Google My Business For Apartments: How To Optimize Your Listings
At Resident360, we come across lots of Google My Business listings that are unclaimed by management companies. That’s the listing that typically shows up on the right hand side of a local Google Search result (see below).
The true beauty of a Google My Business listing is that it can help with your local apartment SEO. Plus, it gives you extra exposure with a huge listing on the right side of the search result. To achieve both you need to have a well optimized listing.
Let’s first look at how Google determines your local ranking:
Local results are based primarily on relevance, distance, and prominence. These factors are combined to help find the best match for the person searching.
#1 Relevance
Relevance refers to how well a local listing matches what someone is searching for. Adding complete and detailed property information can help Google better understand your community and match your listing to relevant searches.
#2 Distance
Just like it sounds–how far is each potential search result from the location term used in a search? If a user doesn’t specify a location in their search, Google will calculate distance based on what’s known about their location.
#3 Prominence
Prominence refers to how well-known a business or in this case an apartment community is. Prominence is also based on information that Google has about a business from across the web (like links, articles, and directories). Google review count and score are factored into local search ranking: more reviews and positive ratings will probably improve a community’s local ranking. Make sure to have a proactive plan for getting and responding to Google Reviews.
How to optimize your Google My Business apartments listing:
If you have yet to claim your listing, the below info will help. If you have your listing claimed, it’s a good idea to review the points below to ensure you’re doing all you can.
To start, you need to claim your listing. You can do that here. This can be kind of a pain in the butt, as you need to wait for a postcard to arrive from Google that verifies your physical address.
After that, you can use the following tips to make your Google My Business listing a success. One thing to note, everything you add to your listing must be in line with the information you provide on your website. Inaccurate information hurts your listing and any local SEO benefits you might be receiving.
- Claim your listing with your property name
- Choose your category – Most apartment communities are choosing only one category for their listing, but Google offers several more that you should be selecting as well. In this video, we’ll show you the exact categories you need to select.
- Fill out as much data as you can – your profile has to be 100%
- Double check your phone number
- Double check your opening times – don’t forget about holidays
- Review your photos – can you improve them?
- Create citations on other sites – directories, review sites, even ILS’s are considered citations
- Utilize Google Posts – Apartment communities that are utilizing Google Posts are being rewarded with increased activity. In this video, we’ll show you how to post and give you examples of what other communities are posting.
Wrapping Up
Remember with Google My Business for apartments, this is not a set it and forget it type of thing. Keep everything active, monitor reviews and stay on top of things.
Like This Post?
Please take a second and share on your favorite social media.
Written by Josh Grillo
Josh Grillo is a #1 Best Selling Author, Speaker and Co-Founder of Resident360.
A handy little article here my man – thanks! Although I’m currently experiencing the issues mentioned above, and I’m quite sure I’ve ticked all the boxes… venue date up-to-date, we have claimed the listings, but only 2 or 3 from 7 or 8 are showing at top of Google vs right-side box. Any more tips since you penned this?
Thx for the comment! Yes, I would add additional categories to the listing. Here’s a video I shot on it: https://youtu.be/PrOlWQIrEQA
Hi, thank you for your post.
I have a question, If I have a rental website with a lot of houses, should i create a google my businnes account for the website or one for each house? So if I have ten houses in total, should I create 10 accounts in total?
Thanks in advance
Thanks for the comment Marian. To answer your questions – I would just create one listing for your actual business. If these were apartment buildings, then you would want a separate listing for each, but since their houses I wouldn’t worry about it. Hope that helps.
We have multiple apartment buildings (3-20 different property names) all managed out of a centralized leasing office. We would like to claim each property, but don’t have office at each property to receive Google’s postcard. How can we go about claiming those ones?
I’ll add: Ask and answer questions about your business. I went through and asked all the questions I could think of that a prospect might ask at each of my communities, because I want to capture people asking those questions and keep them around my google listing instead of sending them off to an ILS, where they can see other communities.
Very smart Donje!
Great question Tiffany… You might be able to try bulk verification. Here’s a link https://support.google.com/business/answer/4490296?hl=en
What is the difference between GMB’s categories such as Apartment Complex vs Apartment Rental Agency in terms of being more relevant on searches with information showing? Lastly, I had a client ask if we were violating the suggestions by Google on which categories to choose (by their own research) by having an apartment rental agency as the primary category.
Ideally – you need to choose the MOST RELEVANT category as your Primary. The others fall secondary. I doubt your violating any terms if indeed your choosing categories that best represent what you do. If you rent apartments I see nothing wrong with Apartment Rental Agency as a category.
No questions here. I love this article. Everyone in marketing should read this article and implement Resident360’s advice. As marketing professionals, we spend so much time looking for ways to improve our digital presence and it usually comes at a cost. This article shows you how to improve your digital presence for free. Nice work, Josh!!