Don’t waste your efforts: Help your local SEO with things you’re already doing
Summary & Takeaways from Episode 92
The Invisible Barrier Between You and Your Clients
Most real estate agents are fighting an uphill battle against the “black box” of Google’s algorithm. You can be the top producer in your market, closing deals and providing elite service, but if your digital presence is buried in the graveyard of page two search results, you effectively don’t exist to the modern consumer.
The silent killer of your digital authority isn’t a lack of talent, it’s neglect. When you treat your online profiles and website as “set it and forget it” assets, Google’s bots assume your business is stagnant. Here are some tips to help you stop the “leakage” of your SEO juice and turn your digital presence into a centralized powerhouse.
The 5-Second Weekly Habit
Neglect can be a huge issue with your Google Business Profile. Google tracks “signals” to ensure a business is still active. If you ignore the “Are your business settings correct?” emails (which are often triggered by new features like parking attributes), Google might lose trust in your business information.
To protect yourself, adopt this 5-second weekly habit: Log into your GBP dashboard and click the Edit Profile and Edit Services tabs. You don’t even need to change anything. Simply scrolling through these settings signals to Google that you’re an active, trustworthy operator. It’s a “proactive pulse” that keeps the algorithm on your side.
Making Your Reputation “AI-Readable”
Here is a technical reality check: AI models like ChatGPT and Claude cannot “see” the star rating or review count on your Google Business Profile map interface. While they can scrape data from third-party aggregators like Birdeye or Experience.com, the map pack itself remains a blind spot for many LLMs.
To make your reputation “dummy-proof” for both AI and humans, you must centralize your social proof on your own website.
- The “175+” Strategy: Create a dedicated Reviews Page. Use clear, indexable text like “175+ Five-Star Google Reviews” rather than just a scrolling widget.
- Contextual SEO: Include long-form case studies or stories of specific deals. This tells the AI exactly what your expertise is (e.g., “downsizers” or “luxury condos”) and exactly where you operate.
- Centralization: Every time you send a client to an external platform to read reviews or read your guides etc, you are losing “link juice.” Keep that traffic on your website to get some SEO benefits out of it. Don’t send them to Google to read your reviews, send them to your Reviews page on your website (which should list all your reviews on all platforms and the approximate or exact number and total – in addition to having plain text and image reviews on the page).
“Vibe Coding” for Agents: The Power of the Custom HTML Block
“Vibe Coding” is the new frontier where agents use Gemini or Claude to generate functional code through natural language. Many agents are currently making the mistake of using external apps like Gamma to host neighborhood guides. This is a strategic blunder that wastes valuable SEO authority by gifting your traffic to another company’s domain.
Instead, use AI to build custom resources that live on your site. Here is the step-by-step:
- Research: Use Gemini to draft a comprehensive local guide (e.g., “The Ultimate Guide to Parks and Sports Facilities in Austin”).
- Generate HTML: Ask the AI for the output in HTML code specifically for your platform (WordPress, Lofty, Squarespace, etc.).
- The Custom Block: Create a new page on your site and paste the code into a Custom HTML block.
This keeps the “time on site” metric (a massive ranking signal) firmly attached to your URL/website.
The Google “Zillow-Killer”: Google’s ComeHome Experiment expanded with eXp Realty Integration
The landscape of property search just shifted under our feet. EXP Realty is now feeding listings directly to Google via the House Canary / ComeHome portal. This is a genuine “Zillow-Killer” move because it places listings at the very top of mobile search results, effectively bypassing the traditional portal-heavy search journey. And if they have an actual home search consumers can use similar to other portals, that could be huge.
This is highly disruptive: it routes leads directly to the listing agent without the “pay-to-play” barriers common on other platforms. It’s the kind of move that makes you wonder if Zillow’s stock is going to take a hit as Google starts amassing these direct feeds. However, even if it starts out free, it won’t stay that way. And it’s only a beta test at this point, so we shall see.
Currently, the beta-testing is happening in:
- Chicago
- Miami
- Cleveland
- Austin
- New York City Area
- Los Angeles
- San Diego
- San Francisco Bay Area
If you’re in these markets, and you’re an eXp agent or subscribe to MyStateMLC.com, your listings might have a “direct flight” to the top of Google, cutting out the middleman.
If you see ComeHome in your area, please let me know and send me screenshots and/or videos!
The Gemini Revolution: Notebooks and Gems
Google Gemini has introduced “Gems” (custom AI experts) that can now be powered by “Notebooks” (specialized knowledge bases). This saves the step of attaching notebooks in Gem chats in order to expand the Gem’s knowledge base (because the knowledge you can add directly in Gems is limited). You can now attach a Notebook in your Gem’s settings and then anything you put in that notebook will automatically carry over to your Gem.
Insider Technical Tip: In my experience, Gemini’s multimodal capabilities are currently superior to the standalone NotebookLM app. It is significantly better at scanning images, hand-written notes, or screenshots of market stats or other things within notebooks. However, there is a catch: you currently cannot add a notebook to an existing Gem (or at least I wasn’t able to in mine). To leverage this integration, you must delete your old Gem and create a new one to enable the direct Notebook LM integration.
The One-Stop Shop Philosophy
The strategy is clear: Stay on top of your Google Business Profile settings. And your website must be the center of your digital universe. Whether it’s your reviews, your neighborhood guides, or your listing feeds, housing content on your own domain ensures that every click and every second of “dwell time” compounds your authority over time.
Stop and ask yourself: “Is your digital presence a collection of fragmented links, or a centralized powerhouse that Google can’t ignore and compounds over time?”
