so I could say go to reviews.jasonpantana.com. Then I’m not even paying for another domain. I’m just going to GoDaddy or DreamHost or whatever my provider is and I’m adding a sub domain just to streamline how easy it is.
Gayle Weiswasser:
How does the review get from that sub domain page onto Google?
Jason Pantana:
For instance, if you go to business.google.com, on that little splash page, there is a link where you can send somebody to go directly to a review. Which is fine if they can click that link. But where that gets lost is if you say to somebody out loud, “Hey, would you mind leaving me a review?” And they say, “Absolutely. Just send me the link or where should I go to do that?” It would be great if you could say, “Just go to review.jasonpantana.com.” And then, let’s pretend that GoDaddy is hosting my domain and I have that set up through GoDaddy. You can set up your URLs to actually just forward to a different link.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Oh, Okay, Got it.
Jason Pantana:
If you go to review.jasonpantana.com, it doesn’t actually load a page. It actually redirects to that intake form on Google.
Gayle Weiswasser:
I see. Oka, got it.
Jason Pantana:
That’s just a way to make it easier.
Gayle Weiswasser:
All right. Okay. Let’s talk about photos. We hear over and over again how important visual content is, this is the age of photo and video. How do agents incorporate photos and I guess video, too, in such a way that it can also work to boost both their location authority and their just overall Google presence?
Jason Pantana:
Okay. There’s a lot that can be happening with photos here. The first thing I’ll do is I’ll reference a bright, local study. They did it in 2019, so it’s probably about a year and a half old now, the study, but I think it’s truer now than ever before. What they did, all industries – real estate, hotels, restaurants, you name it – all industries, and what they found was that business profiles, business listings for Google that have more than a hundred photos got way more clicks. In fact, they had 1065% more people click the website link to go to their website. They had 520% more people click the number to call them directly. So photos have a direct corollary to more calls, more website traffic.
Jason Pantana:
In fact, I have several of my coaching clients who they’ve made me a manager of their Google My Business listing, so I can go back in and look at the insights and I can see what days of the week are the most likely to make the phone ring. I get alerts on how many views they’re getting on photos, and it’s easy to see the effect. First, a lot of people see your profile and then the phone starts ringing. I would reinforce that this is a necessity – you’ve got to be adding photos, a lot of photos, because the more photos you offer, the more calls you get, the more website traffic you get. There’s a direct benefit for it. The goal is to get over a hundred photos. If you don’t have a hundred photos, I would not recommend just uploading a hundred today. I think you’re going to lose the impact of that. I think it works when you do it like anything else? The results from the repetition – you got to do it over and over and over again.
Jason Pantana:
So I would add one or two a day or have somebody help you do that until you cross over a hundred. But I get emails from my clients: “Hey, we had 13,000 people look at your photos on Google Maps this month.” That’s a meaningful insight. If you were looking on social media and you had that many impressions run any kind of an ad campaign, you had that many impressions and that big of a reach, that’s worth something to you. And these are free. What’s more, your Google My Business insights, it will show you what search queries people are running on Google, where it actually is showing your Google My Business listing. Except now, you have direct optics on when they see your photos based upon their searches, and that’s when you really start tying the analytics with the photos.
Jason Pantana:
So a hundred plus photos. I would add them and, if you want to be savvy, I would also geotag the photos. There are tools like GeoImgr – it’s G-O-I-M-G-R.com – and I have a video on my Instagram if you want to go watch the video that demos how to do this. But you can literally take your photo, run it through GeoImgr, and then you can apply the actual physical address. Let’s pretend it’s a picture of a listing: 123 Banana Street. You can actually tag 123 Banana Street. That’s called the EXIF code, it’s kind of like part of the file name. Nobody sees it except for Google as they’re scanning the photo itself, so it’s kind of a digital term but it tells Google where this location was, which is reinforcing location authority in the areas where you’re actually selling homes.
Jason Pantana:
What I’ve got my clients doing is geotagging their photos and aiming to do more than a hundred, and the photos are pictures of them, pictures of their team, pictures their clients took, pictures of listings just sold. Sometimes they’re actually pictures of them with a Zillow review superimposed over top of it. It’s just anything and everything. I would also say videos are useful, too. There’s an opportunity for you to show people an example, like here’s a sample listing video. Here are my pro tips series. There are some file size limits, so Google doesn’t want large video files but this is an opportunity to really index more profoundly. The more content you feed Google, the more opportunity you have to show up in search results, period.
Gayle Weiswasser:
When you talk about putting photos up, where are we talking about?
Jason Pantana:
It’s a great question, there’s two spots. I’m talking about in the Photos section. There is a section of Google called Google Posts. Google Posts are basically, you can use them to repurpose social media content. I do, my clients do, but those disappear after seven days so they’re gone. I would have no qualms if you were to say, “Well, I have a photo.” Let’s pretend it’s a photo of a new listing that I would like to use as a photo and as a Google Post. I would say more power to you. Do it in both places because the Google Post will go away before too long. The Google Photo will remain. Does that answer your question?
Gayle Weiswasser:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). But you’re not talking about posting them on your social media platforms. You’re talking about posting within the Google ecosystem.
Jason Pantana:
Yeah. So business.google.com, there is a section called Posts and there’s a section called Photos. I’m talking about in those spaces, and I’m actually talking about … just reuse your social media content for Google Posts.
Gayle Weiswasser:
How does social media content reinforce your Google presence?
Jason Pantana:
I think mostly, it’s – forgive the expression – kissing the ring to some degree of just giving them more content for the Google Posts, but it does give a sign of life. For example, if somebody is looking at your Google My Business listing and they realize you’ve been uploading content and offering new things all the time, it gives a sense that this is an active, vibrant business and they’re out there doing it – they’re not a static, “can I really trust them” type of business? That’s the Google Post section.
Jason Pantana:
I’m also a fan, they have a section called Products. That’s another space. I have a lot of my clients who are actually listing their listings in the Products section, which is smart – it just links over to their website where you can look at the page there. And they’re also repurposing offers like “Get a Free Home Valuation,” “Search for Homes,” “Download Our Buyer Guide, Our Seller Guide.”
Jason Pantana:
Those types of offers, they’re repurposing them in the Google Products section of their Google My Business listing. Again, this is a matter of going in under the hood of business.google.com, looking at all the different feature sets they offer, and starting to use them. The more you use them, the more you’re going to reinforce your location authority. And by the way, geotagging those photos will help Google sense that, “This is an active profile and they’re doing business, we presume. They’re claiming to do business in these prescribed service areas and they’re uploading photo content that is actually physically marked as originating from those areas, too.” I hope that’s not too complex of a thought.
Gayle Weiswasser:
No, I don’t think so. All right, let’s talk about mistakes. What are some that you see agents making all the time when it comes to this stuff?
Jason Pantana:
The most obvious mistake is they’re not doing anything with it. It’s there and they’re not even managing it. They’re not replying to reviews, we’ll start there. They get people who review them, you should reply and comment to every single review – good, bad, or otherwise – every single review. They’re not utilizing the features, so they’re not uploading posts, they’re not uploading products, they’re not utilizing the Q&A section. They’re just leaving the opportunity on the table.
Jason Pantana:
A mistake is there’s inaccurate information: the name is off, the addresses off, the phone number is off. Again, missing profile gaps. There’s a section in there where you can actually say, “If you want to book an appointment with me, go here,” and you can easily put a Calendly link or something like that in there. I just see missed opportunities, in large part with Google My Business. Then I see maybe one photo, two photos, or no photo at all. That’s not a good effect because if somebody Googles your name and that pops up and they don’t see anything, it just doesn’t leave the right experience for the consumer. I would say those are some of the obvious mistakes I see.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Okay. Well, that makes sense. If you have a weak amount of content and a weak profile, then whoever comes across to you is going to assume that you are not active – that you’re not bu, you don’t have clients, you don’t have relationships, you don’t have transactions – and then they’re going to move on to the next one.
Jason Pantana:
I would also add, I come across lot of agents who somehow, in their experience, have multiple duplicate profiles.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Mm. Okay. What do you do if that happens?
Jason Pantana:
Well, half the time, they’re, “I don’t know who set it up for me,” or, “I don’t have the password to get back into it.” In fact, I dealt with that on the coaching session this morning. You go to Google support chat and you can ask for them to call you. If you get them on the phone, they’ll literally remove the listing for you. But if you can get access yourself, if you have the password, there’s just a remove listing button – remove it. Don’t permanently close it, it’ll say that it’s closed. Click the remove listing button. That way, it vanishes. It doesn’t exist any longer. Those duplicate listings, those are ones that get people in trouble a lot. I’ve even seen them where they’ve got a stronger location authority because they’ve typically been around longer than maybe a new one. So it’s paramount that you get rid of them.
Gayle Weiswasser:
All right. Well, this has been a tremendous amount of information. Thank you, Jason, for sharing so much concrete, very actionable, easily implemented digital marketing information here about Google. I think that’s been great.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Before I let you go, though, I’m going to ask you the question I always ask people who come on the show. Do you have some apps that you can share that you use for relaxation or productivity or entertainment – it doesn’t have to be related to real estate or even search or digital or anything like that – that you’d like to share with our audience?
Jason Pantana:
Hmm. I love it. I certainly get a dose of relaxation when my calendar is organized and when my email is [clean 00:34:04].
Gayle Weiswasser:
That’s true.
Jason Pantana:
I do. I definitely get a shot of dopamine whenever I clear the inbox, no doubt. I would tell you, just the basics. I’m super active in the podcast app. I typically use either Spotify or Apple. I make a lot of use of Audible just for listening. And then also, I would tell you Apple’s notes app. I’m a fan of native apps. I just liked the way they work and I like that it syncs between all my Apple devices. But I do a lot with Apple notes – I jot down ideas and just the simple stuff. Then it syncs up and it’s accurate, it does me a world of good from a content planning standpoint, from a to-do list standpoint and those things. I know that’s nothing special or crazy, but that is what comes to mind, right now.
Gayle Weiswasser:
No, that’s good. Thank you. All right. Well, thank you so much for sharing all this information. Jason, where can people find you online if they want to learn more about your expertise and your content related to search and location authority?
Jason Pantana:
You can Google me, Jason Pantana – P-A-N-T-A-N-A – you can head to my website, I keep a blog up-to-date there: jasonpantana.com. Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Clubhouse – Jason Pantana across the board. P-A-N-T-A-N-A. I probably am the most active on Instagram, YouTube, and the blog.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Okay, great. Well, I’m going to guess that your Google profile is pretty robust.
Jason Pantana:
Well, it is, but I’m not technically a local business, which makes it a little bit different for me. Because I service the world, technically.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Right.
Jason Pantana:
My clients’ Google business profiles are robust, I’ll give you that.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Okay. Well, good. That’s what we’re looking for here. All right, well, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.
Jason Pantana:
Thanks for having me. This was fun, I appreciate it.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Great. Have a good rest of your day.
Jason Pantana:
You, too. Thanks.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Thanks for listening to another episode of the Snapshot. I hope that you enjoyed what you heard today. If you have a moment, please leave us a review – it really helps us get new listeners. This podcast is part of Industry Syndicate, a curated media network containing the highest rated real estate and mortgage podcasts. Find other excellent real estate content at industrysyndicate.com, home of real estate’s first media network.