22. SEO For Real Estate Investors – The Ultimate Guide! [2019]

ACTUAL SEO For Real Estate Investors

Although this is a house flipping blog, it is important to discuss SEO for Real Estate Investors. The most important part of flipping is buying houses at the right price. The best way to get amazing deals is by having a ton of free high-quality leads. As we all know there is no better way to get quality leads than harvesting them from your SEO tuned website. Let’s focus on the Search Engine Optimization side of real estate investing. The way I see it, how will you flip a house if you can’t get any houses TO flip. That is why I think How to SEO For Real Estate Investors is important!

 

It bothers me to NO END when I read articles about SEO, especially about Search Engine Optimization for Real Estate Investors, where outdated regurgitated old info is just repeated site to site! So this is dedicated to all the experts out there and trying to teach them how it is done, and to all of you that actually want to UNDERSTAND SEO and not just follow and apply erroneous regurgitated crap to your website without thinking it through!

All websites about SEO for real estate Investing I have read is simply listing tips. How useless is that? SEO is a dynamic concept, it is not static. It changes, it depends on your goal, on your website. Providing a list of tips is for people that have zero understanding of SEO and I will try to break this habit with this post.

Functional SEO is about understanding what SEO is in its core. To provide you with actionable information on SEO, we need to take a few steps back and determine exactly what your goal is concerning SEO, right?

In all honesty, you do not care about ranking. You care about making deals, getting leads, so you can make a deal. SEO is just a step in that process to get you these leads by the ability to be found by people looking for your services, online. So how do I do SEO for my real estate website? Easy, read this post and do as I do!

The Most Important Concept To Understand For Successful SEO

How often do you see all these SEO guru websites talk about how to please Google? Google this, Google that, Google said this, Google wants that. The second you see a website trying to please google, run! Wait for the next Google update and you see them all running in circles panicking with their hands up in the air. No no, want to do functional SEO? FORGET GOOGLE!! Before you divorce me, unsubscribe and send me death threats, hear me out damn it!

 

Don’t Please Google; Please Your Users, Legitimately!

Think about it. What is Google‘s job? Well other than being filthy (rich). Google‘s only job is to present you the internet surfer with the best website based on what you typed into the search… Right? So what do website owners do? They want to be on top of the search results in any way possible. So the grey hat and black hat SEO is born. Manipulation of Google‘s algorithms to trick Google into thinking that the website is exactly what someone is looking for based on the search query.

Well, Google is not stupid… well actually it is… it is just an algorithm, BUT, google continuously tries (and is succeeding) to improve their algorithms to pick out these websites that manipulate the algorithm and punishes them by deindexing them.

Google Is Continuously Trying To Be More Human-Like

Yup, Google is always trying to be more human-like. What does this mean? Well, think about it. In the early days of SEO, all you had to do is repeat and stuff your keywords over and over again and Google would think that your website is a great match for those keywords. But what if a human was in charge of checking websites for manipulations back then? Would that website have gotten away with keyword stuffing? A human would obviously know immediately that the site owner is just stuffing keywords. At that time Google was just not that advanced. However, with every update, they are getting smarter… more human-like!

So let’s get back to Google‘s only job… providing amazing websites so users get a great web experience. Thus Google wants websites to genuinely provide great content and value to its users, and rest assured google spends a fortune in development to make sure they find and rank that great content.

The Ultimate 2019 Guide To SEO For Real Estate Investors

Some SEO applications have more impact than others… WRONG. Well wait… it is true but do not discriminate. Every Little SEO Improvement Helps, No Matter How Small. That is the secret to my success in doing SEO for my websites. So let’s start with the basics.

Understand The Anatomy Of A Great Website:

Your website just needs to focus on 2 things: SEO and Conversion.

• SEO is whatever deals with having Google rank your site high (or the lack thereof)
• Conversion is whatever deals with your traffic responding to the call of action, whether it is filling in a form, calling you, subscribing, placing an order, whatever the point and purpose of your website.

 

For SEO you need to understand and apply all techniques and best practices for on-page and off-page SEO.  This in itself is literally the other book, reserved for the other time. But I promise I will touch on this soon enough. For now, just enjoy the ultimate guide on SEO for Real Estate Investors!

As for Conversion you need to be credible. Show you can solve whatever problem your user has. The trick here is not just to show you can solve their problem, show them without a doubt you can solve their headaches better than anyone else, better than your competitors. You do not want your users to just fill out your form. You want your users to fill out ONLY your form and not even bother with your competitors! Dig it?

Understand The Difference Between Traffic and Good Traffic.

Everyone wants traffic to their site. The more traffic the more chances of a sale right? Nope! Not even close bubblebutt! Again, instead of just following “Tips on how to do SEO” that you see blasted all over the interwebbles, for Pete’s sake, Understand SEO. Don’t just follow “tips”. You spend so much money and effort on your business, and SEO is the 1 most important thing and you skimp out on that? You know what, Get out of my blog! I am pissed now!! GIT!!

OK after a little tea break and some hippy yoga stuff. Let me continue.

You do need to understand SEO in order to crush your competition (that most likely doesn’t understand it either). Here is how Google thinks, that little bastard. Google wants to bring the best sites to the user, based on the query they have entered into the search. OK, but how the HELL does Google determine what a good site is? Google doesn’t have little Google  gnomes, that check out every site and determine if it is a good site. No no, they have spiders! (what the hell right?) But that is not what I am getting at.

Google determines statistics from user feedback to evaluate the “rank” of a site.

So let’s dive into this a bit more. If a user lands on your site. Takes a quick look and thinks the site sucks… What do you think will happen? They bounce off. They hit the back button, back to the search results to pick the other site. Google “sees” this and records it. Now, what if the opposite happens? A user lands on your site sticks around, takes his/her time to read through the content, interacts with the site, clicks buttons, goes through many pages of the website… Google may see that as, “Oh hey yo… they stayed on this site for a whopping 5 minutes and scrolled through 15 pages and spend a long time looking at the pages reading content, this must be a really good site for the keywords entered, I will rank them higher for those keywords“.

Example? OKieDokie then…

A user does a search for “How To Get High Rankings For My Real Estate Investing Website“. (and this is not my example btw, this belongs to the mighty Brian Dean). So anyone that searches “How to get high” may get this website on the top of the search. But the website is about SEO (How to get high rankings). So when a user trying to find out how to get high, lands on this website, they obviously bounce off quickly as they have no interest in SEO. So Google will start to lower the sites rankings for the key-phrase “How To Get High” but increases the rankings for the keyword “How To Get High Rankings For My Real Estate Investing Website“. As you can see, Google takes feedback to ensures to return the best sites possible for the keywords entered.

 

So now, back to “Not all traffic is good“. If a user is doing a search for: “I need to sell my house fast“, a key phrase you ABSOLUTELY want to rank for, and your site just simply sucks monkey balls, guess what. Google will drop you in ranks. This is why it is important to not just rank for any keyword. Because you will suffer a rank drop!

A Straightforward Recipe For Real Estate Investing Success:

1. Get A Solid Domain Name.

“Ohh but Jerryll even Google says that domain names are not crucial“. Gaadamnit Bish did you not listen to me?! I told you FORGET GOOGLE!! Well, you can not completely ignore Google because it is Google that actually lists your site in the ranks. But those are details.

Here is why you need a good domain name. And with a good domain name, I mean using a strong search for a keyword as your domain name. Well, I gave an elaborate explanation on why a keyword domain name is important, on my blog for real estate investors. Read it, learn it, live it, worship it (or just worship me…) and then continue reading this friggin awesome post!

2. Pick A Solid Website Host

Did anyone say I had to be neutral here? No. So I am telling you Get an Investor Carrot website. Plain and simple. If you don’t Seriously why to bother reading the remaining blog article here, you will not succeed and just shrivel up and croak your dog will stop liking you and your goldfish will die! You will have a hard time being on top of Google if you are going to compete with other sites that do have Investor Carrot as a host. Why? They are very SEO savvy, (not as much as me however sadly), but still very very savvy, they are mobile-friendly, a ranking score Google takes seriously, and they have done a ton of research on conversion and their site comes out of the box ready to crush it (but you should do some customizing).

3. Put Thought Into Your Content

This is the other reason you should think about your traffic and not Google. Content needs to be on point. Both for on-page SEO as well as for Conversion. This deserves some explaining. I have said once and I will say it again. Believe it or not, it is difficult to write for SEO while still writing for conversion. Often these are opposing entities. Regardless you need to not only focus on good content but also on how it is technically written (apply best practices of good paper writing), to keep the content flowing naturally, and have the user eagerly read the next sentence. This is indeed a skill! Use action phrases: “In addition, However, But this is not all, etc. These phrases have a regenerating curiosity effect on the reader to read the next sentence. Use these phrases in strategic locations of your content. There are a ton more of such techniques out there to keep your user glued to your content. Search for them and figure it out! Yeah, I am not going to do all the work for you sorry! Lazy-ass bastards!

5. Find Your Keywords.

Why be cryptic here? Every website just gives you tips and you have to figure it out and decipher it. Of course, knowing how it is important. But this is a very specific SEO article. It is catered to Real Estate Investing. So there is absolutely no need to not directly state which keywords you should be focussing on. Sheesh!

So let me flat out tell you. Here are the keywords you should focus on. So much research soooo technical .. sooo annoying. Dudes. Use your head. What would YOU type in if you needed to sell your house in a hurry, in not such a hurry? Well, how about this:

We Buy Houses In [city] [state]:

Although counterintuitive here is the logic behind this keyphrase. In a city where you have a ton of investors placing these nasty bandit signs all over the place saying “We Buy Houses In [city] [state]” people will become aware of “We Buy Houses” companies and thus when they do need to sell their house fast they will Google “We Buy Houses” companies like so: “We Buy Houses In Connecticut“. And that keyword is thus very valuable in such cities.

Sell My House In [city] [state] Fast/Now/for cash/without a realtor/quickly/etc/:

This is the obvious keyword/phrase you need to focus on. Anyone that wants to sell their house will type that into Google.

Cash For My [city] [state] House:

Yup, then you have the power internetters, that type in lazy versions of actual key phrases. So make sure you sprinkle some of these into your content as well.

Of course, there are more keywords, but hey, you need to think, be clever be original! OK sheesh man, fine!! HERE. You better like and share this damn page on FB Twitter, heck everywhere!

 

If you are looking for cash buyers:

Want a bit of an explanation? Here is the Trevor dude explaining things better than I ever could.

6. Use your keywords within the first 100 words.

Yeah yeah blah blah, boring old regurgitated crap! Yes, have you noticed everyone saying this? It is retarded advice (although true). Do me a favor. Forget this rule. Why? This is written in such a way any non SEO person will just stuff 100 keywords in the first 100 words of the website. Substitute this rule with the following. Apply the rules and techniques of good paper writing. That’s all!

Yes use your keywords early on, but not for SEO manipulation. Do this to let your users immediately understand what your website is about. This not only pleases Google (why you would do the stuffing in the first place), but more importantly, it will up the conversion rate of your website. In addition, it increases the time on page and decreases your bounce rate, which increases your rankings.

7. Use Media.

There are 2 big reasons to use media, pictures, and video. Remember early on this article I had mentioned the 2 most important ingredients of an effective website? SEO and Conversion. Well, those are exactly the 2 reasons you should use media.

 

SEO:

Pictures and video simply give you an opportunity to SEO! Pictures give you a chance to use alt-tags, which Google loves (yes we are pleasing Google here). As for videos, videos keep a user longer on a page, which increases “Time On-Page“, an SEO metric google monitors to gauge ranking of your site. It is therefore important to note that this doesn’t work with just any pics or video. The media needs to be appealing.

Conversion:

Media gives the user a visual means to gauging your website. Illustrations are easier and faster to understand compared to reading blocks of text. Thus media helps users take action on your website. Want a directly related example? Imagine you need to sell your house really fast. Doing an internet search will yield so many options, most scams, some legit.

 

8. Make Your Headings Count

Again, optimize for both SEO and for conversion. On the SEO side of things, use only one  h1 tag per page and make sure you do not have the same keywords for 2 pages. Use your keywords in your headings. When it comes to conversion, make sure you write your headings in such a way it gives benefit to the users correlated to what they came to your website for. Instead of writing “SEO is Hard“, write, “Tips On Making SEO Doable“.

 

9. Writing Long Content Is Crap!

You see guru’s say things like writing about 1089 words. They back it up with claims of million sites research. But that is the dumbest research I have seen done. It is not the length of content that is making it rank. It is the fact that people spend more time on your page if your long content is appealing. So that rule is very misleading. Don’t write long content for the sake of writing long content. Keep in mind SEO and Conversion are often opposing forces.

SEO:

Long content is good, as you can have more keywords, pictures, and videos on your page. More SEO opportunities.

Conversion:

For conversion long content is bad because people’s attention span on the internet is short. (We all know the internet is for free porn!)

So what do we do?

You cut out all the fluff, say what you need to say how many ever words you need to say it with. Make what you have to say compelling, straight to the point. Conversion is what you are ultimately after. Never sacrifice Conversion for SEO. There are always more/other ways to improve SEO. Ideally, an acceptable compromise needs to be made between conversion and SEO. The trick to SEO is mastering leverage of both conversion and SEO to boost the efficiency of your website.

10. Dominate Your Market, Choke Your Competitors Out Of Business

This sounds harsh, but this is not child’s play. This is survival of the fittest. You can play defensively or offensively. I do both. Not only will I make sure I will take the first second and third spot of Google…. ahem:

I will also make sure I suffocate my competitors so they make no deals. That is the one and only way to ensure you will remain on top! These are 3 different websites all belonging to me. It is worth noting that the first spot on Google will receive about 33% of the traffic. The second spot about 20% and the third spot about 11%. The rest of the traffic is shared with everything else. Not only will I get about 54% of the traffic, but I also make sure I am pushing 2 of my potential competitors off of the first page of Google as someone else (my competitor)would have claimed the 2nd and 3rd spot.  As you can see, I am not competing with my competitors. I am competing against myself. No matter who wins, me, myself or moi, I will always win! I told you I am a God when it comes to SEO 😉

 

Dominate Your Local Market.

For every keyword, you should be the obvious choice to your users. This means, get local. For every city, you invest in, BE THE OBVIOUS CHOICE. This is what users see when they want to sell their house in their specific cities:

We Buy Houses In Ansonia CT:

 

 

We Buy Houses In Danbury CT:

 

(These pictures were posted on a public forum where it was not allowed to show URL’s so I had to grey them out).

We Buy Houses In Stamford CT:

We Buy Houses In Madison CT:

11. Build your Brand Online

A huge part of SEO, and ultimate the point of all these making deals is about credibility. I always say that SEO and Credibility often are opposing forces. You often sacrifice one for the other. This, however, is one of the rare cases that these 2 forces work together.

Internet Presence.

Internet presence not only tells Google you are actually legit to a certain extent of course but more importantly (as who cares about friggin Google), it tells people you are legit. A scammer will not likely have a BBB profile, tons of youtube video, great reviews, and a valid email address, is registered with the states IRS, etc. When Google spider bots crawl the net, they notice that” “Ohh here are these guys again, they are mentioned everywhere all over the net. They must be well viewed and regarded by others. I am starting to trust that brand”. When you have to decide which brand to rank higher, would you rank an unknown shoe brand higher than a known brand, let’s say, Nike? Exactly. Why would Google be any different?

And again instead of giving you a stupid list of tips “work on your brand and internet presence”, can move onto the next tip, I will actually provide value! Here is a list of pages you should create with a brand focus in mind. You are welcome!

1. Get a youtube Channel
2. Set up an Instagram account and start populating it with pictures of your rehabs, houses you made offers on, whatever helps you shine bright in the eyes of a potential customer
3. Do the same with Pinterest
4. Start a Twitter account and tweet-tweet and friggin Tweet all your updates, your facebook shenanigans especially. Talking about FB…
5. Get a Facebook business page.. duh
6. Reddit
7. Linkedin and show you are a serious professional.

If you have more pages you recommend, please add them in the comments. I am always looking for more.

12. Work On Citations

Citations look a lot like backlinks. A citation simply is a “mention” online. Basically, if your company is mentioned in an external page (a page on the internet that does not belong to you). Sometimes a link is present to your company page, but not always. Be sure the information in the citation is consistent everywhere. Same address spelled the same way, phone number, company name, etc. etc.

 

Plan Of Action To Get More Leads Using SEO

So how do you “SEO For Real Estate Investors“? Well first, you need to establish where you are. Better put: How bad your standing is on Google, and how bad your site performs. I do not care how good it is, it is more important to me how bad it is. Where can your site be improved? So let’s take my site as an example.

My stats now are as follows. I get about 24-30 leads a week, averaging out to about 6 to 8 leads a day.

So, how bad is my site really?

Pretty good actually. My competitors average about 10 leads a month (organically). But never stop improving of course. So let’s look at the bad.

How Do I Improve My SEO On My Real Estate Investing WebSite?

Consider this:

It is much easier to rank for city-specific pages. Much harder to rank nationally. Yet I am already on the top for anything “Connecticut ” Related.

But any seller that is in a specific city, let’s say Cheshire CT, is not going to type “I need to sell my house in Connecticut”. No no, they will more likely type “I need to sell my house in Cheshire Connecticut“. They will search for their city. Then why are we getting so many leads? I think it is because of our online presence.

We have done such a good job with our SEO, that we will pop up the moment anyone searches something real estate, selling, Connecticut related.

And this brings me to my big secret how we outranked other companies that have been SEOing for years and years while we have been doing it for just months. NO SEO company will put as much effort, detail and quality for their clients as being willing to do for my own company! That s why no one can beat us when it comes to SEO. I am working on it 24/7!!

So now it is time to take back what is rightfully mine. I want to rank and blow away any competition for any and all relevant keywords. So what is the highest priority keywords to claim back?

Well, “we buy houses in [CITY] CT” and “Sell My House In [CITY] CT”.

So we just made a deal with someone in Cheshire CT that needed to sell their house. We agreed to wholesale the property and we found several buyers for it. So hopefully in 2 weeks, we will get a nice wholesale reward.

But here is the funny thing. I do not have a city-specific page for Cheshire CT.

So I made one 2 days ago. And guess what happened. The second I published the page, (and did a Google crawl…) it immediately jumped to #1 position on the ranks!

See:

Keyword1: “Sell My House In Cheshire CT”

Keyword 2: “We Buy Houses In Cheshire CT”

For both keywords, we are ranking first! And this page was just 5 minutes old. I am expecting it to fluctuate a bit but I am confident it will remain number 1.

So what does this tell me?

I need to make more pages of cities I do not currently have on the site, and I need to revamp all the city pages I have on the site to include all I have learned of SEO this past year. (All the city pages I have were made before I knew what I know now, and most of them are not ranking on the first spot in Google. But This will change!)

SO here is the game plan…

1. I am doing a Google search on all my competitors and I will read through their sites.
2. I will fish out all the keywords they are trying to rank for and I will outrank them.
3. Note which cities they are trying to rank for and create pages for those cities.
4. I will include these keywords in my pages. What does this do? My DA is probably stronger than theirs, so even if we fight for the same keywords, I will outrank them because my DA is stronger.

I have started making that lost of cities I will revamp. Cheshire was a new addition. Our We Buy Houses In Glastonbury CT, is the next revamp. (and yup, I included that little text to get me a nice juicy backlink to it!). This is why you should start a legitimate blog!

Here is the story behind it.

I found out new development and a neat trick when it comes to SERPs and rankings. Do me a favor.  Google “We Buy Houses In Connecticut“.

You will see this:

Those that have followed me for a while know I love to brag about my little flirts with Google. Other than the mini links we are honored with by Google (we are the only ones getting them organically… without having to pay for it) we having a whole section dedicated to our company to the right of the SERPs.

But look closely… We have an Ad now where you can get an offer from us STRAIGHT OUT OF THE SERPs!!! And it is FREE!!!

So before you as a seller, even can make a choice which site to click they already see my “Hey, get your offer here“, with a picture and everything!! That is pretty huge and to me at least, unheard of! The best thing is that I know EXACTLY how to get this. I have deciphered the code. Not everyone can get it however, it really depends on the domain name and what keywords you are after.

Lucky me… The keywords: “Sell My House In Connecticut“, and “We Buy Houses In Connecticut“… are MINE!!! Meaning… I own the domain names www.WeBuyHousesInConnecticut.com and www.SellMyHouseInConnecticut.com. However, I will still help those that ask to be helped. So let me know in the comments if you need help with this. If so I will write a how-to on it.

Believe me, I am eager to list down all the things to do in a step by step form how to get on Google ranking 1. And indeed I DO have this list. But giving it away on an open forum will undermine my efforts to rank. Having said this I will help anyone out with the how-to if they are serious and gives as well. Those that only take should have no place on my blog. We can help each other out.

All it takes is a comment, a like, interaction on each other facebook comments, posts, on our websites and blogs. Why no one does it is beyond me. I managed to rank 1 on Google doing it alone. (With Help from Investor Carrot, Brian Dean, and Neil Patel. But these awesome people provided me with the guidelines. The work I did alone. AND IT WAS HARD.

It would be SO much easier if we all banned together and pushed each other up.

 

Here are my links.

• Our Facebook Page
• Our Google+ Page
• Twitter: WeBuyHousesCT

Interact, with us, like us and post on our pages. Put your pages in the comments as well so we can like you right back! Let’s do this!!

This is the best and easiest way to beat the competition.. before your competition has the same idea!!