Why Does Zillow Show Up Above My Own Website When Someone Googles My Name?

Because Zillow has millions of pages, decades of links pointing at it, and a page about you that Google has trusted longer than it has trusted your site. That is the bad news. The good news is that your own name is the one search you can win, and most agents lose it for reasons that take a weekend to fix.

Ranking for realtor in Cheshire is a long fight. Ranking for your own name is not. If somebody types your name and Zillow comes back first, something on your end is missing.

Why the big platforms sit on top by default

Google decides who to show partly on trust, and trust is built from age, from how many other sites link to you, and from how much a site publishes. Zillow wins all three by a mile. Your site is a handful of pages on a domain that might be two years old.

So for a broad search like homes for sale in Wallingford, you are not beating them and you should not spend money trying.

Your name is different. A name search is a search for one specific person, and Google wants to return the thing that is most clearly about that person. Zillow's page about you is a template with your headshot dropped into it. Yours can be the real thing. That is a fight you start ahead in, and then most agents forfeit it.

The five reasons you are losing your own name

Your site has no page that is obviously about you. If your name appears once in a footer, Google has nothing to match. You need a page whose title is your name, that says what you do and where, and that reads like a person wrote it.

Your Google Business Profile is missing or unverified. For a name search in a specific place, that profile is often the strongest thing you can own, and it shows up on the right side of the results with your reviews attached. An agent in North Haven with a verified profile and thirty reviews will hold that space against a Zillow template.

Nothing points at your site. Your Zillow bio, your brokerage page, your Instagram, your Facebook, your LinkedIn, your email signature. Every one of those should link to your domain. Those links are the votes that tell Google your site is the real one.

Your name is written five different ways. Mike on one profile, Michael on another, a middle initial on a third. Pick one version and use it everywhere, exactly the same, including the brokerage name and the phone number.

You have no reviews anywhere but Zillow. If the only place your name appears with proof attached is their platform, you have handed them the argument.

What to do about it, in order

Build one page on your site titled with your name and what you do, something like Miles Herrick, Realtor in Wallingford CT. Put your story, your towns, your listings and your reviews on it. Link to it from your home page.

Claim and verify your Google Business Profile if you have not. This is free and it takes about fifteen minutes plus a wait for the postcard or video verification.

Go update every profile you own to link back to your site. This is an hour of clicking and it is the highest return hour in this whole list.

Ask for reviews on Google, not only Zillow. Ten Google reviews from this year will do more for a name search than fifty on a platform that is competing with you.

Publish something on your own domain every month so the site keeps a pulse. A market note about Southington, a page about what closing costs run in New Haven County, anything that is yours.

What good looks like when it is working

Type your name into a browser you are not signed into. The first page of results should be your site, your Google Business Profile with reviews on the side, your LinkedIn, and then the platforms.

If Zillow still sits at number two after all of that, leave it alone. You have already won the click that matters, because people scan for the result that looks like the person they were told to call.

One thing worth accepting

You will not remove yourself from these platforms and you should not want to. They catch people who are already browsing there. The goal is that when somebody hears your name from a friend in Meriden and goes looking, they land on you instead of on a page where three other agents are advertising next to your listings.

Own the name search. Rent the rest.

Questions agents ask me after this one

Want to see what comes back for your name right now?

If you want to know what a buyer sees when they go looking for you, that is what the Get Your Free Online Visibility Audit covers. I look at what shows up for your name, where your Google Business Profile stands next to the agents you compete with, and whether AI tools have enough about you to recommend you by name. Then I tell you what to fix and what each fix would change. If the answer is reviews and links rather than a new website, I will say so.