A new specialist digital service that is designed to help estate agents and PropTechs has been launched today.

GeoCale, founded by Ben Marley, aims to help businesses in the residential property sector to optimise their Google Business Profiles, making it easier for their Google Business Profile to be found on Google’s local and map searches.

Previously the commercial director at the ESTAS Group, Marley has spent over a decade in the residential property sector. Prior to that, he held senior positions at Rightmove and Feefo, where he was involved in online reviews for estate agents.

Marley commented: “Businesses in our sector spend significant amounts of money, in many cases thousands of pounds per month, on pay per click (PPC) and search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns to generate website traffic. However, if their Google Business Profiles are correctly optimised, they can rank higher in local Google searches organically, which significantly reduces the need for paid adverts to generate the same amount and quality of traffic. These monthly savings on marketing spend can make a considerable difference to profitability or can be reinvested into other areas of the business.”

He continued: “For example, Google quotes that 50.2% of searches result in a click, of which the ‘map pack’ on Google and the top three Google profiles within it receive as many as 44% of these clicks.  Because the ‘map pack’ is the most engaged area of Google, it’s that essential businesses who want to attract local customers ensure their Google Business Profiles are as best optimised as possible.  This means that they will feature within the ‘map pack’ as a result of being the most relevant business based on the Google search performed by the consumer.”

The GeoCale website, which also launches today, offers a free business profile report which provides an immediate snapshot of how well any website is performing against local competitors, based on current levels of Google profile and website optimisation.  GeoCale is offered on an exclusive basis by town, meaning that once an estate agent is onboarded as a client, no other agents in their town will also be able to use the service.

Marley added: “Every time someone searches for a service, Google looks at over a million results in under a second and presents three companies in the map as the most relevant businesses to the searcher. This is why it’s so important that a business’s Google profile is optimised and relevant for Google to select its profile as opposed to its competitors and is exactly why I’ve founded GeoCale; to help businesses improve their profiles so they can be seen more, get more clicks, and attract more customers.”