In this video, I show you how to systematically dominate your local market with real estate reviews. Whether you’re starting from scratch or have a bit of momentum, you’ll be able to see where you sit currently and how to adjust to dominate your market.

Step 1: Setup/Claim/Verify All of the Key Sites

The first step in your review generation strategy is to setup or claim all of the profiles for your real estate business on the key review sites.

These sites include: Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com, Yelp, Google My Business, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

If desired, it also wouldn’t hurt to go through and claim or setup your profile on the sites shown on Moz Local to make sure you’re controlling your entire review landscape.

Step 2: Setup Your Review Funnel

After all your sites are setup and claimed, you need a site to house these links to make it easy for your clients to know where to review you.

This site should also include instructions on how to leave a review on each site and potentially show examples of other reviews that can help show your clients what kind of reviews they should leave.

You can either build this site from scratch by having it designed/coded, use a site like leadpages or instapage to build out this lander, or my TOP recommendation, would be to use a site like realreviews.xyz which has a system already built out to house these links, guide your clients, and even helps to filter out negative reviews before they hit the review portals.

Get Initial Reviews on Each Key Site

After getting your sites setup and a platform established to direct clients to the review sites, the next action you’ll want to take is getting a minimal amount of reviews set up on these sites. The goal of this step is less about getting business from your reviews (but that’s coming) and more about making sure each of these sites doesn’t HURT your chances of getting business.

Step 3: Get At Least 3 Reviews on Zillow

Zillow is the primary driver for real estate business and is a key destination for potential clients to research you. Getting at least 3 reviews on Zillow ensures that your profile meets some minimal requirements to start looking good on Zillow.

Step 4: Transfer reviews from Zillow to Trulia

After getting your initial reviews on Zillow, make sure to get them over to Trulia as well to further the leverage you’re getting off of those reviews.

Further, ensure that you’re adding all your reviews from any of the sites to Trulia as you go.

Step 5: Get At Least 3 Reviews on Google My Business

Since most of your customers will be starting their search on Google, this is the next most important destination to focus on. Work quickly to get 3 reviews on Google My Business in order to have an effective search presence.

Step 6: Get At Least 1 Review on Yelp

Yelp can be harder to get reviews to stick, so we’re setting the bar lower for Yelp. Get at least 1 Yelp review to stick (you can check by visiting your Yelp profile and seeing if the review shows up).

Again, this will not do much to get you new business, but can definitely help your appearance when clients search for you on Yelp.

If possible, ask your clients/potential reviewers if they are already using Yelp before asking them to leave a review there.

Step 7: Get At Least 1 Review and 1 Recommendation on Realtor

Realtor.com is the third most visited real estate site, as such, it’s a good place to make sure you have some level of a presence as well. I recommend a minimum of 1 reivew and 1 recommendation, but like the other real estate portals, it could be advantageous to get at least 3 of each on this site as well.

Focus, Grow, Repeat

So, by now, you’ve established a system for collecting reviews and have gotten your initial reviews to make sure your web presence doesn’t look like you’re “brand new.” Now it’s time to get into the long term process of how you’ll start to “own” any review portal you want to!

Step 8: Check for competition and Find a Weak Spot

To determine your first plan of attack for long term review site domination, I recommend looking for a site that has a weak point that you can leverage.

The best way to do this is to visit each of the review sites, and search for an agent as if you were a client. Try and figure out how each site is ranking agents and then figure out if there is a good option that is easier than others for starting to own a piece of the market.

An example of this is on Zillow – as of the writing of this guide, zillow ranks agents based on the reviews that they’ve generated in an Specific Area. So you could potentially gain a small market advantage in a specific area by focusing on generating reviews in a geographic niche. This would mainly involve looking in the areas you currently do business to see if there are any markets without a clear review dominator for that market.

Step 9: Focus Your Requests Around Where you Can Gain a Foothold

Once you’ve determined where you have an entry point into a review site, focus your requests on that site to build momentum quickly. The alternative would be to ask for reviews for ALL sites you’re interested, but the reality is that you’ll slowly build reviews on each site but not likely generate new business on these for a long time.

By focusing your efforts, you can get to the point of finding new business through your reviews quicker.

The realreviews.xyz service allows you to pick a site you want to emphasize, while still showing other options. For most agents, I often recommend focusing on Zillow first, but showing the options for Google and Yelp reviews. The reason for this is that building reviews on Zillow is powerful, but Google and Yelp reviews can be difficult to get as easily. By showing Yelp and Google as options, anyone who is already using these services is more likely to select these options that are harder to build in the long run.

Step 10: Rinse and Repeat

After you reached the point of success on a given review site, switch your focus to a new site that you think you can dominate using the weakness finding strategies from above.

Do keep an eye on the competition for your established site(s) while you build your new focus though, as you don’t want your hard work to be beaten out by a new competitor.

If someone new comes along that looks like they might dethrone you from an established site, switch your focus back to make sure to stay ahead of the competition.

Overtime, you’ll be able to systematically build out reviews on all the major platforms and build a free lead source that continually generates new warm business for you.

Still have questions or comments? Drop them in the comments below to continue the discussion.