It was 4 months ago that Google offered real estate search within their excellent mapping platform. Last week began what will likely become a steady and progressive expansion of the exposure of this service within more general Google searches – this is certainly going to be a beneficial move for the consumer.
When initially released, to be able to search for property (sale or rent) on a Google map required a number of steps and a fair amount of investigative ability. It did almost seem like Google had in some way hidden this service away from the mass of the market. Were they doing a cautious test or were they apprehensive as to the reaction by the industry??
It was as a function of this limited visibility that the re-direct traffic gained for realestate.co.nz from this service was tiny in comparison to the thousands of visitors everyday who arrive at realestate.co.nz from a Google search. Now this latest change, very ably detailed in this post from the Google maps product manager Andrew Foster will likely see a greater referral traffic from Google maps.
On every Google maps page there is an “More” box at the top right section. Within this is the options for adding to Google maps search results content such as photos, video, wikipedia entries, webcams and now real estate – tick the box and the map now populates with the latest listings of property for sale or rent.
Realestate.co.nz feeds a comprehensive extract from our database every day to Google so with over 112,000 listing you can be sure that the presentation on these maps is the most comprehensive representation of whats truly on the market. Realestate.co.nz is the only portal confident to feed content to Google – Trade me property chooses not to share this great information.
As an industry owned website we have a focus to provide our customers with the best marketing of their listings across the web as well as to provide the property searching public with the best web experience – sharing content with Google is the best way to meet both of these objective perfectly.
I also found this post on this subject from Brian Boero who writes the excellent 1000Watt Consulting blog – he provides a useful USA perspective to this introduction of Google map enhancements for real estate.