While using paid ads can already guarantee you a lot of motivated leads in real estate investing, you should still leverage SEO or search engine optimization. If done correctly, SEO can help build your credibility in the industry.
Three of the best SEO services for real estate investors are SEO Meets Real Estate Investors, Motivated Leads, and Carrot. But if you want to use SEO independently to grow your real estate investment business, you may do so following certain guidelines. The core steps would be to choose a hosting service and domain and do keyword research.
Torn on whether to employ an SEO service for your real estate investment business or do it on your own? This blog will help you decide which path to take! Let's get started!
SEO or search engine optimization for real estate investing is the process of driving traffic to your website or increasing your website ranking through highly optimized content, descriptive URLs, backlinks, page speed, etc.
Similar to PPC, SEO for real estate investors follow specific guidelines in order for search engines to understand the relevancy of your website's content and rank it in relevant Google search results.
When your real estate investor website content is highly optimized, you would have increased visibility when buyers or sellers use search engines like Google and Bing.
SEO for real estate investors is pretty much similar to how SEO ranks for other businesses. However, this doesn't mean it is not complicated especially for beginning real estate investors. Here are the core steps to leveraging SEO for real estate investing.
Since you're already researching SEO for real estate investors, we'll assume that you're in the process of building a real estate website or you already own one.
There are many hosting providers for real estate websites but you need to ensure that you'll choose one that can reduce your page load time. Otherwise, the users will click away and you'll lose potential leads.
At this point, you also need to choose a domain name for your website. Make sure it is short, based on your business name, easy to spell, and not hyphenated.
Ensuring that your website's design is responsive is not only crucial for SEO but also for user experience. The layout of your web design should adapt to any screen size, whether for mobile devices, desktops, or tablets.
If people click away when the website doesn't load past, they'll also leave the page if the design elements of the UI aren't suitable for their screens.
Imagine a potential seller who wants to ask for a cash offer, but he can't fill out the lead capture form on your website because the blank fields aren't mobile responsive.
To start your SEO campaign, identify the location you want to get leads from and research keywords based on it. Use Google Keyword Planner to determine these SEO keywords and how many searches they get each month.
WordPress is one of the easiest CMS to use in building a real estate website. It's also built to make search engine optimization easier, but you can maximize it better if you install certain plugins.
Here are the top SEO for real estate investors plugins we recommend for WordPress:
The primary things that appear in Google search results are meta titles and meta descriptions so they should contain your target keyword. Adding the correct keywords will improve your website's click-through rate and increase the leads you'll be able to capture.
For example, if the main keyword of a blog you are about to publish is "fast cash offer," this exact keyword should appear on your meta title and meta description in a natural way. Mentioning the target keyword once is enough.
Aside from the text, you should also include highly optimized visuals (images and videos) in your content because Google and other search engines index them.
Every time you add an image, make sure that you also write an alt tag or alt text. This tag should contain the main keyword of your content or its variations.
Note that each alt tag should be highly relevant to the image and is also unique. It doesn't have to be long; it just needs to describe the image precisely.
When your website is already up and running, don't forget to optimize it for local searches. Do the following to achieve this:
Earlier, we mentioned that identifying a great hosting service is key to getting your website to load fast.
But aside from this, you may also want to use CDN, compressed images, and a cache plugin, let your JavaScript files load in the content's footer, and minify every code file.
If the above suggestions don't work, there are several WordPress plugins you can install to do the job. If the website is still super slow, consider hiring web developers or a SEO experts.
Schema markup is the language that most search engines use to read and understand the content you publish on your web pages. You may add this to your real estate investment website through a plugin or have a professional add it for you.
Adding schema markup improves your chances of being featured in Google, helps you get more CTR, free traffic, and views on your videos (for a higher bounce rate), boosts your SEO rankings so you would rank higher, makes your website optimized for voice searches, and more.
Instead of using long URLs that include the whole title of your content, opt for shorter ones. This not only ensures a better user experience but also optimizes your content better.
For instance, if the blog post you're publishing has the title "how to find motivated leads for real estate investors," just add the keyword "motivated leads for real estate investors" in the URL.
Here's what it should look like with the main keyword in the URL:
yourdomainname.com/motivated-leads-for-real-estate-investors
A short and direct URL is also easier to remember.
Although optimizing your website's navigation menu is crucial, you should improve your internal linking since it'll help the website visitors find the information they need.
For example, in a blog post about how to sell a house in foreclosure, you may want to add internal links to articles about a short sale, getting a cash offer when facing foreclosure, benefits of selling as-is when facing foreclosure, etc.
As much as possible, don't use your target keywords as anchor text or link text as you may be penalized by Google for doing this.
While your content would rank on Google if it follows good SEO for real estate investors' practices, you can speed up the process by promoting it to target more page visits.
For starters, you can share it with your target audience through social media posts. Repurposing its content into newsletters, ebooks, and infographics is also very effective.
Moreover, writing guest posts on other real estate websites and linking them to your own can also help you get traction. You can also get your content noticed by many by being active on HARO.
Analyzing your top competitors to identify what makes them rank better is also a key component of SEO for real estate investors.
Some of the things you should analyze are keyword research gaps, specific keywords that drive a high amount of organic traffic, their navigation structure, and how they write URLs.
You should also analyze the type of content they produce, the web pages that drive traffic to their site, their pain points, call-to-action, and backlink opportunities.
As a rule of thumb, before you write a blog post that has a lot of competitors, make sure you identify the format used by the top results. This helps Google to find your content relevant. Doing this would also make you publish content in different formats, not only in an essay type.
Some other good practices include a YouTube video and infographics in the first half of the article. This makes sense because visuals make the user stay longer on your real estate investment website.
If your real estate investment website truly provides value, Google would boost your ranking and you'll find more leads. So how do you provide value to drive engagement?
You can create ebooks, checklists, cheat sheets, and other forms of content that your target audience may use to solve a problem or serve as a comprehensive guide in doing things.
Some examples are selling and moving checklists, a checklist when selling to a cash buyer, an ebook on foreclosure, a cheat sheet on pricing a property, an ebook on rehabbing a damaged property, etc.
While your content should provide value to the users, you don't want them to read super long pieces of content without breaks for the eyes.
Make sure that every content you post uses headings, subheadings, lists, bullets, hyperlinks, and quotes.
Adding images, infographics, and videos can also be used to break long-form texts so they would become easy to consume.
Don't add too much fluff to your content. Be very direct to the point, but also detailed so your target audience would appreciate you more.
Backlinks are links from one website to any other page on the internet. These are crucial in improving brand awareness and domain authority.
If your real estate website received backlinks from reputable websites such as Washington Post, Times, Forbes, etc., Google will give you a ranking boost.
If your real estate investor website is new, link-building from high-authority websites is crucial. One strategy would be to brand yourself as an expert in your field and reach out to writers and journalists to share your views on topics they are writing about.
Many studies show that long-form content or cornerstone content ranks better in search engine page results. This is if it features the top or best keywords multiple times.
Note that not all long-form content actually ranks on Google search results. Those that don't really provide any value to a target audience, don't follow the best practices of SEO for real estate investors, and are difficult to digest would not appear in the higher rankings.
In most cases, Google relies on HTML to understand the actual content of each published web page. Hence, if you want to implement SEO real estate investors better, you should at least learn its basics.
There are free online platforms that can teach you how HTML works. One of which is W3Schools. If you focus enough, you can learn the basics in just a few hours and use your knowledge to detect on-page SEO errors.
Title tag, headline tags, alt tag, image tag, paragraph tag, and anchor tag are some of the basics you should know by now.
SEO for real estate investors is not a one-time project. It's an ongoing process so it makes sense to do an audit regularly to guarantee results. Note that this should not only be an audit of your website's first page or home page.
What we mean is that you analyze your competitors, check your organic traffic or search volume, bounce rate, session duration, and click-through rate, check for missing or incorrect meta titles and descriptions on search result, or incorrect anchor text, find keywords that are no longer ranking, broken links, and other pain points.
If you are busy with other aspects of your real estate business or you find SEO confusing, there's still a way for you to leverage SEO to scale your business. Here are the top 3 services you can employ to get SEO off of your plate.
SEO Meets REI is a service run by real estate investors themselves. They offer 3 SEO bundles to help you outrank your toughest competitors.
Given that this service is run by real estate investors, the methods they use are specifically tailored for the real estate investing industry. Moreover, these methods weren't just formulated through simple brainstorming.
The team behind SEO Meets REI spent 18 months testing their methods and they're also currently using it to generate over 1000+ leads a month organically.
SEO Meets REI guarantees that your site will move up in the rankings within 6 to 8 weeks.
Here are the three SEO bundles they currently offer:
If you're interested to learn more about this service, you can listen to episodes 310 and 368 of Carrot's podcast. You may also want to check out SEO Meets REI's YouTube channel to watch what real estate investors are saying about them.
Similar to SEO Meets REI, this service is also run by real estate investors. Currently, they offer two models that investors can choose from — the pay-per-lead model and custom SEO campaign.
Their pay-per-lead model is super simple. You pay-per-lead for the counties you identified. The leads are 100% exclusive and they are pre-vetted.
Their leads were sent through multi-step forms that contain questions that only matter to you.
Their custom campaigns model, on the other hand, is perfect if you want your own real estate website, make it rank through SEO, own an ads account, and more.
Carrot is a very convenient way to build a website for your real estate business. They allow you to make unique customizations to the website even without a single knowledge of codes.
Carrot promises a real estate website that gets SEO rankings and captures free leads on motivated sellers.
Here are some of the best features and free tools of Carrot:
While there are many SEO services out there for real estate investors, you'll get more than what you pay for from SEO Meets REI, Motivated Leads, and Carrot! These services make search engine optimization for investors less complicated!
If you're not into evergreen marketing and you want fast results, a better idea would be to buy leads from pay-per-lead platforms like Property Leads.
We generate leads from the exact SEO strategy of SEO Meets REI so you can expect that they are exclusive and highly motivated.
To start receiving leads from us, fill out our form below.
30 N Gould St Ste N
Sheridan, WY 82801
(207) 309-3949
sales@propertyleads.com
