Happy Sunday. Reminder: If you're doing Costco pies for your clients next week, check your local store to see if they're limiting how many you can buy. (One of ours is, the other isn't.) The Lead Hide and seek vanish. You may never be found for "near me" searches if you hide your address in your Google Business Profile. On YouTube, Joy Hawkins and Colan Nielsen unpack that and several other things that influence "near me" search results. Goodbye local pack? AI Overviews might replace Google's...
28 days ago • 9 min read
Happy Sunday, you! I know you're busy. Thanks for reading. The Lead Rally time. Thanks in large part to AI/LLMs, citations are making a comeback*. Claudia Tomina explains what's going on and offers some ideas on how best to manage all those business profiles across the internet. Personal problems. I keep seeing agents post screenshots of themselves showing up at the top of a ChatGPT or Perplexity answer, which is great! But it's also very possible that the answer has been personalized and is...
about 1 month ago • 10 min read
Happy Sunday! And happy end of daylight saving time -- you've got an extra hour to enjoy today's newsletter. 😉 The Lead Working on your website? Don't miss Miriam Ellis' guide to the perfect small business website. It's not real estate-focused, but there's still a lot of great info in there. Bring it on. Google just announced a new feature coming soon to Search Console. "Query groups" will pull together similar search terms that represent different ways of searching for the same...
about 1 month ago • 9 min read
Hey you! It took a while, but I've finally come to terms with the Mariners missing the World Series. Again. For the 49th straight season. I'm okay with it now. As you can tell. 😉 Thanks for reading, let's get into it. The Lead Ch-ch-changes. Have you seen the new way ChatGPT answers local prompts? The bullet list of names/info has been replaced by a more Googley/visual answer that pulls info direct from your Google Business Profile. We had two separate conversations about this in my...
about 2 months ago • 13 min read
Searching for a new CRM this weekend? I feel that. Good luck. Let me know what you come up with. Thanks for reading today's newsletter. The Lead Double your fun. If you manage the Google Business Profiles for multiple offices, look for this new "Profiles" icon that makes it easier to switch from one to another. Another seemingly related improvement: the ability to share one Post across multiple GBPs. Nice to see Google upgrading GBP tools like this. This mostly tracks. Realtor. com just...
about 2 months ago • 11 min read
Today's newsletter was almost canceled because I was supposed to go to Seattle for that marathon, 15-inning playoff game on Friday. But I didn't, so hello and happy Sunday -- especially to my fellow Seattle Mariner fans! Let's talk real estate marketing... The Lead ZillowGPT. Zillow and ChatGPT are BFFs now. I think this changes very little for agents in the trenches. (Do you think Zillow users will flock en masse to ChatGPT to search Zillow instead of...just going to Zillow? I don't.) But I...
2 months ago • 8 min read
Hey there -- we made it to 100 issues. Thanks for reading. We're diving into SEO metrics today. Let's do this. The Lead Better than one. Amy Toman shares a good reminder that, when it comes to managing your Google Business Profile, two or three users is the way to go. Weird. Several tools show ChatGPT is citing Reddit in its answers much less than "normal." (As if "normal" exists in AI answers...) The timing of this drop coincides with that &num=100 Google issue that I mentioned two issues...
2 months ago • 10 min read
Hello you! Had a great birthday, thanks for asking. I was at an SEO conference. Gonna tell you all about it today. Thanks for "celebrating" with me. 😅 The Lead 800 Google reviews...gone. Google warned months ago that it would be cracking down on reviews that violate its guidelines. Claudia Tomina just posted about one client who lost 800 reviews, among other penalties. It's a retail business, but still a warning to all SMBs like you who rely on reviews and your Google Business Profile. Skip...
3 months ago • 11 min read
You've got two days left to get me a birthday present! 😅 J/K, I don't expect any gifts. But the nicest thing is telling another agent about Marketing Unlocked. Just like with real estate, referrals are the best gift of all. The Lead AI Overviews 🤝 GBP. This may just be a test, but Anthony Higman spotted Google using an entire local pack of Google Business Profiles as an AI Overview. I tested it on mobile and saw the same thing for the phrase "truck accident attorneys montana." NGL, I think...
3 months ago • 12 min read