5-Step Real Estate Investor SEO Blueprint

In this in-depth guide, I’ll share with you my step-by-step blueprint that my team and I have been using for ourselves and our clients to pull thousands of highly motivated seller leads from search engines.

However, I want to warn you. This is an extensive guide (20,000+ words). I poured in this guide years of first-hand experience and trial and error.

I can guarantee you’ll not find anywhere on the web an alternative source that’s even close to what you’ll learn in my guide.

If you’re serious about learning effective and actionable real estate investor SEO strategy and implementing it on your website to help you generate motivated seller leads, you’ll need to dedicate your time and attention.

If you don’t have the patience to learn, this guide is probably not for you.

Before you dive into this guide and invest your valuable time, I want to address some crucial questions that you might have…

• “Why in the world should I listen to this guy?”
• “How is he different from all those self-appointed gurus?”
• “Does he have an appropriate competence on the subject?

These are all legit concerns especially in today’s information age where everyone seems to be an expert in SEO for real estate investors.

Well, let me quickly share with you why I strongly believe I’m uniquely qualified to speak on real estate investor SEO subject matter and you judge for yourself whether it’s worth your time to listen to me or not.

Fair enough?

First, my name is Oleg Donets. I’m the founder and CMO of Real Estate Bees. I began my SEO career back in 2013 and started specializing in real estate SEO around 2016.

About a year later I was introduced to the fascinating world of real estate investor SEO where it all began.

Around that time my team and I launched HouseCashin.com, which started as a typical local “We Buy Houses” lead gen website and gradually evolved into the largest online platform that connects motivated home sellers with reputable real estate investors.

This website alone generates solely through search engines around 1,000 highly targeted motivated seller leads per month (as per time of this writing) and counting!

In addition, we run a vast network of 500+ small, geo-targeted lead gen websites that produce thousands of inbound, highly motivated seller leads per year exclusively through search engine channel.

And finally, let’s not forget the RealEstateBees.com.

Although this beast targets the entire real estate space, I believe that this is yet another testament of a successfully orchestrated and deployed SEO strategy that resulted in 40,000+ monthly visitors (as per time of this writing) and counting exclusively from search engines.

In other words, I know my shit 😊

I did it myself multiple times and I continue scaling it as we speak.

Now the ball is in your court.

If I persuaded you that you can trust my first-hand experience, I invite you to continue reading. I promise you will get tons of value from the strategies laid out in this guide.

If I didn’t persuade you that you can trust my competence, then I wish you all the best and hope you’ll find somewhere else a better source of information pertaining to SEO for real estate investors.

You won’t find in this guide any fluff, regurgitated or basic content like you see literally in every single article about real estate investor SEO available on the web today.

You don’t need to hear about things like:

• keep your meta title under 60-70 characters
• include your keyword in meta titles
• use your keyword in the first 100 words
• don’t over optimize anchor text
• add ALT tags to your images
• etc.

These are all somewhat important, but you can learn it in-depth from thousands of general SEO articles available on the web.

Unfortunately, today all the articles about real estate investor SEO on the internet give you some isolated action points that potentially can help generating visitors from search engines but none of them really give you the full blueprint to a successful SEO strategy.

You need to remember, Search Engine Optimization is just a marketing channel to generate visitors to your website. But unfortunately, it is only one side of the coin.

To be successful in it, you need to know not only how to generate traffic from search but also how to successfully convert it into qualified leads!

This is why I decided to go a different route than everyone else and actually lay out for you an entire road map on how to successfully do both:

1. generate targeted visitors from search engines and,
2. convert them into motivated seller leads.

This is exactly what you are going to learn if you carefully read this entire guide.

And finally, if you receive value from this guide, I’d gladly appreciate if you share it with your friends and colleagues through social media.

In order to demonstrate the concepts from this guide in clearer manner and to make the whole methodology make more sense, I love using a race car analogy.

Like sport cars competing on the racing track to get first to the finish line, so are investors in search engines compete for top rankings.

Like sport cars are deliberately optimized and intentionally modified in all the key aspects to enhance performance, so must be real estate investor websites.

As you know, the winner in racing competitions beat the second-place contestant literally in a few measly seconds or sometimes even in fraction of a second. The same applies to third, fourth, fifth and rest of the places.

Internationally renowned motivational public speaker, sales coach and self-development author, Brian Tracy, calls it the “Winning Edge” concept. He explains it the following way:

If you become just a little bit better in certain critical areas of selling, it can translate into enormous increases in sales (source).

• Does that mean that winning car is ten times faster than the one that comes second?
• Does that mean that the winning car is twenty or even fifty percent as fast as the second one?

Of course not. The winning car is just a few seconds faster. However, that translates into 100x the reward money.

You might be wondering how exactly this relates to SEO for real estate investors. Well, the same exact rule applies in search engine optimization world.

It’s all about paying attention and taking care of every little detail in your SEO strategy, often ignored by most investors and marketing firms, that compound over time into complete domination of search results!

In this in-depth guide, I’ll show you those critical aspects of successful SEO strategy by drawing parallels through the easy-to-comprehend racing car analogy.

Without further ado let’s get started.

This is the first of two parts that make up my real estate investor SEO blueprint. In this part you’ll learn, step-by-step, how to generate targeted visitors from search engines to your investor website.

In this part we won’t discuss how to convert those visitors into motivated seller leads. You’ll learn it in detail in the second part of the blueprint.

Alright. Let’s dive right into it…

So, what do I mean by ‘Foundation’ when it comes to real estate investing SEO?

In terms of my racing car analogy, the Foundation refers to wheels, tires, suspension, aerodynamics and other important components directly affecting a car’s performance.

If any of these components are broken or even not 100% optimized to the optimal performance, a car has no chance to win the race regardless of its other advantages.

Taking it back to our real estate investing SEO world, the ‘Foundation” will be considered everything that is being done directly on your website, which inevitably impacts its search engine rankings.

Things like website back-end code optimization, content architecture, content optimization, interlinking, etc.
You can also summarize all of that in the following two SEO terms:

• On-page optimization
• Technical SEO

Like the solid foundation of a race car that makes it possible to reach and sustain unbelievable speeds, if you get your website’s foundation right, you’ll make the first step towards a successful real estate investor SEO strategy!

In this chapter, I’ll walk you through those few crucial items that will help you lay a solid foundation for your real estate investor website to dominate the search results in your target market.

 

#1 Website Platform

Perhaps one of the most detrimental mistakes I see many investors make when it comes to their website is choosing some sh***y platform.

Generalist website builders such as Wix, SquareSpace, GoDaddy and bunch of others are just not cut out for SEO.

Don’t get me wrong, they are great for building a nice-looking website to show to your clients, friends and family. But if you are planning to utilize search engines as a traffic source for your investing business, then forget about it.

But don’t worry. Since you are reading this guide, I’ll share with you several recommended options that will take your website one step closer to high search engine rankings.

Generally, I recommend the following three options:

 

1st Specialized Website Solution

Specialized website solutions are SaaS (software as a service) companies that developed a niche specific website solution. In our case it would be a website solution built specifically for various types of eal estate investors.

However, I want to point your attention to the keyword “specialized”. As we briefly discussed before, companies like Wix, SquareSpace, GoDaddy and others are all “generalist” solutions.

They appeal to any type of business under the sun. Not only they can’t possibly know all the intricacies of real estate investing business, which is a huge downside, but they also are not built for SEO in general, as I already mentioned above.

So, stay away from the generalist website solutions as much as humanly possible.

That said, opting for a specialized website solution doesn’t necessarily mean you are all set for SEO purposes. Far from it…

Believe it or not, there are many such solutions that are not SEO friendly. Yes, they might have some real estate investor specific functionalities, but they are poorly built from SEO point of view as much as those generalist website solutions.

Luckily, there are a few companies on the market today that offer SEO-friendly real estate investor specific website solutions to investors and wholesalers.

I won’t cover it in this guide. But if you want to learn more about them, read my in-depth guide about the best real estate investor website templates & builders.

 

2nd Specialized Marketing Agency

Similarly to specialized website solutions, there are also specialized marketing agencies. If you decide you want a marketing agency to build you a website, do NOT hire a generalist marketing agency.

While there are certainly many great generalist digital marketing agencies, they are physically unable to thoroughly learn every client’s business model simply because they deal with a lot of different businesses.

One day they get a plastic surgeon client. Next day they bring in a manufacturing facility client. Another day a non-profit organization client comes along. And now you – a real estate investor.

Do you think you will get a well-researched and highly-tailored product for your specific type of business? You won’t! Trust me.

It requires tremendous resources. I know from my own experience. I have been there. I started my career from a generalist digital marketing firm. After a while I had to make a choice because it was unsustainable.

I had to decide to either stay a generalist and deliver mediocre results or specialize in a particular niche, which will allow us to learn a specific industry inside out resulting in outstanding deliverables.

Luckily, we decided to specialize.

Let me tell you, it has been day and night since then. Suddenly, we knew everything about our clients’ business. We knew their pain points, target audience, profitable keywords, etc. We spoke the same language.

Guess how that affected the results.

It increased the ROI for our clients big time! At the same time it made our agency more profitable by simply eliminating wasted resources, which we used to have before.

So, if you are considering going this route, please do yourself a big favor and hire a digital marketing agency that specializes in real estate investing businesses.

 

3rd Do It Yourself

Finally, if you are comfortable with technology as well as have extra time to manage it all, feel free to build your real estate investment website by yourself.

You will certainly need to know the best practices on how to build a website for a real estate investing business.

But it’s doable. You can just reverse engineer other successful real estate investor websites and implement those strategies to your own website.

As far as what website platform to go with, I’d recommend using WordPress CMS (content management system) if you decide to build your website on your own. It is easy to use, SEO-friendly, scalable and free.

 

#2 Content Structure

Like every other type of business has something unique to it, real estate investing business is no different. In terms of SEO, that difference usually dictates the way a website’s content architecture is built.

In other words, a content structure of an ecommerce store, local restaurant and real estate investor websites will be considerably different.

I’m not going to get deep into it here because this topic deserves a separate article. However, I’ll provide a short overview, so you get the idea.

If we look at all the existing types of businesses on the market (thousands of them out there), generally we can group them in three main categories each of which possess critical attributes from SEO point of view:

1. Brick and mortar businesses – Under this category will fall all the businesses that must have a physical location to receive customers in order to provide their services (restaurants, spas, supermarkets, etc.)
2. Service area businesses – Under this category will fall all the businesses that must go to customer’s location in order to provide their services (plumbers, electricians, investors, etc.)
3. Location unrestricted businesses – Under this category will fall all the businesses that can sell their products/services regardless of their own or their customers’ location (ecommerce stores, digital products, coaching, etc.)

Of course, the content structure within each of these three categories will slightly differ from business type to business type. But the main concept of content structure will remain the same.

By understanding these unique distinctions, your next step would be to identify which of these three categories your real estate investing business falls under and implement the right content structure that will facilitate higher rankings of your website in search engines.

This is exactly what you’re going to learn next…

So, the first part seems fairly straight forward, and you most likely already figured it out on your own – real estate investing falls under the service area business category.

That wasn’t that hard, right? However, the next step is more complex.

Now you need to figure out the right content structure for your real estate investing business that will give it the best possible shot to do well in search engines.

But how do you know what works best for real estate investor website to crush it in search?

Well, this is where I’ll share with you my practical, first-hand experience with real estate investor SEO!

So, keep reading.

 

#3 Company Name

Having an easy to remember, catchy and clear company name is certainly important. However, when it comes to SEO, strategically selected name can substantially benefit your real estate investing business.

As you probably know, SEO revolves around keywords.

Major search engines like Google invest billions of dollars in their robust algorithms that are basically built to identify and return the most relevant results to their users’ queries (keywords that they type in the search bar).

Of course, stuffing your website with your target keywords won’t work anymore like it used to in early days. Search engines are way smarter and more sophisticated today.

But by simply incorporating your target keyword either partially or even fully within your company’s name, can give your website an extra boost in search engines.

In other words, if we take two real estate investing companies where one has a random name (doesn’t contain target keyword) and the other does contain target keyword, the latter will have a better chance to rank higher in search engines solely due to its name.

Here is an example. Let’s take the following names:

• ABC Properties, LLC
• Orlando House Buyers, LLC

The Orlando House Buyers, LLC contains one of the main target keywords right in its name.

Assuming that both of the companies do similar SEO work and target the same geographical area, the Orlando House Buyers, LLC will have a better chance to rank higher in search results simply because its name contains one of the main target keywords.

Nevertheless, while it’s certainly helpful to have your main keyword within your company name, I’d not suggest to go too far with it because it can get quite spammy.

For instance. Let’s say you are an investor in Orlando, FL. So, you will most likely target the following keywords:

• house buyers Orlando
• Orlando house buyers
• house buyers in Orlando
• cash house buyers Orlando
• fast house buyers Orlando
• sell my house fast Orlando
• sell my house fast Orlando FL
• sell my house fast Orlando Florida
• we buy houses Orlando
• companies that buy houses Orlando
• etc.

Naming your company Orlando House Buyers or Fast Orlando House Buyers makes total sense in terms of branding, clarity and SEO benefit.

However, imagine naming your company Sell My House Fast Orlando FL or Companies That Buy Houses Orlando.

Do these names sound alright to you?

How do you think your potential clients will react to such names?

Guess what, for some people (home sellers and investors alike) it doesn’t really matter. For some home sellers, as long as you can fulfill your promise and buy their home, they are ok.

Similarly for some investors. As long as the company name helps them bring targeted traffic from the search engines, they don’t care.

Both of these approaches are totally fine. They both give you the upper hand in search engines, especially in the local results (Google Maps).

However, I personally believe in brand building. In my experience, a strong brand brings tremendous value over time.

If you are serious about your investing business and you are in it for the long haul, I’d highly suggest opting for the first approach.

Unfortunately, it will be extremely hard to build a brand around a name like Sell My House Fast Orlando FL or Companies That Buy Houses Orlando. These names are just against all the branding rules.

But as I already said, this is up to you how you want to run your business. I believe after reading this section you have all the information to make an educating decision with regards to your own business.

 

#4 Domain Name

Like the positive SEO impact resulting from a strategically selected company name, similarly chosen domain name is capable of facilitating, and sometimes amplifying, that very effect to benefit your real estate investing business even more.

As I already mentioned in the previous section, SEO revolves around keywords.

This means that if in addition to your company name (selected according to my suggestions in the previous section) you also register an identical domain name, it can give your website yet another boost in search engines.

You can argue all day that Google cracked down on EMDs (Exact Match Domains) a long time ago. But that is not exactly true.

They did crack down on EMDs but only for low quality sites that simply exploited it to gain the system along with their other spammy tactics.

If you have a quality website (quality website being a site with exceptional content and healthy backlink profile) and your official company and domain names contain, either partially or even fully, your target keyword, Google’s 2012 EMD algorithm update will not apply to you.

In fact, it will always have a slight advantage over other websites that don’t contain, either partially or fully, that same target keyword in their domain name.

So, if you are not planning to spam the internet with another EMD website that contains a mediocre (or even duplicate) content and build spammy backlinks to it, I encourage you to leverage the opportunity to use AMD to your advantage.

This is just another low hanging fruit you can utilize for growing your real estate investing business.

 

#5 Internal Linking

What Is Internal Linking?

Internal linking or interlinking is a process of connecting relevant content on your website by linking to it from other relevant content.

Interlinking serves two very important purposes:

1. Provides human visitors with supplemental content to explore making them stay longer on your site by consuming more of your content, which leads to better engagement metrics for SEO purposes as well as improves overall user experience.
2. Opens up additional pathways for search engines to discover and crawl other subject-related pieces of content on your site and establish stronger topical relevance within both your own website and search engines’ index.

Generally, there are multiple ways how you can leverage power of internal linking on your website. I’ve listed below some of the most important and effective ones.

 

1) In-Content Internal Linking

In-content internal linking is perhaps the most powerful interlinking method. It’s when you link to other internal, usually topically-relevant, page(s) on your site right from within the content of your article.

Notice that I used the word “relevancy” in different forms throughout the last few paragraphs a number of times.

This is because it’s important to interlink pages that have topical relevance or at least, one way or another, supplement linked content.

Interlinking topically irrelevant pages will provide little or no value to your visitors as well as to your rankings.

If you care about your users’ experience, I’d not suggest compromising your visitors’ satisfaction by linking to topically irrelevant content unless it really makes sense contextually.

They will hate you for wasting their time lol.

That said, even if a page has a similar subject, don’t just blindly link to it for a sake of creating a link. Only link to other internal pages if they will provide additional value.

For example, let’s say you have an article about how to sell a house during divorce. Another article about selling a house during foreclosure is technically topically relevant because both of them about how to sell a house.

But, in that particular context it will not provide additional value to a reader. Therefore, try to refrain from adding links to such resources.

Another important aspect of interlinking is to make sure to vary anchor text of the link when linking to the same page. For example, we’re linking to page A from article B and we used AnchorText1 for the link.

Let’s say later on we came across an article C from which we also can link to page A. So, this time we’ll use AnchorText2 for the link.

The rule of thumb here is always try to switch anchor text of a link when linking to the same page. I’m saying to do that not because of potential over-optimization.

Not at all. Using the same anchor text for your internal links won’t get you penalized due to over-optimization issues according to Matt Cutts.

I’m saying that because there is actually a great benefit to it. Diversifying anchor text will only help you rank for additional keywords because search engines will now consider those terms relevant too.

However, at the same time, don’t SPAM.

Placing thousands of internal links on your site with identical anchor text “sell my house fast Houston TX” and pointing them all to the same page, won’t get you far.

The same anchor text usage rules apply to all the rest listed below internal linking methods.

 

2) Breadcrumbs Internal Linking

Breadcrumbs are navigational links that allow both human visitors and search engines to understand the content organization of a website more clearly.

Breadcrumbs don’t only provide search crawlers alternative entry points for discovering new content, but they also allow search engines to better understand relations between content in terms of topical relevance and hierarchical significance.

 

3) HTML Sitemap Internal Linking

HTML sitemap is a plain HTML page like other regular pages on your site. Don’t confuse it with XML sitemap. This is different and I’m explaining it in the sections below.

Unlike other regular HTML pages, this page is created solely for listing links that point to all the important existing pages of your site.

This is the only instance where the topical relevance, which I mentioned multiple times in the previous sections, does not apply.

HTML sitemap page serves as an index of the entire site, which in turn justifies its linking to every existing page of a website.

Make sure your sitemap page links to all the important pages of your site that you want to be crawled and indexed.

Another important aspect to keep in mind. Make sure there is a site-wide link in the footer pointing to your HTML sitemap page to allow easy entry for search crawlers from anywhere on your website.

 

4) Home Page Internal Linking

Home page internal linking greatly benefits both sides – user experience and search engine optimization. While user experience is extremely important, here I’m going to discuss the SEO advantages only.

In most cases a home page of any website receives the highest number of inbound links (internal and external combined) compared to all the rest of the pages.

Subsequently, this means that home pages are often the strongest pages on the entire site from SEO point of view. So how does this relate to internal linking?

Well, since the home pages are usually the most powerful pages, their ability to pass link equity (or SEO power if you will) is the greatest.

Therefore, linking right from the home page to other pages on your site will have the greatest SEO impact in terms of crawlability, indexability and rankability of those linked pages.

In other words, you always need to strive to link from your home page to the most important pages on your investor website.

 

5) Navigation Internal Linking

First of all, it is important to note that navigation is a site-wide element, which means it is usually accessible throughout the entire website.

Thanks to that unique attribute, navigational links are often discovered and crawled faster simply because search spiders have numerous entry points to access those links from.

While navigation is also equally helpful for both – human visitors and search engines, it offers additional interlinking opportunities.

You can link to other important pages of your site from navigation in case it was not possible linking to them from a home page.

However, it also should make sense here. Don’t try to list bunch of irrelevant links in your navigation menus. While it will certainly help search engines, it can negatively affect your user experience.

You need to realize that first and for most, navigation menus are created for human users; not for search engines.

However, through smart use of navigation menus, you can create an intuitive navigation for both – human visitors and search engines alike.

 

6) Footer Internal Linking

Similarly to the navigation, a footer is also a site-wide element, which makes it accessible from every URL of your site. However, a footer doesn’t require as much moderation in terms of the links you add there compared to a navigation.

That is great because you can utilize footer to link to other important pages that you couldn’t link to from other areas such as navigation or home page.

Also, as I already mentioned in this guide, link to a key page from your footer – your HTML sitemap. This page has direct pathways to every single important page of your site making it easy for search engines to discover content you want them to discover.

 

7) XML Sitemap Internal Linking

Unlike HTML sitemap that’s created for both human visitors and search crawlers, an XML sitemap is made solely for bots. It’s an easy-to-access file that’s designed for efficient storage of URLs of a website.

XML sitemap allows search engine crawlers to easily parse a website through listed URLs within that file.

Technically, XML sitemap won’t be required for real estate investor websites because these types of sites are considered small.

XML sitemap becomes critically important on large websites with hundred of thousands of URLs that need to be indexed.

For example, RealEstateBees.com has 15.5 million URLs among its XML sitemap files, at the moment of this writeup.

This number of URLs absolutely requires XML sitemap for effective indexation. However, since investor websites usually have under 100 pages, XML sitemap is optional. But it won’t hurt.

Alright, so what aspect of real estate investor SEO is ‘Propulsion’ referred to?

When it comes to my race car analogy, the Propulsion refers to engine – the driving force of every vehicle.

If a car lacks an engine, has too small of an engine or simply poorly engineered engine, the loss in the race is inevitable regardless of how good the Foundation is.

As far as making sense of ‘Propulsion’ in terms of SEO for real estate investors, it’s an extension of the ‘Foundation’ concept. It also pertains to things that are being done directly on a website, but in this case in a more active, ongoing manner.

Nonetheless, to be more specific, by ‘Engine’ I’m referring to content creation and everything that is associated with that activity. Like Engine in cars, Content Creation is a driving force of every successful SEO strategy in websites.

In other words, he/she who has the most content (largest engine) of a superior quality (high quality engine) will have the highest chance to outrank everyone else, given all the other essential aspects outlined in this guide are also done correctly.

In this chapter, you’ll learn the essential content development strategy specifically designed for real estate investor websites that will allow you to leave all your competitors in the dust!

 

#1 Content Creation

To get geo-targeted, motivated seller leads from search engines, you need to have four primary content types on your investor website.

Each content type will attract sellers with a different degree of motivation, however.

 

1) Service Location Content Pages (highest motivation level leads)

‘Service Location’ pages usually target need-driven and local-based queries that indicate commercial intent.

For example, “plumber in Houston TX”, “HVAC contractor near me”, “best Dallas real estate agent”, etc.

Since service area businesses often target several locations, real estate investors and wholesalers can utilize it to their advantage for SEO purposes to expand their geographical reach.

Here is what I mean.

Let’s say you want to attract motivated sellers in Houston, TX. Houston would be your primary market you are after.

Therefore, usually your website’s home page will be optimized for that main location targeting the following keywords:

• house buyers Houston
• Houston house buyers
• house buyers in Houston
• cash house buyers Houston
• fast house buyers Houston
• sell my house fast Houston
• sell my house fast Houston TX
• sell my house fast Houston Texas
• we buy houses Houston
• companies that buy houses Houston
• etc

That is great. It can definitely bring a decent volume of high-intent and geo-targeted motivated seller leads.

However, what about all the nearby suburbs like Sugar Land, Spring, Katy, Cypress, The Woodlands and many others?

Unless you have a very strict geographical buy box, you would probably absolutely love getting leads from all those close by areas as well. Don’t you?

This is where location pages come in…

This type of content gives you an opportunity to reach motivated sellers in all those additional geographical areas by creating a separate, dedicated page for each location and ranking them in search engines along with your primary target location.

In other words, if you implement and then promote these location pages correctly, they will eventually start ranking in search engines and you’ll begin receiving motivated seller leads from all those sub-markets!

Considering the fact that leads generated through organic search are among those with the highest ROI, just imagine what it can do to your investing business…

It can easily take your business from 1 deal a month to 5, 10 or even more deals per month! I bet you start seeing a huge potential here.

While I’d love to walk you through how to properly create, optimize and then promote these service location pages, unfortunately I won’t be able to explain it in this already long-ass guide. It will require a separate, full-blown article to do so.

But, if you would like me to create step-by-step instructions on how to do it, sign up to this list to let me know you are interested. If I receive enough requests, I’ll certainly create it and will let you know by email as soon as it goes live.

Let’s keep moving.

 

2) Service Situation Content Pages (highest motivation level leads)

‘Service Situation’ pages usually target more specific need-driven and local-based queries that also indicate commercial intent.

To better understand, let’s get back to our example with the plumber, HVAC contractor and a realtor.

So, a more specific need-driven query for a plumber search would be something like “drain cleaning Houston TX”, “leak repair near me”, “Houston water line installation”, etc.

A more specific need-driven query for a HVAC contractor search would be something like “AC repair Los Angeles CA”, “air conditioning installation near me”, “Los Angeles furnace repair”, etc.

Finally, a more specific need-driven query for a realtor search would be something like “sell house Dallas TX”, “first time home buyer realtor near me”, “Dallas rental realtor”, etc.

In other words, as you see from the above examples, service situation content pages are pages dedicated to a particular service (or “situation” like we call it specifically for real estate investing businesses).

You are probably thinking for yourself how exactly this translates to my investing business, right? Well, here is how.

For real estate investor websites, the service situation pages will look like this:

• Sell your inherited house fast in Cleveland OH
• Sell your water damaged home fast in Cleveland OH
• Sell house during divorce fast in Cleveland OH
• Etc.

Obviously, there are many other situations that you can come up with. I’m not going to list them here. I’m sure you know them all.

To attract those people who search for a quick solution to their situation, you must have a dedicated page for each situation on your investor website.

With these pages you will get a chance to capture a different segment of motivated sellers!

In particular, sellers who search for solutions like yours by using more specific search queries that describe their particular situation rather than more general queries, like the ones I listed in the previous section.

In other words, if you add this content type to your website and then promote these situation pages correctly, they will eventually start ranking in search engines and you’ll begin receiving motivated seller leads needing a solution to those situations!

Likewise, I’d love to walk you through how to properly create, optimize and then promote these service situation pages. But unfortunately, I won’t be able to squeeze it in this guide. It’s very long already.

So, if you would like me to create step-by-step instructions on how to do it, sign up to this list to let me know you are interested.

If I receive enough requests, I’ll certainly create it and will let you know by email as soon as it goes live.

Any who, keep reading.

 

3) Service Property Type Content Pages (highest motivation level leads)

‘Service Property Type’ pages are conceptually very similar to ‘Service Situation’ pages. The only difference between them is that one targets sellers that define their search by a particular situation while the others by a specific property type.

For instance, sellers that define their search by a property type will use the following key phrases in the search engines:

• sell my condo fast Phoenix AZ
• sell my townhouse fast Phoenix AZ
• sell my land fast Phoenix AZ
• sell apartment building fast Phoenix AZ
• sell commercial property fast Phoenix AZ
• etc.

That is true, if you are only after residential real estate, the commercial asset classes won’t be relevant for you. Therefore, you can take advantage of the residential property types only.

However, if you know how to deal with commercial properties yourself or you have someone else who does, adding commercial asset classes along with the residential ones, can be a huge extra income source.

Nevertheless, like for other content types that we have covered so far, this one also requires you to have dedicated pages for each property type to attract this additional type of sellers.

By adding these pages to your investor website, you’ll be able to attract yet another segment of motivated sellers needing to sell a specific property type!

Again, it’s not feasible for me to go deep and explain how to properly create, optimize and then promote these service property type pages in this guide.

If you want me to create step-by-step instructions on how to do it, sign up to this list to let me know you are interested. If I receive enough requests, I’ll certainly create it and will let you know by email as soon as it goes live.

But wait… there is more!

 

4) General Informational Content Pages (lowest motivation level leads)

Finally, the fourth and last primary content type you need to have on your investor website to attract motivated sellers is ‘General Informational’ pages.

These pages usually target educational queries that indicate informational intent. In fact, I want to go one step further and actually separate this ‘General Informational’ content type into two categories:

1. Direct general informational content
2. Indirect general informational content

Let’s use our plumber, HVAC contractor and a realtor to demonstrate this type of content in general and each specific category in particular.

Example #1 for a plumber

• Direct general informational content: How to find a good plumber
• Indirect general informational content: How to unclog a sink

Example #2 for a HVAC contractor

• Direct general informational content: How to find a good HVAC contractor
• Indirect general informational content: How to install window air conditioner

Example #3 for a realtor

• Direct general informational content: How to find a good realtor
• Indirect general informational content: How to buy a new construction home

I’m sure you see the pattern.

The direct category represents queries which you can directly pitch your services for. It’s because visitors’ intent indicates direct interest in something that you provide as part of your business offering.

Therefore, it makes it natural to invite your visitors to consider your solution as they consume your content.

The indirect category, on the other hand, represents queries which you cannot directly pitch your services for. It is because visitors’ intent indicates an interest to learn how to do something on their own, which often does not involve hiring a professional.

In this case, you still have an ability to naturally pitch your services, but we need to be more creative here. I’ll go over it in a bit.

Nevertheless, I’m sure you clearly see the benefit of having direct general informational content on your website. So, there is no need for me to expand on it more.

However, you may think differently about the indirect ones. All the indirect queries are educational in nature and might seem have little to no value from the business standpoint.

But make no mistake. They are valuable on several levels all of which can help grow a business.

Here are the three main benefits you can get from having indirect general informational content on your website:

 

1) You can convert that traffic into qualified leads if done correctly.

Think about it. Whenever someone searches for “how to unclog a sink”, what do they really need? Sure, they want to get information on how to do it themselves.

But what for?

In most cases they need it because they have a clogged sink that needs to be unclogged but they don’t want to pay a plumber to do it, right?

They just happened to think they can do it themselves, which they certainly can, and save money.

However, what if you satisfy their need by providing them with that very information but at the same time point out some disadvantages of doing it on their own?

For instance, maybe while trying to unclog the sink, an untrained individual can mess something up that will cause even greater damage.

In that case they will certainly need to call a certified plumber to fix it, which will cost them 5x more than if they hired one in the first place.

Do you think this approach will help change minds of some people trying to do it themselves? You bet it will! This is certainly a working strategy.

We deployed it across multiple industries including real estate investing, and it starts generating qualified leads every time like a charm.

The trick that makes this strategy work is rooted in peoples’ ignorance. As human beings, we don’t know what we don’t know.

We think to ourselves, oh this is just a clogged sink. I can do it on my own. What can potentially go wrong, right?

That is right until… a smart marketer gets into the picture and exposes potential risks associated with a particular activity, which our ignorance has been shielding us from seeing all this time.

You see, when we start learning about it deeper and being presented with potential dangers of doing it on our own, we suddenly, at least a certain portion of the population will, get second thoughts.

And this is where we need to add a strong ‘Call to Action’ to collect the lead.

In other words, this strategy works according to this formula:

Satisfy visitor’s need (provide answer to visitor’s question) >>> Plant a seed of doubt (point out potential risks) >>> Introduce a better alternative (Call to Action)

While I believe all that has illustrated the concept quite clearly, let’s talk how you can apply it to your real estate investing business to generate qualified leads.

Think about which informational topics, relevant to real estate selling in general, you can piggyback on to naturally plug your solution in.

Well, there are quite a few. Here are some of them:

• How to sell a house without a realtor
• How much does it cost to sell a house
• How long does it take to sell a house
• How much do realtors charge to sell a house
• How to find a realtor to sell my house
• Etc.

All of these topics and many others have a potential to extract qualified leads if you structure the content according to my formula.

Let’s get to the second benefit you can gain from having general informational content on your website.

 

2) You can build a rapport with your prospects and establish trust.

It’s important to understand that not all informational content builds rapport. There are billions of pages on the web with informational articles.

However, most of that content is at best mediocre that nobody cares about.

This brings us to my point I’m trying to make – your informational content MUST be exceptional if you want to build rapport with your target audience.

So, whether you create content yourself or hire a writer, do NOT produce generic content that will add up to the pile of garbage content we currently have on the internet.

If you decide to create informational content, which I highly recommend, only produce in-depth, actionable and educational content. Again, you only get to build rapport with your prospects through high quality content.

That might sound obvious and cliche, but reality tells otherwise. Simply, go to any of your competitors’ website and look through their informational content.

I can guarantee that 99.9% of the websites with “informational” content will have mediocre, generic and/or poorly written content.

To make matters worse, a considerable number of those websites will even have duplicate content, often provided by their website vendor, that is used by hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of their other clients.

Don’t be one of those real estate investors making this crucial mistake. If you read to this point, you have no excuse. In fact, realizing what most of your competitors do, you have a huge advantage over them now!

Leverage it to your advantage.

Content is a long-term investment. The sooner you understand that fact the quicker you will start building organic traffic to your website that actually converts into qualified leads and subsequently closed deals!

Now as I believe this point is clear, let’s get to the third benefit you can gain from having general informational content on your website.

 

3) You can naturally attract editorial backlinks referencing your content.

This benefit goes hand by hand with the previous one. If you produce an exceptionally valuable content, besides building a rapport with your prospects it will also attract natural backlinks.

However, oftentimes you won’t get a taste of it until your content starts surfacing somewhere on the first page of search results, ideally at the top.

This is because whenever a content creator (usually a blogger, journalist, link building company, etc.) is looking for a quality resource to reference in their article, they tend not to go to the second page of search results but rather pick one from the first page.

Surprising right?

In other words, you will get an opportunity to start landing those super quality and relevant editorial links just because your informational article was:

• (a) found on the first page
• (b) of a superior quality

And therefore, some content creator decided to reference it as a resource in their article.

You might think that it’s very unlikely that your informational piece of content can be picked up like that by some content creator.

But trust me, this happens all the time!

We get those types of links to our informational articles quite often. Sometimes they come from websites of small local businesses while others from powerful industry blogs and national publications.

However, as I mentioned above, you won’t start seeing it unless your content ranks on the first page of search results.

This last statement directly supports the big lie Google tries you to believe in – create exceptional content and links will be magically built on its own.

The first part of the statement is true – you need to have an exceptional content. But the second part is false. That doesn’t work this way.

You must proactively build links to your content for it to rank. Once it’s ranking, only then it will start passively receiving backlinks.

But remember, it only works as long as your content is high quality.

I hope it makes sense. I don’t want to go deep into link building here because we have an entire chapter dedicated to it further in this guide.

 

#2 Keyword Research

Now that you know which four cornerstone content types to include on your investor website, the next logical step is to find the best keywords for real estate investors your target audience actually search for to find services like yours through search engines.

This brings us to a keyword research – one of my favorite parts of content creation.

Keyword research is paramount for any successful SEO campaign. At Real Estate Bees and our other brands that we run, we NEVER create a single piece of content without doing keyword research.

This is a non-negotiable rule of our SEO and content teams. On the contrary, I’m blown away how many companies violate this major principal every single day!

Now, granted if you have a large email list or social media following and that is the primary channel you’re driving traffic through to your website, by all means, feel free to create content without prior keyword research.

However, if your main objective is to attract traffic from search engines, producing content without conducting keyword research will result in literally zero return on investment for your business.

So, whenever you’re tempted to write an article on a topic that you feel can be ‘nice to have’, STOP. Ask yourself – have I done keyword research to justify existence of that article?

If your answer is – no, don’t waste your time and money on writing that article.

On the other hand, if your answer is – yes, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have the green light to write the article either.

It simply means that your article idea has passed the first check point. There are other elements to consider when it comes to getting a full green light to start writing an article.

Among them are priority of the content, availability of writers, price point, and others. But, I’m not going to get into it in this guide. Here I want you to understand the importance of the keyword research and how to do it high level.

Alright, so in order to conduct keyword research, you’ll need a reliable tool. I personally use ahrefs. But you are welcome to use any keyword research tool you like.

Here is my step-by-step process on how to do keyword research:

 

Step #1 – Identify a Seed Keyword

The very first thing I always do when starting keyword research is to identify a ‘seed’ keyword.

A seed keyword is a word or phrase that, in your own opinion, best describes your target audience’s query that they will type in search engines to find services like yours.

To do that, I usually go through a little mental exercise outlined below in which I walk you through my thought process.

Let’s say you’re a real estate wholesaler. In this instance your main target audience will be home sellers (on the acquisition side). In fact, if you’re somewhat experienced wholesaler, you won’t be simply interested in every home seller.

Instead, you’ll target motivated home sellers who are in some sort of distress. To take this even further, you also will want them to have as much equity in the property as possible.

Most wholesalers will agree that what I’ve just described indicates a highly valuable motivated seller lead for investors and wholesalers. So how do you attract these types of home sellers through search engines?

Well, let’s think what our ‘seed’ keyword could potentially be that will allow us to laser-target these specific home sellers in search engines.

Ask yourself, how can I verbalize a home seller that meets all the following criteria?

• (a) In distress and therefore needs to sell quick and potentially for cash.
• (b) Has high equity in a property or ideally owns it free and clear.

Well, there are quite a few scenarios that I can immediately come up with here. But let’s explore real estate inheritance for sake of this example.

First of all, let’s run this scenario through our checklist to confirm whether it meets our criteria.

• (a) Considering that a large portion of the US population either in dept or live from paycheck to paycheck, usually when someone inherits real estate, it becomes a financial burden to them rather than a relief. That is mostly because owning real estate costs money, which most people don’t have extra of. So, the optimal solution here is to get rid of it and as soon as possible. Great! We have a distressed situation here. Check.
• (b) Very often when one inherits a property due to death of parents, the property is usually paid off. Even if it’s not fully paid off, often than not a large portion is paid off. Great! We have a seller with either high equity or free and clear property. Check.

Now that we validated the intent of our target audience we want to attract, how do we translate it into a seed keyword to use for our keyword research?

Very simple. Put yourself in the shoes of a person who inherited unwanted property. What will you type in a search engine to get your trouble solved?

Most likely you’ll type something like this: “sell inherited house” or “sell my inherited house”. This is, in fact, what most people would type.

It does make sense. So, we can get started from here and use “sell inherited house” as our seed keyword.

 

Step #2 – Plug the Seed Keyword in a Keyword Research Tool

The next step is to take use of a keyword research tool to achieve the following objectives:

• (a) Verify the existence of actual search volume for our seed keyword.
• (b) Find other available variations of keywords that have the same search intent as our seed keyword.

Alright, so I plugged in the “sell inherited house” seed keyword in ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer keyword research tool and here are the results.

As you can see on the screenshot, our seed keyword does have actual search volume, which confirms our first objective.

Now, if you look at all the rest of the results, you’ll see bunch of different variations of our seed keyword. Many, not all, of these variations have the same search intent as our seed keyword, which confirms our second objective.

 

Step #3 – Group Discovered Keywords by Search Intent

Once you have your first list of keywords, export them to a spreadsheet for further sorting. This is a crucial step. So many so-called SEOs do it either wrong or completely skip it.

It’s imperative to categorize all the found keywords by groups with the same search intent. Otherwise, your content will target users with different search intents, which often results in numerous issues.

I won’t get into it here. I’m covering those issues in great detail in the next section dedicated to keyword selection.

That said, I want to note that in this particular context, when I say “search intent”, I’m actually referring to two things:

• (a) Topical search intent (I also call it a ‘Theme’) – this search intent refers to any keyword that has the same meaning but is spelled differently. For example, one person can type “sell inherited house” whereas another person will type “sell inherited home”. The words used to describe real property are different, but they mean exactly the same. Therefore, both of those keywords will fall under the same topical search intent or keyword Theme.
• (b) Sale cycle phase search intent – this search intent refers to a person’s phase within the sale cycle. For example, one person can type “sell my inherited house fast” whereas another person will type “should I sell my inherited house?”. The first example indicates Commercial intent. That person is interested in selling fast NOW. On the other hand, the second example indicates Informational intent. That person is not yet ready to sell but rather interested in getting more information to make the right decision.

Ok, now that this clarification is out of the way, here is how I categorized those keywords by intent.

From the screenshot above you can see that I grouped together all the keywords with the same topical intent (Theme) while at the same time indicated whether each group falls under Commercial or Informational query (sale cycle phase intent).

This approach to keyword grouping gives you a clear idea what pieces of content you can create and which keywords exactly to optimize each of them for.

This is the holy grail of keyword research! Trust me. I’ve seen so many people omit this step and then get surprised why their content doesn’t rank well.

If you adopt this practice of properly segmenting your keywords before starting to create the actual content, you’ll join the top echelon of SEOs out there.

Anyways, let’s get back to it.

So, if you look at that last screenshot of my keyword categorization, you’ll see that you can create three pieces of content, as indicated below.

I hope all this makes sense so far. Nonetheless, keyword research doesn’t stop here.

 

Step #4 – Repeat Step 1, 2 and 3 with New Seed Keywords

As I said, the keyword research doesn’t stop after getting your initial list of keywords. In fact, if you end your research at this point, you may possibly miss some significant keywords!

Therefore, every time you exhaust your initial keyword list, start over with a new seed keyword.

I’m saying that because often keyword research tools don’t suggest all the available related terms. I find quite often that some crucial keywords are being excluded from suggested keywords by many tools.

This is why you must always try to come up with additional seed keywords to go through those first three steps a few more times to hopefully identify new related keywords missed in the first round.

Let me show you a practical example to demonstrate my point. So, as I said, we need to come up with alternative seed keyword.

Can you think of other seed keywords?

Well, being an investor, you are most likely familiar with ‘we buy houses’ keyword. This is a massive keyword in real estate investing space that targets motivated sellers.

So, what if we try to modify it for our specific purpose – house inheritance. In this case, let’s try using ‘we buy inherited houses’ phrase as our seed keyword and see what we will get.

This keyword falls under the same keyword theme as our first seed keyword “sell inherited house” because it has identical topical search intent.

As you can see, we got some results. Granted, this is not that much. However, considering that in reality the search volume is about 4x higher than what is usually reported by ahrefs tool, this is not bad.

Since this keyword falls under the same keyword theme, we can now add it to our spreadsheet and then use it for further optimization of our first piece of content.

I hope you realize what just has happened…

By simply coming up with an additional seed keyword and running it through our 3-step process, we identified a brand new keyword variation, which was missed in the first round!

This is huge because if we ended our keyword research after the very first attempt, we’d miss a crucial keyword that could have translated in tens of thousands of dollars in lost revenue!

Don’t forget that this is just one piece of content. Multiply it to all other articles that you’ll have on your website and suddenly we’re talking about hundreds of thousands and potentially millions of dollars in lost revenue in the long run.

Let it sink in for a moment. You don’t have the luxury of messing up keyword research because the stakes are too high.

Knowing how to properly do keyword research is one of the essential skills that differentiates amateurs from super star SEOs. Applying it to your investing business will allow you to identify top real estate investor keywords with the highest ROI.

So, as I already mentioned, I highly recommend going through the steps 1 to 3 a few times with different seed keywords to hopefully identify all the major key terms.

Once you’ve done that and categorized all your keywords by groups with the same search intent, the next step in the content creation process is keywords selection.

 

#3 Keywords Selection

Keyword selection is an extremely important activity when it comes to content optimization for search engines. It’s one of those that can potentially make or break your future SEO efforts.

Proper keyword selection will help you:

• rank better in search engines
• rank for greater amount of relevant keywords
• increase conversion rates
• avoid keyword cannibalization
• decrease bounce rate
• improve user satisfaction

Finally, all of that will directly contribute to the amount of deals you close!

While improper keyword selection is usually seen among newbie SEOs, there are plenty of experienced SEOs who make that mistake too.

The main cause of improper keyword selection is rooted in fundamental misunderstanding of keyword intent (also known as search intent).

There are three primary mistakes SEOs make when selecting keywords:

1. Selection of incorrect keywords
2. Selection of contradicting keywords
3. Selection of supplemental yet interfering keywords

Let’s go over every mistake and understand what each means.

 

Mistake #1 – Selection of Incorrect Keywords

The first mistake, which doesn’t happen very often, is when an SEO professional selects completely incorrect keywords to optimize a web page.

Usually this happens due to not being closely familiar with a given industry, which is manifested through misunderstanding of keyword intent.

I have a great personal example to illustrate it.

I remember when I first got into real estate SEO, I was fooled by one of the industry’s largest keywords – homes for sale.

At that time, real estate was a brand new niche for me. We just landed our first real estate client. So, I have never done keyword research for that industry before.

To make matters worse, I did not own a home at that time either. Therefore, I have never made any real estate related searches online.

All that made me absolutely unfamiliar with the industry, which would shortly bite me in the ass. Not realizing my own ignorance, I started optimizing the website of our first real estate client based on what I thought was right.

Long story short, I optimized a web page that was supposed to target home sellers for a “homes for sale” keyword 😊

For those who didn’t get it, the keyword I used to optimize the home seller-focused page had home buyer intent. 100% opposite!

Smart me…

Call it dumb or stupid but this is how I approached it back then. I saw words “sale” and “home” contained within that massive keyword and it was enough for me to make the connection.

The severity of this mistake is quite profound as you can see. If not fixed immediately, it will cause significant damage over time.

Thankfully, very quickly I realized that I used a completely wrong keyword to optimize that page and fixed it. But this type of mistake occurs all the time mainly due to lack of experience in a particular niche.

So, watch out. Make sure you understand the intent behind each keyword very intimately.

 

Mistake #2 – Selection of Contradicting Keywords

The second mistake happens more often than the first one but its cause is usually the same.

The only difference is that in this case an SEO person selects correct keywords along with incorrect ones to optimize a web page.

Let’s take the same exact example with the optimization of a home seller-focused page. Contradicting keywords in this instance will be “homes for sale” and “sell your home”.

To better understand what I mean, look at this Meta title optimized for two contradicting keywords:

Sell Your Home Fast in Houston TX [3-14 Day Close] Houston Homes for Sale

The following Meta title contains three parts:

• Part #1: Sell Your Home Fast in Houston TX – this part of the Meta title contains main target keyword plus geographical modifier. Nothing wrong here.
• Part #2: [3-14 Day Close] – this part of the Meta title contains an attention grabbing element to make your ad stand out in search results. Nothing wrong here either.
• Part #3: Houston Homes for Sale – this part of the Meta title usually contains secondary target keyword (synonym) plus geographical modifier. However, in this case we mistakenly included a contradictory keyword (antonym) that has an opposite search intent.

In other words, with this Meta title we signal search engines that we target opposite audiences, in particular – home sellers and buyers.

Again, this type of keyword selection mistake occurs mainly due to lack of experience in a particular niche, which ultimately leads to misunderstanding of keyword intent. However, often it can also be attributed to a lack of attention to detail.

The severity of this mistake is also quite significant simply because it’s not clear which queries search engines should rank the web page for.

Having two contradicting keywords that target queries with opposite intent will ultimately confuse search engines in determining which queries to return your web page for in the search results.

If not fixed immediately, the wrongly optimized web page will underperform significantly.

 

Mistake #3 – Selection of Supplemental Yet Interfering Keywords

Finally, the last mistake happens more often than the other two.

While this mistake is usually made by SEOs that lack a deeper expertise in content optimization, its main cause is still rooted in fundamental misunderstanding of keyword intent.

Let’s unpack all that so you can understand what I mean.

First of all, what do I mean by ‘supplemental yet interfering keywords’? It’s actually quite simple.

It means that a content of a given web page is optimized with target keywords alongside the supplemental ones. First that may sound like a good thing to you but only if you confuse the term ‘supplemental’ with ‘synonymous’.

Supplemental does NOT equal synonymous.

These are two similar yet different concepts. Synonymous keywords have the same keyword intent whereas supplemental ones do not.

Even though supplemental keywords can be contextually very close to the topic of a given web page, they have a different keyword intent from the target keywords.

We should avoid using supplemental keywords because they usually target visitors who are in a different phase of the search cycle. Therefore, they will ultimately destruct (interfere) visitors from the given web page’s main objective.

Here is an example of such interference that includes two supplemental keywords. Let’s look at the following two keywords:

• benefits of a cash offer on house
• how to sell house for cash

These two keywords are closely related to the same subject matter. Don’t they?

Due to this apparent relevancy, they are often mistakenly used by less experienced SEOs to optimize a single piece of content. Therefore, you can often see articles on the web (in any niche) optimized for these two keywords.

However, people searching for each of these keywords are in different phases of their search cycle.

Let me explain.

Let’s take the keyword “benefits of a cash offer on house”. What is the search intent behind this keyword?

The person using this keyword clearly wants to understand the advantages of getting a cash offer on their house. This means that they’re currently in the phase where they’re trying to decide whether it’s worth to sell for cash or not.

In contrast, if we evaluate the search intent of the “how to sell house for cash” keyword, we’ll see that a person searching for this keyword wants to learn how to sell their home for cash.

That person is already in a different phase of their search cycle. They don’t need the information about the benefits of a cash offer in this stage.

They already decided that they want to sell their house for cash after receiving enough information in the previous phase.

If you combine together these (or any other) supplemental keywords in the same article, you are subject to the following disadvantages:

• Rank worse overall in search engines than what you could have – because you’ll confuse search engines with selected keywords that have different intent.
• Rank for lesser number of relevant keywords in search engines than what you could have – due to the same reason provided in the first point.
• Decrease conversion rates – because you’ll confuse, and often annoy, your visitors with irrelevant content to their search phase.
• Increase bounce rate – due to the same reason provided in the third point.
• Worsen user satisfaction – due to the same reason provided in the third point.

And all that simply from selecting a wrong combination of keywords to optimize your content for! This mistake alone can cost you millions of dollars of lost revenue in the long run.

Don’t be one of those investors neglecting this and the other two mistakes I’ve outlined in this section. Be an avid student of proper search engine optimization.

I’m considering creating a private Facebook Group for people who are interested in learning more about SEO for real estate investors. In that group you’ll be able to ask me directly any specific questions you might have.

If this is something you’d be interested in, vote below to let me know. If I receive enough positive votes, I’ll create the group and invite you to join.

Congrats! You made it to the ‘Fuel’ chapter, the third critical part of the equation to dominate the search results in your target market.

At this point, you have everything you need to lay a solid foundation for your website to prepare it for the next phase of real estate investor SEO.

I’m thrilled to tell you that you now know more than 99% of all your competitors out there trying to rank their investor websites in search engines!

If you diligently follow my blueprint provided in the ‘Foundation’ and ‘Propulsion’ chapters and actually implement it, this next phase, I’m about to walk you through, will catapult your website in search engines and blow your competitors out of the water.

So, let’s dive right into it.

First, let me define what I mean by ‘Fuel’ when it comes to real estate investor SEO.

In terms of my race car analogy, Fuel refers to exactly what it means – a substance that powers up the engine of a vehicle (gasoline, diesel, etc.).

If a car has an empty fuel tank, the engine won’t even start resulting in guaranteed race loss regardless of how well optimized a car’s tires, suspension, aerodynamics, etc. are (the Foundation) and how powerful the engine is (the Propulsion).

In our real estate investing SEO context, the ‘Fuel’ concept is exactly the opposite from ‘Foundation’ and ‘Propulsion’.

Unlike those two concepts, which pertain to everything that’s being done directly on your website, Fuel constitutes everything that’s being done outside of your website.

In other words, any activity made outside of your website that directly impacts its rankings will fall under the ‘Fuel’ concept.

While there are a few such activities among which are Citations, Mentions and Backlinks, the major one that really matters the most and truly characterizes the “Fuel’ concept in terms of SEO is Link Building (also known as backlink acquisition).

In the SEO community we call these activities – off-page optimization.

Like the premium grade fuel that allows race cars to reach maximum speeds in the shortest time possible while simultaneously being more efficient, quality backlinks is the Fuel that’s absolutely essential for your investor website to rank highly in search engines.

In other words, he/she who has the most backlinks of a superior quality will have the highest chance to outrank everyone else, given all the other essential aspects outlined in this guide are also done correctly.

In this chapter, I’ll show you all the most effective and evergreen link building methods that will make your competitors eat your dust!

 

#1 Digital PR

Digital PR stands for Digital Public Relations. Besides its original utility, which has been widely exploited by businesses to gain public exposure, credibility, and status, in the recent years it has become quite a popular backlink acquisition strategy.

If you don’t know what it is, in a nutshell it’s an exchange of value (content) for an attribution (backlink) to the creator of that content.

For example, a reporter from a national publication receives an assignment to write an article about house closing costs. In order to make the article more credible, that reporter seeks a number of industry experts to provide their commentaries on the subject.

This way when the story gets published, the reporter will credit each quoted expert for providing their expertise by mentioning their name, title and company in the article.

As part of the attribution process, the reporter might also link to each expert’s website resulting in a juicy backlink from a reputable publication!

Of course, not every mention results in a backlink. It depends on each publication’s editorial policy.

However, if done correctly and consistently, Digital PR is certainly a lucrative backlink acquisition strategy that can land incredibly powerful links!

You’re probably asking now, “this all sounds great but how can I utilize this link building method for my real estate investor website?”

Great question. You have three options:

1. Do it yourself
2. Hire Digital PR-specific link building agency
3. Hire traditional Public Relations firm

If you want to do it yourself, you absolutely can! It’s not a rocket science.

Unlike 5-10 years ago when this space was strictly reserved to traditional PR firms, with today’s online PR platforms such as Qwoted, HARO and others, anyone can become their own publicist.

That said, you do need to know certain best practices that will skyrocket your response rate. Unfortunately, I’m unable to walk you through it in this extensive guide.

If you’d like to learn how to utilize Digital PR to build links for your investor website, sign up to this list to let me know you’re interested.

If I receive enough requests, I’ll certainly create step-by-step instructions on how to do it and will let you know by email as soon as it goes live.

 

#2 Guest Posting

Guest posting or guest blogging is another popular link building method among SEOs. For those who don’t know, the concept of guest posting is similar to Digital PR’s – content in exchange for a backlink.

However, in guest posting you submit an entire article rather than a short commentary like in Digital PR.

While guest posting is a very effective backlink acquisition strategy, most of the people do it wrong. There are four major mistakes I constantly see most link builders make with this method.

1. Writing useless content and submitting it on questionable websites.
2. Following identical content formatting style that leaves obvious footprints.
3. Placing links in unnatural manner that can be spotted immediately.
4. Fueling the ultimate competition by linking to parasite websites.

If detected by Google’s automated algorithm, in the best-case scenario these and other critical mistakes can lead to your guest posting efforts resulting in zero positive impact, which means you wasted bunch of money and time.

However, in the worst-case scenario if these mistakes trigger a manual review, your website will most likely get penalized with the manual action.

I wish I could explain ins and outs of a proper guest posting link building process in this guide. However, it deserves its own guide.

If you’d like to learn how to avoid these major mistakes and how to approach this incredibly effective link building technique in the right way, sign up to this list to let me know you’re interested.

If I receive enough requests, I’ll certainly create step-by-step instructions on how to do it and will let you know by email as soon as it goes live.

 

#3 Link Insertion

Link insertion, also known as niche edits, link building method has also become quite popular in recent years. We have been seeing a considerable increase in demand for such links.

What’s even more interesting is that a lot of large national brands have started increasingly pursuing this strategy. However, it’s not surprising to me because it’s perhaps one of the most effective and valuable link building methods.

The reason being that this strategy checks most of the boxes according to my Backlink Potency Grading Formula (BPGF) making these types of links the highest quality in terms of potential ranking impact.

For those who don’t know what link insertion is, it’s a strategy that allows you to insert your links into already existing articles published by other websites.

For example, let’s say you want to build backlinks to your article about the advantages of selling a house to investors.

Having this subject in mind, with the help of simple Google Search Operators, you can easily find bunch of already published articles with related topics to yours, which you could use to naturally link to your article from.

For instance, say you want to find existing articles about closing costs for home sellers to insert a link to your target post.

Articles on this subject will allow you to find a natural connection to your post thereby making webmasters more receptive to your pitch to add your link.

Let me quickly demonstrate how the process of finding articles with a specific topic works. You go to Google and use intitle: search operator in conjunction with your desired topic.

Here is how this search query will look like:

intitle:closing costs for home sellers

And here are the results this search query has returned:

Not bad at all – 369,000 potential placements for your link!

Obviously, most of them won’t agree to add your link for various reasons. But hey, even if a tiny fraction of this number will take on your offer, you are golden.

And by the way, don’t forget that this is just one topic we have used in this example. There are tons of other related topics you can come up with to find potential backlink opportunities for that same target article of yours.

I hope you see the power of this backlink acquisition method!

Not only it allows you to insert your link into topically relevant articles but it also lets you leverage an established authority many of those existing articles have accumulated since their initial publishing.

To take it one step further, to a real ‘gangsta’ level, in addition to what I’ve just covered, my team and I also strive to find articles with organic traffic!

In other words, not only we look for articles that are topically relevant and have an established authority but we also want them to have a decent organic traffic from search engines.

This third component in the mix makes this link building strategy so much more valuable beyond obvious SEO benefits because it also lets you create targeted referral traffic!

In the end of the day, it’s all about getting targeted traffic to your website. Search engine optimization is simply one of the traffic sources.

Anyways, I believe you grasped the huge potential of this strategy. I wish I could give you detailed guidance in this article on how to implement this backlink acquisition method.

But unfortunately, it’s too extensive and requires a separate guide dedicated specifically to it. If you’d like to learn how to properly implement this link building technique step-by-step, sign up to this list to let me know you’re interested.

If I receive enough requests, I’ll certainly create step-by-step instructions on how to do it and will let you know by email as soon as it goes live.

 

#4 Link Exchange

Link exchange technically falls under the ‘link insertion’ link building method. But I decided to create a separate category for it because it’s how you can scale your link insertion efforts!

Generally speaking, a link exchange is when you reach out to other websites (or others reach out to you) and propose to exchange links.

The link exchange doesn’t necessarily need to be direct where you link to their site and they link back to your site, even though there is nothing wrong with it.

However, there are many not very savvy SEOs and webmasters (even though they think they’re very smart) that are absolutely against doing direct link exchanges.

When presented with the opportunity, they blindly refer to Google’s guidelines which indeed clearly indicate that direct link exchange is considered a link spam. Duh…

Yet, the same guidelines clearly state the following: “Any links that are intended to manipulate rankings in Google Search results may be considered link spam.”

Doesn’t that apply to ANY link building method besides the direct link exchange?

This has always been my pet peeve to observe so-called SEOs who will reject quality direct link exchange, yet will right away turn around, and purchase links through guest posting, link inserts or other ways.

Regardless, here is my take on this – as long as…

1. This is NOT your only link building strategy, and
2. You’re NOT doing it on a mass scale, and
3. The link is CONTEXTUALLY RELEVANT

… there is absolutely nothing wrong with it! In fact, I strongly believe it’s a great trade.

This statement 100% applies to all the rest of the link building methods.

Anyways, whether you pursue direct link exchanges or indirect ones (also known as ABC or 3-way link exchange), it won’t take your link building efforts to the next level unless you approach this method from a different angle.

I call it – Link Exchange Partnerships!

In essence, it’s a combination of Guest posting, Link insertion and Link exchange backlink building methods cleverly executed in an ongoing, scalable and mutually-beneficial manner.

In simple words, this method lets you leverage other peoples’ link building efforts on an ongoing basis rather than a one-off link exchange. Here is what I mean.

Think about it, when you submit a guest post to a particular website, if you’re doing it right, you most likely do the following:

1. Prospect for quality websites to submit your guest post to.
2. Reach out to website webmasters to pitch your content ideas.
3. Write a well-researched, high-quality and insightful article.
4. Add into your article contextually-natural links to various supplemental helpful resources, whether they are on your own website or other unrelated to you websites.

Once the article is published, you get your backlink (or a few backlinks sometimes) which is great. That said, this only adds one new referral domain to your overall backlink profile.

You might say, “Well, Oleg, I’m not going to stop on submitting a single guest post. I’ll continue pursuing this link building method indefinitely.”

Fair enough. However, do you know how much resources you’ll need to land, say, 10 links through guest posting?

Without getting into the nitty gritty, because it will require a separate article to walk you through your available options and how much approximately they will cost you, on the low end you’ll pay $5k ($500 per post).

And this is just for a single link building method. It gets kinda pricey if you add others as well.

Now, what I’m about to tell you next is where it gets very interesting!

Imagine having five non-competing companies from the same or similar industry that also actively invest in guest blogging and are willing to collaborate with you by linking to your website from their own guest posts.

In this scenario you can land five backlinks adding five new referral domains to your overall backlink profile without spending a single penny!

You’re probably asking, “Oleg, why in the world would these five companies link to my website from their guest posts?” Great question! Here is why…

Because you’ll link to their websites from your guest posts in return 🙂

In other words, you’ll establish a reciprocal partnership through which you’ll agree to link to their websites from your guest posts if they return the favor.

Think about it, in order to make your guest post helpful (for readers) and naturally-looking (for search engines), you have to link to useful, supplemental resources besides your own website.

Now, as I mentioned in the “Guest posting” section above, most of the SEOs (the amateur ones) take an easy route by linking to what I call ‘parasite’ websites as their ‘supplemental resources’.

By parasite websites I refer to Wikipedia, Forbes, Investopedia and many other huge websites.

Don’t get me wrong though, these are really quality websites. But there are numerous websites that have better content on any given topic.

The problem is that it’s more time consuming to find those websites with better content to reference in the guest post as supplemental resources.

Therefore, most of the SEO folks resort to a quicker solution by linking to a few of those parasite websites that generally have content about any topic under the sun.

While the SEOs, practicing what I’ve just described, think that they fooled everyone by this brilliant technique, they don’t realize that the only person they fooled is themselves.

Unfortunately, there are at least five major issues with this approach that negatively affects directly not only those armature SEOs but also ultimately hurts indirectly all the SEO professionals out there.

But I digress. This is a discussion for another article which I don’t want to get into here. Let’s get back to where we left off.

Ok so, instead of linking to parasite sites from your guest posts, you’ll link to your partner websites. This is why they will also link to your site from their guest posts!

Huge win win for everyone!

It’s literally limitless. It depends on how far you want to take it. Remember, you don’t have to have five partners. You can have twenty or more!

Let’s do a little exercise to demonstrate the power of this strategy.

If you were to land twenty guest posts without partners, you’d get 20 new referring domains to your backlink profile.

Now imagine for a moment if you had five partners where each of them also link to you from their twenty guest posts.

With the same amount of resources you’ve invested in your twenty guest posts you’d add a whooping 100 new referring domains to your backlink profile!

I hope you see the potential more clearly now 😊

I personally believe that this is the most powerful, sustainable, scalable and economically-efficient link building strategy in existence today PERIOD. But it takes time and skill to get it going.

There is much more to learn about it. I wish I could give you detailed guidance on how to create this link building machine in this article. Unfortunately, it’s impossible.

If you’d like to learn how to utilize this link building technique step-by-step, sign up to this list to let me know you’re interested.

If I receive enough requests, I’ll certainly create step-by-step instructions on how to do it and will let you know by email as soon as it goes live.

If you’re reading this then the chances are high you’re done with the first part of my real estate investor SEO blueprint, which taught you how to effectively generate traffic to your website from search engines.

In the following part of my blueprint, you’ll learn, step-by-step, how to successfully convert the visitors you’ve attracted through search engines into motivated seller leads that will ultimately translate into DEALS!

Let’s get started…

Credibility is perhaps one of the most important things when it comes to converting visitors into leads and subsequently into clients!

It’s an intangible asset paramount for establishing trust between you and your prospects. People MUST trust you before they are comfortable doing business with you.

This is a universal ‘social’ law that’s very hard to bypass unless there is a sufficient degree of credibility that helps bridging the gap.

While in this chapter I’ll be mostly referencing the term “Credibility”, I want you to know that I’m using it as an umbrella term for all the following components that collectively represent the “Credibility” concept:

• Trust
• Reputation
• Authority
• Influence
• Positioning
• Status
• Expertise

In this chapter I’ll show you a number of effective ways to create a solid credibility that will instantly establish trust between you and your visitors making your website a lead generating machine!

 

#1 Authority Signals

Authority helps you become a sought-after industry expert. There is a huge benefit in being an authority figure in the market.

It lets you tap into the power of positioning!

As explained in my article 7 Robust Positioning Strategies to Become an Expert in Your Field, companies or individuals who have been able to successfully position themselves as sought-after experts in their field, gain significant advantages over their competitors.

One of those advantages is an unprecedented conversion of web visitors into hot leads due to your stellar credibility!

Below I’ve listed a number of powerful authority signals you can utilize on your investor website to clearly project your credibility to position yourself as an industry expert in the eyes of your prospects.

 

Media & Press Coverage

One of the crucial building blocks of your credibility is getting featured in the nation’s most reputable media outlets and publications.

It’s undeniable that having media coverage helps you instantly boost your credibility as an industry professional. That is a proven fact.

This is absolutely must for you if you want to position yourself as a go-to industry expert in the marketplace.

You can’t otherwise legitimately claim that you’re one if no prominent outlets confirm it by featuring your insights on a subject of your expertise.

But how do you go about getting that coverage for your seemingly small and ordinary real estate investing business?

Well, if you asked me this question five years ago, I’d say you need to hire a PR firm that will cost you at a bare minimum $5k per month in retainer fees.

However, luckily time has changed and the Public Relations space has evolved dramatically. Nowadays you can get featured in prominent national publications without a pricey PR firm.

Of course, you need to learn that skill and dedicate the time to do it on your own. But now you finally have the ability to be your own publicist whereas five years ago it wasn’t possible.

Also, if you don’t want to do it yourself, we at Real Estate Bees launched a concierge Publicity Program exclusively for our platform’s members.

Since the launch of the program, we’ve earned thousands of media and press placements for our members.

What’s even more incredible is that the basic level of our Publicity Program is absolutely FREE! That means you can sign up and start getting media coverage already today 100% FREE!

 

Industry Expertise

While similar to the Media & Press, which legitimizes you as an industry expert, there are also other effective ways to demonstrate your industry expertise.

One of those effective ways is to author in-depth educational resources on the subject of your expertise.

For instance, as an investor, you want to be perceived as an industry expert when it comes to subjects that interest your target audience – property sellers, right?

In other words, you want sellers to consume your insightful content on the topics they research and then potentially reach out to you for help.

High quality, in-depth educational content makes your prospects feel that you know what you’re doing. It automatically lends you reputation.

Exceptional content also builds trust with your prospects, and as mentioned several times – trust equals sales!

After understanding those crucial facts, the real question now is – where should you create your in-depth educational resources?

Well, technically there are two main places where you should be creating your educational resources at.

1. Your own website
2. Other people’s websites

As far as your own site, your educational resources can be created in the form of blog posts, videos, guides, etc.

In other words, you simply invest in creating high-quality educational resources for your target audience right on your website.

This is certainly one of the imperative components of any successful real estate investor SEO campaign. To learn more about it, refer to the “Content Creation” section where I explained it in detail.

So, having solid educational resources on your own website is the first way to demonstrate your industry expertise. However, it can only take you so far.

While it’s absolutely great to have educational resources on your own site, in the end of the day it’s your website. It’s biased by nature. There is no unbiased third party entity involved.

This is where other people’s websites come into the picture, which is the second, yet more powerful, way of demonstrating your industry expertise.

When it comes to other people’s sites, I strictly refer to quality, authoritative, and preferably industry-specific websites. However, in this case, the industry specificity is not that important.

As long as your target audience trusts the website which your content is published on, by extension it will transfer that trust to your content and boost your perceived level of industry expertise.

Therefore, I’d highly recommend becoming a consistent contributor to as many authoritative publications as possible that reach your target audience.

To do that, you simply need to identify those publications and apply to become a contributor. There are quite a few publications on the web that accept contributors.

At Real Estate Bees, we created such a program available for qualified industry pros who want to demonstrate their industry expertise by sharing their first-hand, practical experience with our massive audience.

If you want to learn more about this opportunity, feel free to check out our Expert Contributor Program and apply to be considered.

 

Trust Badges & Seals

Before we get into this, let’s first define what a trust budge is.

Trust Badge, also referred to as a Trust Seal, is a small graphical emblem issued to commercial companies by credible third-party entities that serves as a sign of trustworthiness and legitimacy.

Trust badges are extremely important for businesses in any industry, including real estate investing, because they help achieve the following important objectives:

1. Boost reputation, credibility and trustworthiness
2. Provide third party-backed proof
3. Reduce consumer friction and anxiety

By prominently displaying your trust badges on your website can directly increase conversions, whether it’s a contact form submission, phone call, newsletter opt-in or any other conversion you’re after.

Therefore, make sure that you showcase your earned trust seals on your website as it’s a very effective way to demonstrate your credibility and ultimately convert more visitors into motivated leads!

At Real Estate Bees, we have several types of trust badges that we issue to qualified real estate investors.

When you join REB platform, our Quality Assurance team will manually review your profile and if approved, you’ll be eligible to use one of our Trust Badges to place on your website.

If you still haven’t earned any trust badges from other authoritative entities, joining REB platform is a great way to start building your credibility online.

 

Awards & Accolades

Like the trust badges, showcasing your awards and accolades is a similar way to demonstrate your credibility.

If you received awards or accolades acknowledging your achievements, take advantage of them by publicly displaying them on your investor website.

These too add extra points to your overall credibility making your web visitors trust your company even more.

 

#2 Social Proof

Social proof is another powerful tool to instantly boost your credibility. It has been successfully used to influence decisions and behaviors of individuals since 19th century.

Social proof concept, as we know it today in the marketing context, was originally born from a psychological phenomenon called bandwagon effect.

According to bandwagon effect, social proof causes people to trust your product or service primarily because other people tried it already.

In other words, it persuades your visitors that they can trust your company. That’s incredibly powerful!

In this section I’ve listed a few powerful ways you can utilize social proof on your investor website to boost your credibility.

 

Testimonials & Reviews

Positive client testimonials and reviews about your business is perhaps one of the most powerful social proof signals.

You want to have as many of those as possible prominently displayed throughout your entire website for your visitors to see.

There is probably no other more robust credibility building tactic than having a bunch of testimonials from your past customers.

What even more powerful is if you have those raving testimonials in the video format. Video is 10x more persuasive than written reviews.

It will help you to establish a solid reputation and build report with your prospects so much faster. So make sure to not simply ask your clients to write you a review but opt for capturing a video testimonial.

I know that it’s more time-consuming and not always comfortable. But if you’re serious about growing your investing business, this is the way to go. It will pay off big time!

 

Case Studies

Case studies is another incredibly effective method to demonstrate social proof. Case studies are similar to client testimonials but they are more involved because they require your input as well.

According to Maria Veloso, renown direct-response web copywriting expert and the author of Web Copy That Sells, explains the effectiveness of case studies this way:

Unlike testimonials that usually just state the end results, case studies tell a story. Case studies present another opportunity to engage the emotions of your readers and cause them to identify with your subject’s pain, problem, or predicament-and vicariously experience triumph in the solution you offer. With case study, you can also elevate the perceived value of your product in your own words, as compared to a testimonial, where you’re limited to using the actual words of your customer, whether those sentiments are well articulated or not. Finally, a case study tends to appear more factual and objective than a testimonial, as there is a general sense of objectivity conveyed.

For example, let’s say you’re a flipper who just purchased a property from a distressed seller. You can create a compelling case study out of this transaction that will resonate with future sellers.

To be more specific, you can create that case study by:

• (a) describing the seller’s situation
• (b) outlining what seller wanted to achieve
• (c) explaining how you helped the seller
• (d) etc.

In other words, describing the entire transaction that will serve as an in-depth case study.

Combined with the images of the property, yourself along with the owner and a video testimonial, a case study like this will serve you as 24/7 sales person! I don’t believe there is anything else more powerful than that you can have in your marketing arsenal.

 

Endorsements

Endorsement is a stamp of approval from prominent individuals. If you can get an endorsement from a celebrity, which is probably unlikely, it can be a very powerful social proof for your business.

However, endorsements don’t necessarily have to come from A-list celebrities. An endorsement from a local celebrity, prominent figure or reputable person will do the trick.

Those endorsements are way easier to get. For example, you can offer your services to those people for free in exchange for a testimonial.

Once you get one, not only you get a valuable testimonial, but you also can easily convert it into endorsement.

 

Recommendations

Recommendation is basically an endorsement from a ‘regular’ person, not a prominent individual. It can come from a client or colleague.

You’re probably wondering how recommendation is different from review or testimonial. Well, it’s just the format.

For instance, at Real Estate Bees we came up with a simple yet very effective way of getting digital recommendations via social media.

It allows you to leverage your past, current and future clients and colleagues by easily recommending you to their sphere of influence via popular social media platforms.

If you want to learn more about it and how to implement it to boost your social proof, check out this feature’s overview.

 

#3 Legitimacy

Another important component of a strong credibility is clearly conveying your legitimacy. How do you demonstrate your legitimacy?

Well, there are a few, widely underestimated among real estate investors, aspects I listed below that you can utilize on your website to project your legitimacy as a business!

 

Company Overview

At the time of writing this, literally 95% of every real estate investor website that I visit either doesn’t have company overview at all or has a generic and unauthentic one.

Which page of your website do you think your prospects will visit next right after landing on the first page? You’re right if you said – ‘About Us’ page!

According to many different studies, ‘About Us’ page is the second most visited page after the home page. What impression do you think your prospects will get about your company after seeing an empty or generic ‘About Us’ page?

Do you think they will trust you more or less? I think you know the answer.

Yet, the vast majority of real estate investors completely neglect that crucial, trust-building aspect. Don’t be like everyone else. They don’t know the importance of having a solid Company Overview.

Do yourself a huge favor by making sure you do the following:

1. Not using a pre-made generic placeholder content for your Company Overview.
2. Composing a unique, authentic, and comprehensive Company Overview.

 

Owner Overview

I can’t stress enough how important it’s to have Owner Overview on your investor website. Most of the investors also neglect this one.

In fact, Owner Overview is ignored even more than the Company Overview.

It sometimes seems to me, when I visit various investors’ sites, that the website owners try to hide from visitors who’s behind the company!

How stupid is that?

Why in the world would you do that knowing that your prospects (the sellers) are going through some sort of hardship and desperately trying to avoid unethical scam artists?

The sellers want to see that there is a real human being on the other side representing the company and it’s not another unverifiable faceless organization.

Having a clear, honest, and comprehensive biography (AKA Owner Overview) of yourself along with your headshot (or multiple photos including your entire family) does wonders!

It boosts your legitimacy right off the bat by dramatically reducing your prospects’ anxiety while simultaneously building positive rapport.

Do not overlook this extraordinarily powerful tool! If I had to choose between the Company and Owner overviews, I’d always pick the Owner Overview over the other.

But you don’t need to choose either or… Leverage both to your advantage!

 

Team Overview

Another effective way to demonstrate legitimacy is to include your team members along with their own headshots and bios on your website.

It only applies if you actually have the team, of course. So, if you’re a lone wolf, never mind.

However, if you have at least one team member, even if it’s an assistant, add them to your site. It will only help.

You see, people naturally think that if a company publicly displays its team, it must be a legitimate organization that has nothing to hide. It’s just basic psychology.

So, use it to your advantage.

 

Credentials

Similarly to discussed above trust signals, credentials can also be used to convey legitimacy and consequently boost credibility.

By ‘Credentials’ I refer to anything that can legitimize you as a qualified and competent professional in the eyes of your prospects.

For instance, relevant education, industry certifications, licenses, etc. If you or your team members have any of those, list them all on your website.

Again, it can only benefit you.

 

Guarantees

Strong guarantee is a huge legitimacy boost because it clearly communicates to your prospects that you’re very confident in your service.

Do you have any irresistible guarantees that you can offer to your potential clients? Like those that some Realtors dare to make: “Your house sold in 30 days, or I’ll buy it myself”.

If not, then think hard about what irresistible guarantee you can come up with.

Don’t just throw around statements like “We’ll buy your house in 7 days” like most of the investors do.

Come up with a real guarantee (like the example above) and not an empty statement. This alone will set you apart from your competitors.

Technology is the cornerstone of every successful business. If you don’t have the right tech stack in your real estate investing company, you’ll inevitably suffer consequences that directly impact your bottom line!

Whether it’s a poorly converting website, lack of automated follow system or anything in between, it will hinder your ability to reach your maximum potential.

Think about it for a moment, let’s say technology helps you to close one more deal a year.

Depending on the exit strategy you deploy in your business, it can mean extra profit of $5k at the lower end to $40k at the higher end.

That said, of course there are plenty of investors who make 6 figures in profit from each deal. But in my example, I referred to the vast majority of investors out there.

Do you think that extra profit of $5k to $40k will pay for your technology? Hell yeah! In today’s market you can get a solid tech stack for under $5k a year.

But hey, let me tell you something more exciting…

If you get the right technology and actually use it for the fullest in your business, I can guarantee it will help you close way more than just one deal!

In fact, not only it will help you close more deals, but it will also allow you to buy back more of your time to spend on things that matter to you the most (family, friends, travel, hobbies, etc.).

Anyways, if you haven’t been convinced yet that investing in technology to run your real estate investing business is a must, you can skip this chapter.

However, if you’ve realized the incredible value technology can bring to your business and subsequently to your lifestyle, keep reading.

In this chapter I’ll show you the most essential technology every successful real estate investor must have to close more deals!

 

#1 Website

Website is your primary web asset which you’ll be driving all your traffic to.

While it’s imperative to have a highly converting website for all traffic channels, it’s really doesn’t matter which website platform you use except when it comes to organic traffic specifically.

In other words, for all the traffic sources other than organic, it’ll suffice to have a website that converts well. However, for organic traffic you must have not only a well converting website but also SEO-friendly one.

In this chapter I’ll be solely discussing the essential components that will help you increase the conversion rates on your investor website. I’ll not cover here the SEO friendliness aspect.

To learn more about that, refer to the “Foundation” chapter where I discussed in detail about SEO-friendly website solutions and their importance for higher ranking in search results.

 

Cash Offer Form (Acquisition)

First thing first, what will help you connect with more sellers? More cash offer requests, of course. But wait. The quantity here is only one part of the equation.

The quality of those inquiries is another major aspect. In other words, you want to get as many cash offer requests as possible from qualified prospects!

So, the question is – how do you maximize the amount of cash offer requests while simultaneously making sure those requests come from qualified and motivated sellers?

Well, the answer is simple…

You need a highly converting cash offer form that’s asking your prospects all the qualifying questions without negatively affecting conversion rate.

You see, most of the cash offer forms on the web used by the vast majority of investors today collect unmotivated and unqualified leads.

Why? Because the web forms used to collect those leads are:

1. Don’t qualify the prospects appropriately.
2. Aren’t optimized for conversions at all.

It seems that there is nobody in the industry (website solution providers, digital marketing agencies and investors themselves) except us (Real Estate Bees team) who heavily invests in optimization of this crucial form!

My team and I have been investing in the optimization of this vital form since we got into this space. We’ve been pouring a lot of resources (money and time) into perfecting it.

While we’ve achieved some phenomenal results so far, we’re still not done. It’s an ongoing process that never ends.

In fact, I’m working on creating a massive case study that will reveal the results of our Cash Offer form.

If you’re interested in having access to that case study, sign up to this list and I’ll send you an email notification whenever it’s live.

Anyways, if you want to close more deals, first and foremost you need to make sure you have a well converting cash offer form on your investor website.

 

Popups (Acquisition)

Yes, popup windows can be annoying to visitors if they interrupt their experience. However, despite what some people say, popups work extremely well!

Just to be clear, when I say “popups”, I generally refer to different types of popup windows. Some are more effective than others.

Popups come in different shapes, sizes, and built-in logic. Here are a few examples:

1. Popup that covers the entire screen instantly on page load.
2. Popup that covers the entire screen after X seconds from the page load.
3. Popup that covers the entire screen when a user scrolls to a certain point.
4. Popup that covers the entire screen when a user tries to leave the page.

There are other different types of popups that don’t cover the entire screen. They are usually less intrusive but at the same time they also seem to be less effective.

I certainly still recommend using them as well. However, in this section I want to concentrate on the popups that cover the entire screen as they are clearly documented to be quite effective.

I personally prefer using the fourth popup in the list above. This popup style is also known as “exit intent” popup.

While the “Instant” (popup 1) and “Delayed” (popup 2) popups beat the “Exit intent” popup every time according to this study, the “Exit intent” one is way less intrusive because it triggers only when a user attempts to leave the site.

In other words, it doesn’t interrupt the browsing experience of users and only appears when they are ready to leave.
But again, this is my personal preference. You might do differently in your business.

That said, I still use “Instant” and “Delayed” popups in various situations in which I deem their use more appropriate. Nevertheless, this is a discussion for another day.

To sum it up. Use popups on your investor website. Regardless which popup you will decide to deploy, they will help you convert more of your visitors into leads.

 

Location Pages (Acquisition)

By ‘Location Pages’ I refer to those same ‘Service Location Content Pages’ which I discussed in detail in the ‘Content creation’ section of the ‘Propulsion’ chapter.

You’re welcome to refer to that section to understand what these pages are if you skipped it for some reason.

While Service Location Pages (I’ll call them SLP from now on) help you get more traffic to your website from search engines, they also help converting visitors (if set up correctly)!

Let’s take a quick example of two investor websites where one has SLPs and the other doesn’t. Let’s assume both website target home sellers in the state of Texas.

In this case, the first website will have SLPs for all the major cities in Texas. Each SLP will include relevant content dedicated to each city demonstrating to home sellers that this company buys houses in that specific city.

The second website will only have a home page, which will generally say that this company buys houses all over Texas but doesn’t have clear indication that it buys in a specific city where the particular seller is from.

Which website do you think will convert better? It’s clear as day. Is not it?

The more specific and relevant the content of your web pages to your visitors’ needs, the better it will convert.

This is why having highly relevant, well-laid out and geo-targeted SLPs is an absolute MUST for every real estate investing website.

 

Property Marketplace (Disposition)

You may ask, “Oleg, why do I need a property marketplace on my investor website? How will it help me with my conversions?”

Well, when it comes to conversions, I’m referring to any type of conversion that will potentially increase your overall revenue; not just on the acquisition side.

As an investor, you’ll inevitably go through a typical evolution that most of the investors go through, namely – wholesaling followed by flipping, then rentals, then capital raising, etc.

In other words, in any stage of your investing career, you’ll need to have a reliable disposition mechanism to help you close more deals in the shortest time possible.

This is where a property marketplace comes in.

Imagine having a robust property marketplace on your investor website where you can list your own and other investors’ deals to facilitate disposition.

But make no mistake. I’m not talking about those antiquated property marketplaces that you see on most of the real estate websites that have a marketplace.

I’m talking about Zillow-like, enterprise level property marketplace with 5-star user experience and outstanding performance! A marketplace that other investors, home shoppers and tenants would love to use for their real estate needs.

Don’t you think it will increase your conversions in terms of closing more transactions, whether it’s finding an end buyer for your wholesale deal, selling your flip, or getting a tenant for your rental?

You bet it will!

In fact, there is no doubt in it at all! I see how well it works on our own projects that we run on a national scale, including our RealEstateBees.com’s real estate marketplace.

Besides everything I’ve just described, there are actually many other ways you can monetize your property marketplace in a big way. But this is a discussion for another day.

To sum this section up, make sure you have an advanced property marketplace on your investor website. It can dramatically increase the number of deals you close.

 

Buyers List Builder (Disposition)

A solid buyer list consisting of qualified cash buyers is a huge asset in real estate investing space, especially for wholesaling purposes.

But you don’t necessary need to solely be wholesaling real estate to benefit from a buyer list. You can also be a flipper, landlord or anything in between to take advantage of a buyer list.

So, how do you build a buyer list through your investor website?

Well, the obvious answer that every investor out there would provide is to install an opt-in form on your site and start collecting emails.

That is certainly better than nothing. However, it’s really an outdated, inefficient, and labor-intensive way of doing it.

You see, most of the investors who’re currently building their buyers list, usually make active buyers to fill out a web form collecting a general info about their buying preferences.

The issue is that whenever those investors get a property they want to sell, they will need to go through the following manual steps:

1. Go to their email autoresponder.
2. Segment subscribers to identify only those buyers whose buying preferences match their current property (which is not quite possible via average autoresponder due to unique buying preferences of every buyer).
3. Compose a unique email detailing all the attributes of the property, uploading images, etc.
4. Send the email.

This is an extremely inefficient and labor-intensive method that can easily take an hour or more every time you get a new property for sale.

Sure, if you’re a beginner who gets only one property per month, this might work for you for a while. But if you’re a seasoned investor who closes 5, 10 or more deals per month, you’ll waste a lot of your valuable time on this primitive method.

Therefore, you need to make sure you have a fully automated buyer list building system that’s capable of doing everything I’ve listed above 100% on autopilot!

 

#2 Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System

You most likely heard many times that follow-up is everything in real estate. Rightly so.

Regardless how good of a salesperson you’re, you won’t be able to close 100% of your leads right on the spot.

Even if your conversion rate from lead to close is 50%, which is pretty darn good, you’re leaving the other 50% on the table.

This is where automated follow-up systems come in. Just to be clear, it doesn’t matter if you use a full-fledged CRM software or a less sophisticated follow-up system.

As long as the tool you’re using is capable of intelligently nurture your leads until they convert into clients, it’s totally fine.

That said, I’ll make a few tool recommendations of the CRM systems that we know for certain are superior to others based on:

1. Data we’ve collected directly from real estate investors – We constantly survey our investor members by asking them about their favorite tools and services. One of those surveys is dedicated to the best CRM systems.
2. Data we’ve collected from most of the tools on the market – We’re an affiliate of most of the CRM tools available on the market today. This enables us to see all the data pertaining to how long an average investor uses a particular CRM, which directly indicates how good/bad each tool is.

 

First Spot – REsimpli

The ultimate winner by far out of all the rest of the tools on the market is REsimpli. This CRM not only has one of the highest customer stickiness rates in its category, but it was also voted one of the most used CRM software among our investor members.

If you want to learn more about this tool, check out my in-depth REsimpli CRM review.

 

Second Spot – Forefront

Not as popular among our investor members as the first tool, this CRM software is also used widely by many real estate investors.

In addition, Forefront also demonstrates a solid customer stickiness rate, which indicates that investors keep using the software successfully.

If you want to learn more about this tool, check out my in-depth Forefront CRM review.

 

Third Spot – REI BlackBook

Finally, REI BlackBook is another quite popular product among our investor members. However, based on what we see, this CRM happens to have a significantly higher cancellation rate compared to the first two tools.

While this tool is used by considerable number of investors, its low customer retention rate indicates that the tool requires some improvements.

If you want to learn more about this tool, check out my in-depth REI BlackBook CRM review.

 

Other Available Tools

If you prefer to conduct your own research rather than rely on the info provided above, I invite you to check out our popular consumer guides that compare all the CRM software tools available on the market today:

• Best CRMs for real estate investors
• Best CRMs for real estate wholesalers

 

The End

Congratulations! You’ve finally reached the end of this extensive real estate investor SEO guide.

If you’ve invested your precious time to read every single word of this guide and will actually implement everything you’ve learned, I guarantee you’ll crush it!

If you diligently follow my complete blueprint outlined in this guide, you’ll demolish your competitors while simultaneously create a steady flow of qualified motivated seller leads from search engines!

In case you’re interested in learning more about SEO for real estate investors, I’m considering creating a private Facebook Group in which you’ll be able to ask me directly any specific questions you might have.

If this is something you’d be interested in, vote below to let me know. If I receive enough positive votes, I’ll create the group and invite you to join.

And finally, if you feel this guide have provided you value, I’ll really appreciate if you share it with your friends and colleagues through social media.

Thank you for your attention and good luck!