Danny Johnson
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Show NotesThis is the final of four episodes where Danny Johnson of Flipping Junkie and LeadPropeller discuss generating motivated seller leads online for real estate investors.
In this episode the focus is mainly on search engine optimization and using content marketing to rank your site. We’re covering white hat versus black hat SEO, on-page and off-page SEO and all about content marketing in this episode.
Find out why Danny chose not to build LeadPropeller real estate investor websites on WordPress and why you should care.
Discover these 4 Steps to Creating a Great Blog Post
1. Determine the best keyword to focus on
2. Come up with a great title
3. Write the article
4. Search engine optimize (SEO) the blog post
For information about our managed (done-for-you) SEO and PPC management services, call Josh at LeadPropeller at 210-999-5187.
linksOnline Lead Generation for Real Estate Investors Webinar
LeadPropeller Real Estate Investor Websites
LeadPropeller Real Estate Investor Websites
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Episode TranscriptionDanny Johnson: This is Flipping Junkie podcast episode 58. [music] Welcome to the Flipping Junkie podcast. My name is Danny Johnson, former software developer turned house flipper, flipping hundreds of houses. Each week, we bring you interviews, strategies, stories, and motivation to help you get started flipping houses and on your way to becoming your own boss and achieving financial freedom. Thanks for spending time with me today. Now, let’s get to it.
All right everybody. Welcome back to the Flipping Junkie podcast. We’re in the middle of this series where we’re covering online lead generation for real estate investors. This is part 4. We’re talking about SEO and content marketing, and this is really huge. And I know a lot of people have been waiting to hear more about this because most of the leads that I generate online are from ranking my house-buying site and their organic search results. So these are the search results when you go to Google and you’re searching for something. And then, the results that it displays there underneath the ads are your organic search results. And so ranking my house-buying site.
On top of that is where I usually generate my best leads, meaning they’re the highest converting ones because more of them actually become deals than a lot of leads I get from other marketing sources. They’re also the cheapest leads and deals that I generate as well for my cost. Leading cost per deal are usually the lowest with my house-buying website that’s ranking there organically that come through from when people search for something, see my website in the search results at the top of page 1 usually between the first, second, or third spot. And then they click on that and go to my website and submit the information.
So I’ve been using a website to generate these motivated seller leads online for over a decade now. And during that time, I’ve become really obsessed with figuring out how to rank the site to the top of the search results and stay there because, as you know, there’s always competition and there’s been more and more competition but I’ve managed to keep that ranking high and generating most of my leads still online.
So things change fast obviously online and it’s a lot to keep up with. But what I’m sharing today on the podcast is what’s currently working, and I’m also going to be discussing what should work in the foreseeable future as well because it boils down to the basic setup of how search engines work and how they will continue to work because it’s just based on how they’re set up and how they’re supposed to work.
So as with the other podcast episodes I did in the series with online lead generation, I’m going to have a webinar. There’s so much in here. There’s so much information and I think visually presenting it to you in a webinar will be a great way to learn more about this and to really have it sink in. So I hope that you guys join me on the webinar. We’re going to focus solely on the topic of SEO and ranking a website to generate organic leads online, and we’re going to discuss ins and outs of on-page and off-page SEO. We’ll talk about that today as well.
And I’m going to be deep diving into the magical search engine pleasing content marketing strategy. And I call it magical because it’s a great way to rank your site and to rank it not only for the keywords that most investors target but to rank it for all kinds of other keywords that also produce leads and deals. So it’s going to be very cool. We’re going to talk about all that stuff in great detail.
And the webinar is going to be held on December 13th. That’s a Tuesday, I think. December 13th at 7 o’clock p.m. Central. So be sure to register your seat as soon as you can. You should probably go and pause the podcast. I’ll still be here when you get back. Don’t worry. Head over to leadpropeller.com/webinar. So that’s leadpropeller.com/webinar and register for that webinar that I’ll be having on December 13th. That’s going to be a lot of fun. You’ll be able to ask some questions and get into all of that.
So SEO today. Let’s talk about SEO which is Search Engine Optimization, and that’s pretty much when you get your website to rank in the search results on Google and Bing or any other search engine. And you optimize your site and do things to get recognition from other sites to show that you’re relevant and worthy of being displayed at the top of the search results. That’s how you get there. That’s how you get to the top, is by being worthy of being at the top. So when people are surprised that they create a website and they publish it and make it live and they’re not getting it and they’re not seeing it in the search results at the top and they wonder why. You haven’t proven yourself yet. A brand new site is not going to show up at the top right away usually. Sometimes they do. It’s random but really you’re going to kind of work at it, and that’s what we’re going to cover today.
So why should you care about ranking your website in the search results? And like I said, I generate most of my best ones so that’s a very good reason, too. But for some real statistics here, according to imforza.com, 93% of online experiences begin with the search engine. So online experiences people go and 93% of the time, they’re starting with like Google or Bing. And Google owns 65% to 70% of that search engine traffic. So they own the lion’s share of that. Most people are on Google searching for stuff. So it makes sense to focus our efforts on how Google works and how Google ranks sites, and that usually translates well into how Bing does as well. And so your site should rank there as well. And so we’ll talk mostly today about how it works with ranking with Google.
But according to a study done by Advanced Web Ranking, the top three spots in their organic search results get over 55% of the clicks. Fifty-five percent. That’s the lion’s share. That’s the top three spots. So the top three organic search results get 55% of the clicks. And the breakdown is the first position—and this is over a bunch of different industries and keywords. I personally think that with our niche, it might even be higher for the top spot but first position, 31% of the clicks. So a whole third of the clicks when people search go to that first organic result. So ranking first is very important.
Second position getting 14% and then the third position getting 10%. So if you’re in third position for a keyword and you’re getting let’s say 10 clicks a month and if it’s averaging 10% like they found in the study, then that could be a possible 100 clicks if you add 100%. But you could maybe multiply that by 3 to get 30% if you’re in the first position. So if you move from third position to first, you can triple the number of leads that you are getting.
And according to the same study, over 71% of searches result in a page 1 organic click so almost 3/4 of people that do a search will click on one of those results on that first page. And here’s the startling thing: Page 2 and 3 combined together only get about 5%. So if that doesn’t tell you something, you got to rank. And if you’re going to rank, you got to be on the first page. And if you’re on the first page, you really want to be in that first spot, definitely in the first top three.
So basically to boil it down, if you don’t rank on the first page for a keyword, you might as well not rank at all. And that might seem daunting. That might seem scary. It might seem like, “Well, man. I don’t know if I want to even attempt this because I’d have to get on the first page and beat out the competition. But I want you to know because there’s got to just be an understanding of the time it takes to get to the first page and understanding the commitment that you’re going to make and the fact that this is for the long haul. Because if you don’t go into those expectations, you could be spending money in time and then wondering why you’re not generating anything from it. And you could maybe do some work after four or five months or something. You’re on second page and you’re wondering why you’re not getting leads and you think, “Well, man. Even if I get on the first page, am I going to get any leads? Because I’m on the second. I’m not getting any.” And I said, “Yes, you will get much more. But if you didn’t know that, you might just bail and say, ‘Man, this is too much work.’” And that’s what happened.
So one other way to think about it is if it was easy, everybody would be doing it and they wouldn’t work so well. So it’s actually good when you find these situations where it’s kind of hard for somebody to do something. Because if you commit to it and you’re persistent and you get there, it’s much harder for other people to actually go and beat you out. So it’s just worth it. Ranking does take time. There’s a lot of competition. You really got to have a strategy to rank and then stay ranked.
And the investment time and money as well are worth it though because, as I’ve mentioned several times, my cheapest and best leads come from my organic rankings. They’re even better than the AdWords ones. The AdWords are great, and we offer a LeadPropeller managed AdWords service that does great if you want to do that. But I think this long-term SEO strategy is something that should be done once you’re generating some income from your AdWords, getting some leads and doing some deals.
But SEO and content marketing investment made over time is not going to generate noticeable immediate results, but they’re going to build slowly over time. The real estate investors that stick with it and have a plan are the ones that are dominating in the rankings and getting the leads online. So investors I guess do nothing or very little give up after four to six months and figure it doesn’t work or it’s too hard, that’s their problem. Let them have that problem because it’s much easier for me to stay top ranked when I know that other people aren’t willing to put in that work.
So what’s perceived as a lot of competition really usually isn’t as bad as it seems, and we constantly have motivated sellers tell us that they’ve called five or six people and we were the only ones that picked up the phone. So usually, the competition with buying houses when you see other people doing motivated seller marketing isn’t nearly as bad as what you might expect because the situation is like this. So seriously, pick up your phone. The fact that people don’t pick up their phones is crazy. They’re doing all that marketing and trying to get leads and then they’re not even answering calls. And what is a single deal worth to most investors? Like 20, 30, or 40 grand. And these people aren’t picking up their phones.
Anyway, two types of SEO strategy. You’ve got white hat versus black hat. You may have heard of these. Black hat SEO is where you use tactics to try and trick Google into thinking that website is more relevant and more of an authority than your competition. And if you’ve ever seen a site that has crazy grammar and kind of like weird, twisted up text with a bunch of words and stuff ranking at the top of the results is probably because of a black hat SEO work that was done. And the tactics are solely focused on really just appeasing Google’s robots because Google doesn’t physically go out and have somebody sit there and go to these websites and determine how relevant they are. They have computer algorithms and software, these robots, the spiders that crawl the Internet and parse all of this stuff and try to figure out what it’s all about. And so they figure out how that kind of works and then they make the pages for that. The experience for human visitors is horrible because of this, and you can imagine it’s very bad. So you can rank at the top and get people coming to your site. But if the site is garbage, it’s not going to convert any leads. So what the heck is the point?
Not only that, getting ranked quickly using black hat tactics is very short sided because I’ve seen—and I’ve seen several investors outrank other better websites all of a sudden but it never lasts. Within a week or so, they’re gone, never to be seen again. A lot of times, they’re pushed back page 27, page 97, or sandboxed altogether and that’s a dreaded Google sandbox basically meaning you’re band from the search results because you were trying to game the system. And what you are showing is that you’re just a sneaky son of a gun and they’re not going to reward you with the top position.
So black hat is sort of the get-rich-quick approach to SEO, and I do not recommend it. If someone promises you to get your site to the top within a month or two, you should probably not work with them. And besides that, if they promise you that they’re going to rank you at the top of the search results pretty quickly, you need to find out what they mean by that because you don’t just rank a site in general for nothing. You rank for a keyword, right? So someone’s going to search for something to get results and then you’re ranking for that keyword.
So what is the keyword that you’re ranking? And I see this all the time because if you talk to SEO companies to do your SEO work and they’ll tell you, “We can get you ranked probably on the first page within two to three months or something like that.” You got to find out what keywords they’re talking about. Because if what they’re talking about is something like somebody searching “I want to sell my house that had 50 cats in it right now,” that’s pretty easy to rank for because it’s something that nobody ever searches for. And the tougher keywords, the ones that most investors target because they’re the ones with the highest search intent to be leads because they’re motivated sellers are things like “sell my house fast” and whatever your city is and then like “we buy houses” and whatever city you’re in. So you can ask them how quickly to rank for those kind of keywords. You just have to know that if you’re looking for. And if you’re looking for SEO services, LeadPropeller does offer SEO services. If you go to leadpropeller.com/seo, you can see a little bit more about what we do. Being that we do work solely with real estate investors, we know it pretty well and we’re focused on that. So very helpful.
So that’s black hat. We’re going to talk about white hat. And we don’t do black hat. I kind of mentioned that now, but we do only white hat of course. But white hat SEO plays by the rules of search engines and considers the website visitor and their experience on your site to be important. So you want to provide the information and service the searcher is looking for because that’s what Google wants because that’s your job as a search engine, to provide the most relevant and useful sites for what people are searching for. If they don’t do that, they’re not a valuable asset to people. They want people to go to the search engine and use them because they’re always producing these results that are garbage.
So white hat is the long game, and this is the way to rank your site in a sustainable way and to help bolster your rankings to make it harder for people to outrank you. So white hat is definitely the way to go. And seeing SEO as a long-term strategy instead of a get-rich quick. “I’m going to rank really fast, but it’s not going to do much for me. And my site is going to do go down the tubes because I did that.” So be very careful.
So white hat search engine optimization can basically be broken up into two sides. You’ve got on-page optimization and off-page. And on-page basically consists of the way the website and its pages are constructed and the information that they contain on those pages. And then off-page SEO consists of things that Google looks at that are not on your website or not under your control. So they’re not really things that you can typically control yourself, and we’ll cover those “things” in a minute. But these two aspects of SEO on-page and off-page need to be considered when trying to rank your website because both are needed to get to the top in competitive real estate investing, house-buying niche that we’re all trying to rank in.
So on-page SEO is basically—there’s three main aspects of the on-page stuff and these are the way your website is created and the content. So basically three aspects of the proper use of HTML which is the Hypertext Markup Language used to create webpages to show them in a browser. So the proper use of that HTML for relevancy. And then the second thing is site architecture. It’s basically the way the site is built. And then content is the third one. So you’ve got HTML for relevancy, site architecture, and then content; are the three things that you’re going to be looking at for on-page.
So the proper use of HTML for relevancy as a real estate investor, it has to have several things so that Google knows your pages are relevant for keywords being search from motivated sellers. And so some of this might seem a little bit technical to you, talking about h1 tags and stuff like that, but don’t let it get you too bogged down or worried.
So h1 tags are basically like the main heading of the website. Usually, a website will have a big heading on it and that’s usually with an h1 tag. So you should only have one of those per page and that one should contain the keyword that that page is trying to rank for. It needs to have that keyword and the h1 tag for the title or the main heading, and usually at the front is better. Then you have h2 tags, h3, h4, h5. And they kind of get smaller and smaller. Basically subheadings and then subheading of subheading and all that kind of stuff. So sort of a structure that needs to be had, and I like to have where h1 tags basically have the keyword you’re focused on for that page and then h2 sort of have—one of them have the keyword and the other ones have like related terms to that keyword phrase.
And then, you have metatags for your each page that get used in different ways. So if you’re looking at a website in the browser, the tab will usually have the title of the website on the tab in the browser. So that’s the metatag for title. And then, there’s one for description where some search engines will use that description metatag to display in the search results, so it shows your URL, your title in the search results. And then that little paragraph description is basically from the meta description. Another metatag is keywords, and that’s not really used much anymore. So a lot of times I don’t even fill that in, and it’s not really anything to worry about too much.
And then on top of that including your keyword that you’re focused on ranking that page forth throughout places like the first 100 words of the page maybe in an Alt tag of an image. So basically if you go to a site and the image hasn’t loaded yet and it shows a word there, that’s usually sort of like the Alt text for that image and so you can have keyword in that Alt tag for the image.
And then you also want to end like your URL to the webpage. And so when you construct your webpage having that in the URL up there, the keyword helps out. And then on top of that having outbound links and inbound linking so your page should be linking out to other relevant information authority sites, sites that Google thinks are high authority stuff. Stuff like government websites, .edu which are education sites. And then things like Wikipedia and just other sites that are basically relevant and high authority obviously like real estate sites or like local sites. So if you’re focused on targeting a city, then something relevant to that city is a high authority for your city.
We talked about the proper use of HTML for relevancy. Number two is the site architecture. So this is the way that your site is built, and it’s got a huge effect on your ranking because there’s thousands of ways to code a website but many are bad for SEO. And basically what it boils down to what you need is really a mobile response of site and that means the site looks good and adjusts not matter what device it’s on. So desktop browser looks great. And then if you get on an iPad and go into Chrome or Safari and load the website, it’s going to look good on the phone, same thing.
And beyond that, having it be mobile friendly. So this is another thing that Google looks at, how does it get rendered on a mobile phone or something. It might adjust for the mobile phone and be mobile responsive. But if the links are real close together, it makes it hard for people to click on one without inadvertently clicking on a different link and so that is sort of classified as not being mobile friendly. So you also want your pages to be mobile friendly, not just mobile responsive.
And then if you’re curious, there is probably—I think last time I looked my site was getting roughly 40% to 50% of its traffic that’s from mobile devices. So this is a very serious thing. It’s not just a thing to try to get a couple of extra leads. This is a big part. It’s like half of the traffic. So if your site is not mobile responsive and it doesn’t adjust to those different sizes and then people have to scroll to the right and left and all that kind of stuff, you need to get it updated, get it changed, and get it to be mobile responsive and mobile friendly.
The next thing with regards to the site architecture is the page load speed. This is huge. Optimized pages that load fast are huge because user experience is what it’s all about. So if somebody goes to your site and it takes two or three seconds to load up, there’s a big chance that they’re just going to hit the back button and leave. And Google knows this and they want to give results that pop up quickly. They don’t want to send people to sites that are loading forever, and so this is huge.
Ways that you get your site to load quickly are optimizing the above the fold so it gets displayed immediately so that that displays quicker. Optimized images, you can use tinypng.com to optimize images without loss of quality, very cool; Smart Coding; and things like that. And then WordPress isn’t so good at a lot of this stuff because it’s got to kind of construct the pages with PHP every time somebody goes to a page. But page load speed is definitely something with the site architecture that you want to focus on to improve your search engine rankings.
Basically with regards to site architecture, what it boils down to is that your site provides a good user experience. So it’s all about making sure that when someone goes to your site, everything just looks good. It works good. It’s easy to navigate. It’s clear what you’re trying to get them to do. It’s clear what you provide. It all happens fast and everything works out great.
Basically, I created LeadPropeller real estate investor websites so you don’t have to figure out all this stuff because I know there’s so much stuff out there. If you just do a search for SEO, you’re going to get millions of results. And waiting through all of that stuff and trying to figure out what’s relevant and what’s working and what is relevant these because a lot times those search results you’re looking at from 2010 and things change quickly. And so some things that may have worked then don’t work now. And so basically, we’ve created these sites that are optimized and we stay on top of all this stuff so that you don’t have to. Having a LeadPropeller site takes care of these first two things for you with the way it’s built, page load speed, and all that kind of stuff.
We talked about proper use of HTML for relevancy and then site architecture. Now, we’re going to talk about content. And I save this one for last because it’s really one of the most important factors and Google rewards websites that they deem to be the most relevant and helpful for searchers. And your website content is really what makes you relevant because the more content you have, the more you can be found to be relevant for and it translates to ranking more and more keywords because you have more and more relevant content and different content which generates more and more leads which gives you more and more deals and more and more profit. If you don’t want that, I don’t know why you’re listening to the podcast. So content, content, content. You got to create some more content. Our sites come with a lot of content by default targeting the main keywords, but you should be creating more.
Content is basically webpages on your site and they include the homepage and other pages that are linked to through your navigation bar but also blogpost and stuff like that. So basically, your homepage should target about three to five keywords and then you need to have other pages to focus on ranking for single keywords other than those. The way it used to be was people used to try and rank their homepage for everything, and it’s hard to do because you can’t possibly have enough content when your homepage will convince Google that that page is relevant for all these different things because it can’t possibly be relevant for all of them at the same time. So with the old folks on the homepage alone, you’re really only targeting the tip of the iceberg. You’re only getting that subset of keywords that you’re going to be ranking for and you’re going to be losing out on all the other ones.
So content marketing is the targeting of lots of keywords using lots of pages or posts on your website that are each relevant for each of the keywords. What’s amazing about the power of this is whenever you start creating these posts and these other content to rank for these keywords, you’ll find that Google is ranking you for 10 or 15 more keywords just for that one that you were trying to rank for 1. So it’s pretty cool, and you can see the value in this because you’re casting a wider net to catch people searching all kinds of different things from different situations.
So how do you create all of these posts, right? It seems like a lot. If you don’t know how to create a webpage, how are you going to create all these posts and all those content? And this is why WordPress is so popular. WordPress basically is perfect for adding blogpost to your website. It’s a content management system (CMS). Some of the other real estate investor websites out there are built on WordPress. You might have ones built on WordPress and we had considered WordPress for LeadPropeller but really quickly dismissed it because of the lack of easy customization and then sometimes having issues with page load speed and stuff like that. Sometimes plug-ins cause problems. We just saw that as too limiting. If you ever tried to edit different parts of a WordPress website, you’ll know what I’m talking about. It’s a mess. So it’s not good for general websites in my opinion. And why we didn’t go with it? We wanted our sites to be easily customizable so we built a custom editor so you can kind of point and click and change stuff and we couldn’t really necessarily do that with WordPress so we created a custom editor and we have different templates we tailored in individual taste and they can change colors and fonts and texts and all that stuff easily themselves and republish so it makes it really nice.
But for the ability to easily add content to your site through blogpost, we wanted WordPress to be available for that part of the website, not for the entire site. So we coded up the ability to add a WordPress blog to your site with just a push of a single button. Now, this is huge because if you ever manually installed WordPress, you know it’s a pain in the butt and you just need to set aside a day for it and most of us don’t have a free day to spend messing with that kind of garbage. So we created a push button to install WordPress into the LeadPropeller sites. The first time I set that up, I think I still had five or eight steps that people needed to do. And since then, we’ve made it to where we got rid of all the steps and it’s a God sent. It’s just incredible. So with the sites now, you can sites that load superfast. They’re easy, customizable, and look great with that attached WordPress blogs that you can add this content. So we didn’t lock into the limitations of WordPress. So please be careful if you’re deciding to look into a site design solely around WordPress because you can have those problems with customization and page load speed and stuff like that.
So four steps to creating a great blogpost. How do you do it, right? How do you create this content that you’re going to be posting on your website that’s going to rank you for these different keywords? Well, first of all, you got to determine the best keyword to focus on. You start with what focus keyword you’re going to have then you come up with a great title. You write the article and then you search engine optimize the blogpost. And you know I’m going to get down to each of these steps so you know what we’re talking about.
Step one is determining the best keyword to target. If you use AdWords, you can use the keywords that are converting well. And what I mean by converting well is they clicked on your ad, they came to your website, and they submitted their information or they called you meaning they became a lead. So people search all kinds of things on Google related to real estate and houses, but only a subset of those people and the things they are searching for are related to selling their house fast to an investor.
Especially in the beginning, you want the keywords that have high search intent that show that people are looking for someone like you and your service, somebody that’s buying houses fast. Situations like divorce, foreclosure, lots of repairs on a house, inherited house, nightmare tenants. Those kinds of things relate to people wanting to sell house quickly and then also just blatantly typing in stuff like “someone to buy my house,” “I need to sell my house fast,” “we buy houses because I see the bandit signs all over the place that say, ‘We buy houses,’” and things like that, “sell my house fast.” So you want to target these keywords. Our default content for LeadPropeller sites when you get one already has a default content that you don’t have to come up with. It focuses on a lot of these main keywords already, but you can add to them with more phrases and stuff like that.
So you can choose the keywords that show the right intent to sell a house fast is what you want to do. You can also choose keywords to focus on your target market in real estate in general and situations at motivated sellers’ phase. And it’s really all about semantics. So using Google search suggestions can help out. And what I mean by that is if you go to Google and you start typing in to search for inherited house, it’s going to start showing you suggestions. And those suggestions are based on things that you’ve already searched for before and likely you haven’t searched for something like that and so it’s going to show you suggestions of what other people have searched that are similar to that. And so, you can get great keywords suggestions from that.
So just as an example, some of the main ones would be “we buy houses in” and then your target city. So for me, it’d be San Antonio. “How to sell your house fast in San Antonio,” “who buys houses in San Antonio,” and “how to choose the best house-buying company in San Antonio.” You notice I include San Antonio on all those. You’ve got to focus and target all of these posts and all of these content on your local city because ranking locally is so much easier than ranking nationally and you’re not competing nationally. You’re competing with people in your market. And so always make sure that your site is deemed as relevant for that city because it’s much easy to rank for a search term when it’s in that city. So if somebody is in your city and they’re typing just “we buy houses” but you have a bunch of posts about “we buy houses in San Antonio,” even if they didn’t type in San Antonio, it’s likely going to rank you because they know your posts and pages—probably I’m just talking too fast. It’s still going to show those results even if they didn’t type it because they know where the searcher is searching from. And then like a real estate related article in the location would be something like, “San Antonio median home prices increased 10%,” and then have an article about that or “Five best neighborhoods to buy a house in San Antonio.” And these are things just to make your site fuller and contain things related to houses, related to real estate and your location. So these are the things that you want to do.
Another one would be: “Inherited house. Not sure whether to sell or rent?” would be a good blogpost. What are the tax implications when selling rental property? Tax implications when selling a rental property is another good article. And these are things people are searching for. And if you give them information about this stuff, they might not be thinking about selling the house to an investor. But if you give them the information at the bottom of the post, you’re talking about how—if you want a no-obligation cash offer, you got nothing to lose. “Why don’t you check out this option that you have? We can make you an offer.” And so it’s very powerful. It’s a good way to reach a bunch of other people and not just the main keywords “we buy houses” or “we sell house fast.” You’ve got all these other stuff that you’re going to be ranking for and getting a lot more traffic and a lot more leads.
So that was step one, figuring out what the keyword, what the focus of the blogpost is going to be. Step two is going to be come up with a good title. And it’s going to be something interesting at least for somebody searching for that. Don’t just do the keyword. Make it something relatable and interesting. And then focus keyword needs to be in the title and should be at the front of the title if possible. So if you’re charting like inherited house, you can put “Inherited house. Not sure to sell or rent.” So that’s a title that includes a keyword and at the front. Include the target location in the title also so it could be, “Inherited house in San Antonio. Not sure whether to sell or rent.” So that’d be a good one. And don’t make the title super long. You need to have it towards as short as possible but including the keyword and being interested.
So the next step then, step three, is going to be to write the article and this is where a lot of people run into difficulty because writing these posts can be very painful. You got to do some research. You don’t want to just be rambling on about stuff that you don’t really know a whole lot about. And so Google actually even considers the difficulty of reading your article. They actually have a way to determine that. So even if you’re writing, you can’t have a bunch of complex sentences, all kinds of like strange grammar and stuff like that. Easy reading is what they want. And then an article should be at least 1000 words. Content that is longer is usually deemed more relevant and it gives a searcher better experience. So 1000 words at least. And my advice is to hire out the writing of these articles. So you have basically the topic, the title, the keyword and then like go to upwork.com. It’s upwork.com and you can find writers. And typically, you’re going to spend about 2 cents a word. So that 1000-word article will cost you about 20 bucks to have someone else research and write it and man. I don’t know about you. But for me to pay that is well worth it because it takes me a couple of hours at least to write my own.
So we know that writing these articles isn’t something that 99% of investors actually want to do, and I hear you. I’ve spent a lot of time writing hundreds of articles over the years. It’s very time consuming. It’s sort of life-draining if you’re not interested in this subject. And that’s why LeadPropeller customers have the ability to purchase content packs. So we decided, “Hey, let’s create this content. Four people will manage all that and then they can just buy these content packs of articles.” Those are packs of articles so multiple articles, usually about eight articles per pack that already are SEO optimized to target and rank for the best keywords for real estate investors. So when you buy one of these content packs, you basically can set it up to be scheduled to drip a new article or a blogpost out to your website over time, and it’s usually like once a week.
And it’s important not to publish all of them at once because Google considers website freshness and reward sites that are updated frequently. So you don’t want to just publish all at once and then go stale and not really have anything posted for months and months. So we set it up to work automatically. We’ll set up the timing for you and you can specify how many days or whatever between each of the blogpost that they go out and get published and they automatically publish for you and put your information into the content as far as your contact number and name, your business name. All that kind of stuff goes into these content packs and to the articles and you don’t have to write them. They’re already set up. They’re already optimized. You can get those and then set them up to publish on autopilot.
Man, this is just something. This is incredible, the technology that we can build and innovate. If we just had this kind of thing whenever I was getting started with websites, it would’ve saved me a ton of time. I would just love to have that, be able to buy these content packs and just have them encrypt out and not have to go through all the time-consuming work of getting it written, optimizing it, posting it, and keeping up with all that. When you’re running around making offers on houses, stuff like that is just stuff that goes to the waste side first and you don’t commit and then you just give up. And so having these ways of having this stuff done for you and paying for, you actually end up saving so much money in the long run and making more money because you’re using your time more wisely. Anyway, it was too cool not to share. I had to share it with you.
But step four now. So we’ve determined the keyword, we’ve come up with the title, written the post. Now, we need to optimize the blogpost. So you can have it written but you’re going to optimize this thing so that it’s relevant and Google can deem it as relevant and authoritative or your keyword that you’re trying to focus so to rank that post for that keyword.
So I had mentioned just now that the content packs that we offer at Lead are already SEO optimized. Let’s talk about the optimization that you need to do for each of these posts. You basically need to include relevant images and do image optimization for fast loading because we talked about that page load speed being an issue.
So images, you can just go to tinypng.com and drag and drop your image under there and it’ll optimize it without loss of quality. And what I mean by relevant images are a lot of times you need to include images of houses and things like that because Google can actually see—not see but they can run through the image and kind of figure out what’s in the image. And so if you have relevant stuff in your images, it helps you out.
You also need to link to high authority and relevant websites. So this is that outbound linking, linking out to other websites. You need to do that. Take some of the words in your article that are relevant to some kind of information that’s really spelled out and found on another website like Wikipedia or Housing and Urban Development or even IRS for tax stuff if you’re writing an article about taxes. But you also need the inner link. So can you link out to all those authoritative websites but you also should link to other relative blogposts on your blog. Inner link these posts together so that you can boost the rankings of all of them and make for a better user experience because you’re allow a way for your readers to find out more on your website about this stuff that’s relevant. And so that’s kind of why we broke these content packs up into content packs as we have these articles that are all about the same topic that are inner linked so it’s cool and powerful. It helps with ranking.
So you need to include the focus keyword at least four or five times if you got about 1000-word article or more. Just make sure that that keyword is throughout the article several times and included in like a subheading which is an h2 tag and things like that. And then you need to include related keywords found in Google search suggestions because it’s all about semantics. And if you type in your focus keyword for that article into the Google search, I might give you the recommendations. If you hit enter and actually do the search, if you scroll down to the bottom, they have other similar searches. Man, I would include most if not all of those in the article, make sure they show up somewhere in there. It really helps because Google is showing you that they feel like all those phrases and search terms are very similar to what you searched. So if you’re trying to focus on that keyword and you’re providing all these other relevant similar phrases, they’re going to say, “Man, this post is really focused on this topic and it’s very relevant.”
Determining whether your blogposts that you create are optimized correctly can be a challenge for a lot of people if you don’t want to go through and learn hardcore SEO down to all the little elements and stuff that you need to do. One of the things that we did was with the WordPress installations on LeadPropeller sites, is we include for free a LeadPropeller SEO tool and this basically shows you all the points that need to be hit to optimize a page properly, and we’ll show you whether it’s optimized. And if it has some points that you haven’t hit, well, it’ll tell you and you can go and optimize those. So it’s very cool. It really takes all the guest work out of it and saves you a lot of time and lets you know that what you’re doing is going to be rewarded because you’re doing it right. Because you can spend all day long. You can spend some money and get this written, post these things and they’re not optimized well and it just doesn’t work and it was just a waste of time and money. So that LeadPropeller SEO tool really helps by taking out that guest work of whether what you’re posting is optimized correctly or not. It’s kind of cool because you put in the keyword that you’re focused on and it tells you whether that keyword is in all the places that needs to be. And if you included outbound links or images and all that kind of stuff, we go through all those points and check them and then report back whether you need to do some more optimization.
So we’ve been going here for 45 minutes or so. That’s all on page white hat SEO. Let’s talk about off-page real quick because this is huge and has a big bearing on how well your site ranks. Basically, off-page are things that you can’t control typically and it’s things outside of your website that Google looks at. And really what it boils down to is backlinks, right? So mostly just back linking. And whenever Google started, this is sort of the big thing about their algorithm that they set up that made Google what it is and it basically was a way for them to look at how many links were coming from other websites to a website to tell whether that website was more authoritative or other people found it useful because they figured, “Well, somebody linked to it.” They thought it was good information and so that’s how they built the search engine. And so obviously, if you have a brand new site and it gets published, you just get published. Nobody is linking to you and so Google doesn’t have much to go on other than what it can determine by your on-page. So you need to get some backlinks and ways to have things pointing to you from other websites so that you can bolster your ranking there.
So backlinks basically show Google that your page has authority. Most sites have very little, if any, backlinks. And honestly, real estate investor websites don’t have a lot of backlinks. It’s not like you’ve had somebody that’s already been out for a while like had a website out for a while. You might be worried they’ve got thousands of backlinks. Usually, that’s not the case. And if they do, it’s probably a bunch of junk black hat SEO backlinks which actually works for them than not having any. So backlinks from high authority websites is what you want. We’ve talked about what high authority website is, but basically Google looks at it. If a site that has a bunch of backlinks go into it then links to you, then you’re going to get a lot of power from it and authority from it. And really what it boils down to is if you get a really high authority backlink from a great strong website, it’s worth way more than the same amount of backlinks from websites that aren’t as good. So if you got like these directories or something that you’re posting to that are real junky and spammy, you can have 10,000 of those and that won’t help you as much as having one from .edu page or even just like your local Chamber of Commerce or something like that. So one backlink from high authority site can be worth more than thousands of some scrappy ones.
So it makes to focus on trying to make your site really something that people want to link to. And so what you want to do is get backlinks from relevant local and real estate related websites. Local and real estate related sites are good sites to try to get backlinks from. And what we’ll talk a little bit in the webinar—I think we’ll go ahead and probably try to cover a little bit in the webinar as far as using press release to help you out with doing that but we don’t have time in the podcast for it.
But do’s of getting backlinks from relevant local and real estate related websites. Don’t go to fiverr.com and hire somebody for 5 bucks to get you hundreds of backlinks. Don’t do that. It’s not good. Another thing that you need to do when you get backlinks is vary the anchor text. So if you have a way to have somebody link to your site from their website, the anchor text is basically the text that the link is made up of. And a lot of times you’ll see people put like “we buy houses” and then the city and that’ll be the anchor text going to their website. Well, if you’ve got a site and you use that “we buy houses in” whatever city for all of your backlinks so you have like a hundred of those and that’s all they are, it’s not natural because Google knows that when people backlink to other sites the majority of them are usually just a domain name as the backlink, the anchor text. So they look at that sort of that spread out of different anchor texts and can tell whether it’s kind of natural or whether it’s not. So that’s where like doing a lot of those hundreds and thousands of backlinks from Fiverr can hurt you because they typically use the same anchor text on all of them and it’s very, very spammy.
So the other thing that you can do is the local citations. It’s much easier to rank locally, like I said before, than nationally. And so you got to make sure that Google knows that you’re relevant for your city. And the big thing about local citations and the main thing—if there’s one thing you remember about local citations is that you have to have consistency. All of your local citations should have the exact same business name, address for the business, phone number. Everything should be exactly the same. You can vary the description for the business up a little bit, but all the contact info and all that needs to be exactly the same. If you have a bunch of differing information across different websites, it’s not going to help you as much as having all of it exactly consistent.
So some great sites that you can go to and get a lot of these free local citations—and it’s basically just sort of listings of your business really is what a local citation is but you can go to yelp.com, local.com, citysearch.com, superpages.com, hotfrog.com, ezlocal.com, ibegin.com, yp.com, localpages.com and then do a search for your local Chamber of Commerce website. And a lot of times, I think you can get some listings there. You can post your business listing on the local Chamber of Commerce website which is pretty powerful so great pro tip for you.
So I know we kind of rushed through that a little bit, but backlinking is something that doesn’t happen quickly. It takes time, but you can set up these local citations, help out big time. You can get the Facebook business page set up, your Google local page set up. You need to do all these. You’re Bing business page set up. Those are all free and be consistent. Make sure that all of the local citations have the exact same business information that’s going to help you out, help you rank locally. And if you do those things over time, you can start seeing sometimes when people search certain keywords in your city on Google Maps and stuff like that, it’ll pop up yours as one of the local search results where it shows the map and it shows some of the businesses. So that’s very important to do that kind of stuff. It really helps you out.
So anyway, that’s SEO and content marketing now. Like I said, we’ll dive deeper into that stuff and share a lot more in the webinar. It’s a lot easier to do when I can show you a lot of the stuff. We’re going to cover and I’m going to show you the LeadPropeller SEO tool and how easy it is just to install and drip out content using our content packs so you can see that and see how cool that is. But be sure to register your seat for the webinar. You can go to leadpropeller.com/webinar. If you can’t remember that and you can remember 58, just got to flippingjunkie.com/58. That’s the show note page and we’ll have a link to the webinar registration there. So be sure to join me.
Thank you very much for listening to the flipping junkie podcast. If you haven’t subscribed on iTunes, please do. Rating and reviews are always appreciated. I get a lot of people email me and message me on different platforms, link, and stuff like that and tell me how much they loved the podcast. I always ask you’d be willing to go to iTunes and leave a rating and review. It’d help me out a lot. It’s a lot of work to put together the podcast and so doing that helps it to gain some traction. So if you don’t know how to leave a rating and review on iTunes, you can go to [music] flippingjunkie.com/rate, R-A-T-E. But anyway, you guys have a great week and we’ll see you next time.
