In this video we discuss PPC vs SEO for real estate investors.

We go into detail about what PPC for real estate investors is, how it works and who would benefit from it.

SEO vs PPC For Real Estate Investors

We then go into detail about what SEO is and why investors would benefit from it.

If you need immediate deal flow we suggest implementing a Google Ads campaign as soon as possible. With Google ads you are essentially jumping the line and able to get in front of distressed sellers almost immediately.

SEO is a mid to long term strategy where you will be investing capital, time, resources for a decent period of time before you start seeing a return on it. However, once you SEO is performing well your cost per lead and cost per deal will drop the floor and it will become your most profitable marketing channel.

We hope this video clears up some confusion about PPC vs SEO for real estate investors.

Grab Your Free Copy!

Enjoy a complimentary copy of our book, “The Complete Guide To Internet Marketing For Real Estate Investors” where we lay out all of our marketing tactics on how we drive floods of distressed home sellers to our clients!

Download

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When it comes to quickly generating distressed motivated seller leads nothing is better than PPC for real estate investors.

Are you looking to take your real estate investing firm to the next level with a proper pay-per-click advertising campaign?

We’ve worked with tons of real estate investors since 2015 and know the industry like the back of our hands.

The following guide has everything you’ll need in order to generate more quality leads from your PPC advertising campaigns.

Your PPC strategy should be one of your top priorities when it comes to ensuring the survival and growth of your real estate investment firm.

The vast majority of home sellers go straight to Google when it comes to finding a buyer. 

100s, if not 1000s, of searches per month are made in your area around phrases such as ‘sell my home’, ‘home buyers’, and many more high-intent variations.

Most of these people searching don’t spend much time scrolling down Google so this is why it’s more important than ever that you are listed in the top results when homeowners sit down at their computers and start researching.

This guide will cover everything we do when it comes to laying out perfect PPC for real estate investors.

What is PPC?

The acronym, PPC stands for pay-per-click and refers to a model of online advertising where you pay for every click on your ad. Users click your ads and you can direct them to your company website where they can reach out for your services.

PPC is a broad term which applies to all of the following…

• Google Ads
• Bings Ads
• Facebook/Instagram Ads

PPC advertising can produce extremely fast, affordable, and consistent leads for your business if done correctly.

Pay per click allow you to instantly put your company in-front of a home seller and get them calling you today!

Let’s dive into how they can work for you.

Successful Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Campaigns for Real Estate Investment Companies

We’ve talked with a lot of investors throughout the United States and many of them have a very negative perception of PPC advertising.

Generally, these investors fall into one of two scenarios.

Scenario 1 is that they have already spent thousands of dollars on PPC with very little to no return on investment — essentially, they’ve been throwing money down the drain.

Scenario 2 is that they see the average cost per clicks for related search phrases, usually between $15-$50 and can’t fathom spending that much for a website visitor.

However, these fears should not keep you from investing in online advertising.

Scenario one is usually the result of a business owner attempting to run ads but not knowing how the AdWords platform works. Alternatively, it could be the case these investors have hired generic ad agencies who a) don’t know the industry and b) provide low-quality work (we’ve seen a lot of these).

Second, we can understand the fear involved with scenario two but urge the business owner to think in terms of revenue and profit. Yes, a single click can be expensive but this is low compared the 5-figures you could make from a single deal.

We’ve seen so many home investors that go into AdWords, pick some keywords off the top of their head and stuff them all into a single ad group to save time. Further, they bid either too high or too low and send people straight to the home page of their main website. This is the wrong way to do it and is what will lead to wasting thousands of dollars with nothing to show for it.

Google wants your ad listing to be relevant to what the user searched for. For this reason, the quality of your ads and the page users land on effects where your ad is placed as well as how much you’ll pay for a click.

If someone searches for ‘need a buyer for my home’, your ad won’t perform well if it:

• Doesn’t include some variation of the search phrase
• Doesn’t give the person incentive to call you
• Doesn’t give a reason why your company is the best choice over others

Everything above also applies to the page you send users to — the page must be relevant.

Your web page must be clear, answers questions, sells your services, and tells the person what to do next. Without these, you’ll pay for clicks but get no leads.

So what’s the right way to do this then?

The first step to building a high-performing PPC campaign is to first plan out the services you want to advertise for.Then, you’ll perform keyword research to determine high-intent keywords that people are searching for in your area around those services.

With a list of keywords, you’ll then want to organize these into groups so that you can write relevant ads for each and send users to the right web pages.

Do this and Google will reward you with high positions and cheaper clicks.

The Real Benefit of Pay Per Click Ads for Investors

You may still be asking, “what is the benefit of pay-per-click advertising like Google and Bing Ads?”

Why spend money on PPC when you can get free traffic by investing in SEO for your real estate investment firm?

We’ve listed a few reasons below whey PPC is such a solid strategy for investors.

1. The results are virtually instantaneous. You can set up an AdWords campaign within a day and have your ads showing at the very top of Google search results. This can take 6-12 months to accomplish with just SEO.
2. Hyper-targeting. You can choose to target specific keywords, locations, days and times, demographics like income, gender, and age, as well as psychographics such as what people are in the market for.
3. You’ll be serving ads to people ready to sell. Less persuasion is necessary when the user has told you they need someone to buy their home. The user searches, clicks your ad, sees your website, and reaches out by phone or email… it’s that simple.

The Different PPC Platforms

As mentioned before, PPC is a broad term and applies to many platforms that offer advertising. However, the two main players in this game are Google Ads (AdWords) and Bing Ads.

These are the two we focus most of our client’s advertising budget on because they are search-based.

With social ads, the intent of the user is less known because people don’t go to social platforms to search for solutions to their problems. For this reason, these advertising platforms can be a bit more complex as well as hit-or-miss.

On the flip-side, users tell you exactly what they need with search engines like Google and Bing.

With Google Ads, you can run a variety of different ad formats such as search, display (images on Google’s partner sites), and video (YouTube). Google provides the biggest opportunity so is the first platform we suggest you focus your attention on.

Bing ads are fairly similar to Google but will usually a) provide less leads since less people use it and b) attract a different type of client since the demographics of Bing users are slightly different than that of Google.

Google owns 90%+ of the market share so we suggest focusing most of your attention there and perhaps allocating 10% of your budget to Bing as this platform can sometimes provide good results.

The cost per click of Bing ads is generally less than AdWords (less competition) so this platform could be a hidden gem for some firms.

How the Process Works

Let’s briefly cover how Google Ads works.

First, AdWords is an auction-based system that places your ad in certain positions based on several criteria.

Most people assume ads are placed solely on the max cost per click (CPC) the advertiser is willing to spend but this is only one factor.

Unfortunately, Google Ads for real estate investors are not as simple as bidding higher to achieve the first position.

As mentioned earlier, Google care about showing users highly relevant ads. Because of this, they can’t just allow the highest bidder to get the top position. Instead, they use what is called, quality score, to help determine ad placement.

The more users click your ads the more money Google makes so they incentive relevancy using quality score.

Quality Score

Quality score is a metric from 1-10 that rates your ads based on the keyword targeting, ad, and landing page quality of your campaigns.

The quality score of your ads can be seen as a multiplier. A good quality score will reduce the amount you need to pay per click to achieve a certain position whereas a bad score will increase how much you’ll need to spend to achieve the same position.

Your quality score depends on a multiple of factors, including:

• Ad click through rate (CTR)
• The relevancy of your ad copy to your ad group’s keywords
• Landing page quality and relevancy
• AdWords historical performance

And a variety of other factors…

No one besides Google developers know exactly how much each factor is weighed but it is well accepted that CTR plays an important role.

Google will typically reward advertisers with high CTRs with higher ad ranks and lower overall costs per click.

How RE Investors can Get Amazing ROI with Google Ads

How can one really get this done correctly?

In order to maximize the effectiveness of your PPC ads it’s important to first split keywords into relevant ad groups as mentioned earlier in this guide. 

Second, you’ll want to pay close attention to the text that you’re writing in the ad itself. Ad text can make or break performance is generally overlooked by most investors running AdWords.

Lastly, you’ll want to send traffic to a dedicated web page that addresses the exact service mentioned in your ad. Most home pages are not well designed for PPC advertising so you’ll want to make sure you make something specific for your ad traffic.

Do these three things and you’re already way ahead of the curve.

Know Your Budget

The very first thing you’ll need to decide before building the account is your monthly budget for ad spend. 

It’s crucial to have a number in mind from the beginning as this will inform your keyword selection and overall campaign strategy.

For most real estate investors, even in smaller cities, we recommend having at least $3000/month to allocate to Google Ads.

Anything less than this number will make it difficult for you to achieve your desired results.

At first glance, a minimum of $3000 can scare some companies away but once again I encourage you to think of this in terms of ROI. If that 3k lands you one deal it’ll pay for itself.

Here’s some average figures we’ve seen in the industry for you to make estimates off of:

• Our campaigns generally will get an average conversion rate of 20% or more. So this means that for every 5 clicks to your website 1 person will reach out by phone or email.
• The CPC will vary depending on what market your in but, as mentioned, we see anywhere between $20-$60 per click.

Know Your Sales Numbers

It is crucial for your company to know its sales numbers before investing in Google Ads.

Let’s say for every 10 leads you close 1 deal (portfolio, wholesale, or flip). In this case you have 10% closing ratio.

Let’s also say that you have $3000 per month budgeted towards ad spend. Your average cost per click is $30.

$3000 / $30 = 100 clicks

Then, calculate the conversion to lead percentage. Ours is 20% on the low end so we’ll use that as a conservative estimate.

.20 * 100 = 20 leads

From the math above, you can expect to get 20 leads per month with your $3000 in ad spend.

Now, assume your close percentage is 10%. This means you’ll close around 2 extra deals per month.

Now let’s say you make, on average, $20,000 profit per deal.

2 * $20,000 = $40,000

In this scenario, you just spent $3000 and got $40,000 back in profit. That’s a more than 10X ROI!

These numbers are just estimates and will vary, of course, but the above process will help to give you an idea of what to expect with Google PPC Ads.

How to Setup the Perfect Real Estate Investment AdWords Campaign

Do the above numbers make sense for you?

If so, it’s time to start building your campaign!

Keyword Research

The first step is keyword research which can be done with a variety of tools.

• Google AdWords Keyword Planner
• SEMrush
• Ahrefs

Gather all the keywords based on the services you want to promote and group these together by relevance.

I’ve listed an example ad group below with some associated keyword phrases:

Ad Group: Sell My House

Keywords: cash home buyers, sell my home fast, cash for houses, companies that buy houses

You can see how the keywords in the ad group above are all very similar in nature and user intent. It’s reasonable to lump these all under the same ad group since a single ad will address all of them properly.

So an immediate step for you to take is to open up a spreadsheet and start researching keywords to create ad groups with.

Negative Keywords

Most people stop after they’ve found all the keywords they want to target — the majority forget this next important step!

Perhaps the #1 reason businesses burn through their budgets so quickly is because they don’t add negative keywords to their campaigns.

Negative keywords tell Google when not to show your ads.

You can specify the words or phrases that must exist in a user’s search for your ads to not show.

For real estate investors, there are HUNDREDS of words you don’t want your ads to show on.

Some examples:

• Most searches indicating the need for a realtor
• All your competitors as well as national brands
• Jobs, classes, and certification type searches

You don’t want your ads showing for these terms because a) you’ll get useless clicks that cost you money and b) you’ll improve your ads CTR which will improve your ad quality score.

Make sure to create an extensive list of negatives right off the bat in order to avoid wasting money.

Ad Groups

As mentioned before, you’ll want to group keywords so that the ads shown to users are highly relevant to the search they made.

You can get really fancy with ad groups but I’ll mention one split you may want to consider doing.

Sell My Home | General

This ad group would contain all the general terms around people ‘selling their home’

Sell My Home | FAST

This ad group would contain all the keywords containing some form of the word fast, quick, urgent. The reason we split this out from the generally is to a) hammer on ‘urgency’ in the ad text and b) see if there is a difference in performance.

Sell My Home | Detroit

This ad group would contain keywords that have a geo-modifier attached in the search phrase. The idea, once again, is to indicate location in the ad text and see if there is a difference in performance from the general terms. These geo-modified terms can be towns, cities, states, counties, and even zip codes.

Keyword Match Types

The other thing to keep in mind is the match type of the keyword you place in the ad groups.

Google has several variations of keywords that you can use called, Match Types. I’ve listed those below.

• Broad Match
• Broad Match Modified
• Phrase Match
• Exact Match

It’s important to know the difference because each will show on different types of searches.

We almost never use broad match keywords because these will show for too many irrelevant searches.

We’ll typically stick with broad match modified, phrase, and exact match keywords.

Let’s use the keyword ‘sell my house’ to explain the differences in match types.

A broad match keyword is indicated with just the text sell my house and no other symbols. This match type tells Google to show your ads on searches that have similar intent to your key phrase. This means that Google will show your ads for people searching for realtors, info on selling a home, and even people looking to buy. The match type is far too broad.

The broad match modified keyword looks like, +sell +my +home. Plus symbols indicate to Google that you only want your ad to show on searches that contain all of the words given (or some variation of each). This means your ads would show on user searches such as, ‘I would like to sell my house’,’how to sell my inherited home fast’, etc.

As you can see, the broad match modified version of the keyword is much more specific and will lead to better performance.

Phrase Match: “sell my home”

Phrase match ensures that your ad will only trigger on searches that contain all of the words and in the exact order specified. 

An example search would be, ‘need to sell my home within the next year’.

Changes have recently been made to this match type to include synonyms, stop words, and misspellings but ultimately this match type is much more specific than broad.

Exact Match: [sell my home]

Exact match will only trigger your ads when someone makes the exact search you specified. In this case, this keyword would trigger only on the search, ‘sell my home’.

However, changes have been made to the exact match keyword type as well. These changes will allow for slight variations as well as stop words and geo modifiers.

Generally, we’ll mix in a variety of broad match modified, phrase, and exact to test differences in performance and capture as much market share as possible.

Campaign Settings

Initial setup of your campaigns is crucial for success.

You’ll be presented a series of steps when first setting up your AdWords campaign.

Campaign Goal: Since we’re looking to get phone calls and form submissions you’ll want to select ‘Leads’ as the campaign goal.

Campaign Type: As mentioned previously, there are a variety of campaign types to choose from; search, display, video, etc. We recommend beginning with a search campaign since these are the standard ads that will display in the search results area of Google. You can definitely leverage display and video ads but we’d suggest doing these further down the road if you goal is to get leads immediately.

Title Your Campaign: The title of your campaign is really only for organizational purposes. We’ll sometimes test multiple campaigns but for now, stick with one and name it whatever makes sense to you — ‘Cash for Homes’

Networks: There’s a few options in the network section of your account that control where your ads can be seen. We suggest unchecking the “Include Google search partners” and “Include Google Display Network’ options since these will show your ads on alternative platforms. We’ve found these generally don’t convert as well as the normal search results ads.

Locations: You can select specific locations (towns, cities, states, zip codes, counties) to show your ads in and or target a radius around a certain area. Additionally, you can choose to exclude areas if you find a certain area to be low-value.

Note: By default, Google’s location targeting is set to ‘people in or searching for your target locations.’ Even though this feature is labeled ‘recommended’ by Google, we suggest changing this to ‘people in your target location’.

People ‘searching for’ will show your ads to people who are out of your target zone which can lead to wasted clicks.

Budget: Google will then ask you how much you would like to spend per day. For this, just take your monthly ad budget and divide by 30 since this is the average days per month.

Bidding: We generally stick to manual bidding since it gives the most control over your campaigns but you can choose a more automated strategy such as ‘maximize conversions’ or ‘target CPA’.

Setting Up Your Ads

The ad setup process is quite simple but there are a few things to keep in mind:

1. You want your ads to be extremely relevant to the user’s search query
2. You want your ads to draw attention and make people click

Below, you’ll find a good example of a ‘cash for homes’ ad.

Headline 1: Include your main keyword

Sell Your House As Is for Cash

Headline 2: Include benefits of your services, special offers, trust signals, and anything else that will encourage the user to click.

Get a Cash Offer in 48 Hours

Display Path: Use the main keyword or a partial variation

/cash-offers

Description 1: Re-state the benefits of your service compared to others and include a call to action.

Call Now. Sell Your House As-Is, At a Fair Price, Close on Day of Your Choice. We Pay Cash. Any Condition Property.

Description 2: Same as the above. Continue selling your service and make it clear what the user need to do next.

We recommend that you write at least two different versions of an ad per ad group so that you can test for differences in performance.

Ad Extensions

Ad extensions are attachments to your ads that provide certain links to your website, additional information about services, and even the ability to directly call your phone. The more extensions you have the better. Extensions make your ads bigger, provide more information, and will ultimately help improve your ads’ quality scores.

Call Extension: When enabled, call extensions will show on your ads displaying your phone number and giving the user the ability to click to call your business. These extensions are a must have since they skip the who landing page process and get you leads straight from an ad itself.

Sitelink Extension: These are links that display under your ads that provide quick links to certain pages of your website. If you’re using a landing page, these likely won’t be necessary unless you have other landing pages for different services that you’d also like to link to.

Callout Extension: Callouts are small lines of text that simply add more information to your ad. We suggest you treat these as small sales headlines to hit on the benefits that people care most about. These are great for additional selling as well as making your ad bigger on the search results page (leading to more clicks).

Structured Snippet Extension: Structured snippets are categories that display under your ad and can be used to list of brands, services, styles, etc.

Form Extension (NEW): Just recently, Google released a new extension that is similar to the call extension but allows the user to input their contact information into a form directly from the ad itself. These are brand new so we’ve just started testing them and would suggest you do the same.

Conversion & Call Tracking

If you aren’t tracking conversions than you’re throwing money into the wind.

Without knowing what is leading to deals there is no way to know account performance and improve your ads.

You might as well pause your ads right this minute if you don’t have conversion tracking setup… that’s how important it is.

There are three types of conversions that we setup:

1. Calls from Landing Page. This will track people who click the ad and call from your website.
2. Contact form submissions. This will track every time someone lands on a ‘Thank You’ page after submitting a form.
3. Ad Extension Calls. This will track phone calls made to the click to call feature on your ads when you have call extensions enabled.

Make sure you are tracking all three of these before moving any further.

Landing Pages

You’ll want a landing page for each service that you’re promoting.

Ideally, your landing pages should have the following characteristics:

• The main keyword somewhere in the top headline (H1)
• No navigation bar
• Sales information — Bullet point benefits of your service
• Relevant imagery
• A short contact form
• Mobile-friendly design — the site looks good on mobile devices.
• Include the areas you purchase homes in
• Reviews, testimonials, and proof
• Trust symbols like accreditations, rewards, and years in business

Remember that your landing page plays a HUGE role in the success of your campaigns. You can send the best traffic to the web page but if it doesn’t convert you won’t make any money.

Analytics & Monitoring

Once you launch your campaigns, it’s time to let your ads do their thing. We suggest jumping in the account several hours or a day later to see if impressions and clicks are occurring.

Most people assume you can just let the campaigns run and that’s it but Google Ads is really a long process of continual tweaking to get things right.

You’ll want to consistently be looking at your AdWords data within the first several months to see which as groups, keywords, and ads are performing the best.

The initial goal is to get your lead cost as low as possible while maintaining volume. Once this is done, you can scale up how much money you allocate to ads to increase the total leads.

Once you scale, it’s simply a matter of putting $1 in to get $5 back. This is the power of pay per click advertising.

We have some investors spending $20,000 per month in ads while others are spending $3000. Who do you think is getting the better return?

You guessed it. The investor spending $20k.

Start small, optimize your account, and then scale everything from there!

Facebook Advertising

As mentioned, FB also offers PPC advertising.

However, we suggest focusing on Social ads later on in the process.

The leads on social platforms are generally earlier on in the selling process than leads coming from search engines so the approach changes — these leads require more persuasion and follow-up.

This is why social platforms are great for retargeting home seller leads because you can recapture traffic that comes to your website from Google but doesn’t convert.

Sometimes these people just need some more time and education to reach out for your services.

PPC for Real Estate Investors: Are You Using Online Paid Advertising to Your Advantage?

PPC campaigns are an exceptional way to increase traffic and fuel growth of your real estate investment business. Paid ads can make sure your brand is the first thing local homeowners see when they are looking to sell their property.

An effective PPC campaign takes deep industry knowledge and patience in order to perfect but the end result is worth it. Get House Deals has been building successful real estate investment pay per click campaigns for the past 5 years.

Contact us today to get a Free Audit and Strategy Session. We’ll provide you with a complete game-plan to ensure you’re the #1 investor in your local area.

Grab Your Free Copy!

Enjoy a complimentary copy of our book, “The Complete Guide To Internet Marketing For Real Estate Investors” where we lay out all of our marketing tactics on how we drive floods of distressed home sellers to our clients!

Download

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Looking to take your real estate investing firm to the next level with a proper SEO campaign? We’ve done tons of Google ads and real estate investor SEO since 2015 and know the industry like the back of our hands.

The following guide has everything you’ll need to know about SEO in order to naturally rank your investment website higher in the Google Search results.

The majority of homeowners now turn to Google when they’re looking to quickly sell their home.

Since time is of the essence, most people rarely will scroll down more than half of the Google Search results before reaching out to a company.

For this reason, it’s vitally important your website shows up at the top of the page in your local area.

The process of ranking your site naturally in search engines is what’s known as SEO.

In this article we’ll cover everything we do for our clients when it comes to ranking real estate investment websites.

What is Real Estate Investor SEO?

Real estate investor Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing a website for search engines such as Google and Bing.

The goal of optimizing a website is to get it to naturally rank higher in search result pages so that more traffic clicks through to the site.

Since traffic from Google has such high-intent, the seller leads you get from SEO traffic is generally much higher quality than other platforms.

This is why it’s so valuable to be ranked at the top for the first page for seller queries such as, “sell my home fast”, etc.

Can SEO for Real  Estate Investors Help?

• SEO will help you to keep your seller pipeline full all year round. Four out of five consumers use search engines to solve their problems so if you aren’t online you’re missing out on a huge part of the market.
• SEO will help you to improve your sales processes. By optimizing your website, and speaking with the seller leads it generates, you’ll get a clearer sense of what people are looking for in the selling process. You’ll stumble on certain desires and niches you never thought existed and this can all be seen with the detailed analytics of online marketing.
• Search engine optimization not only helps you gain visibility but also increases your brand’s trust in the local area. User’s are more likely to trust higher-ranked websites.

How Long Does SEO Take to Get Results?

• It takes Google & Bing a while to understand the content of a website and rank it among search results — this is especially true with new websites when performing real estate investor SEO. How long it takes you to rank depends on the age of your site, the quality of your website, and the competition in your market. In general, it’ll take anywhere between 6-12 months to get exceptional results. The good news is though, these results tend to last for years to come.
• Longer and slower campaigns will typically return better results. Oftentimes, business owners can get impatient with rankings but it’s important to approach real estate investor SEO with a long-term mindset. This is why we use SEO only as one part of our marketing plan. We’ve found that supplementing PPC with a real estate investment marketing strategy provides the best results since advertising provides fast results while you wait for the SEO efforts to kick in.
• Results tend to flatline around the 6-12 month mark. Once you’re ranked in the top spot there’s only so much more traffic you can get with SEO. At this point in time, it’s important to monitor and maintain efforts since competition can always creep in and steal your spots.

What Kind of ROI Can You Expect?

The ROI for SEO for real estate investors can be nothing short of incredible. Since the profits on a single deal tend to be multiple 5-figures, it’s easy to justify a couple thousand dollars a month towards search engine marketing. Further, SEO is extremely front-heavy in terms of investment so the results will persist for many months to come.

In most areas, a #1 spot on google for key search phrases can return 20-50 leads per month (passively). 

We typically will look for ROI around the 4-6 month mark with our clients.

How to Measure the Success of Your SEO Efforts

What is measured gets managed.

One of the biggest mistakes investors make with SEO campaigns is they don’t track any of their efforts.

Without tracking, you won’t know what is working, and there is no way to improve results.

This is why it’s important to track certain metrics in your marketing efforts known as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

The KPIs you set for your real estate investment marketing strategy should align with your business goals, budget, and expected timeline of efforts.

• KPIs show us what is and isn’t working with a real estate investor SEO campaign so adjustments can be made month-to-month.

Here are some of the metrics you’ll want to track for your campaigns.

• Organic Search Rankings – Specifically, you’ll want to pay close attention to the change of rankings over time
• Organic Traffic – The total amount of users visiting your website from search engines
• New Leads – The total amount of people contacting your from your website either by phone or email
• Time on Site/Bounce Rate – Both of these user engagement metrics are important for understanding how well your website is answering the major questions of visitors

How Search Engines Work

The first step in SEO for real estate investors is understanding your existing situation. You’ll want to take a look at the above-mentioned metrics for your existing website to see where you stand in the search rankings.

A simple test – When you type in keywords such as ‘sell my home [your city here]’, does your website show up anywhere on the first page of Google search results? Repeat the same process with any other high-value keyword phrases you’d like to rank for such as ‘cash for homes’ or ‘home buyers [your city here]’.

Before getting too far ahead of ourselves, let’s first understand the differences in results on the Google search page (SERP).

You’ll generally see three different sections on a local search page.

1. Paid Google Ads Listings – Ads generally will show up at the top of the Google Search page as well as at the bottom and even now in the map area. Google Ads are indicated by a green “ad” text on the listing. User’s appear here based on an auction system where they bid certain amounts for clicks. Google Ads is what’s known as pay per click (PPC), meaning the advertisers pay every time someone clicks their ad.
   
2. Google Maps Listings – The map listings display the top 3 ranking businesses but can also be expanded if the user clicks to see more in Google maps. The map rankings are based on the strength of your website and how well your google my business listing is optimized. Google map rankings also take into account reviews and location to the person searching.
3. Organic Search Rankings – The listings under the map area are known as organic results. These are websites that are naturally ranking for key phrases based on the strength of their SEO.

We recommend using this tool to quickly check your rankings for any area and keyword. Type in the keyword, the location, and click ‘get URL’ to see where your website stands. It’s important to use a tool like this since Google will show your website higher in the results if you visit it often. Instead, you want to make sure you eliminate any bias and search as if you are a random person looking to sell your home for cash.

Keyword Research for Real Estate Investors

What keywords should you be ranking for?

The first thing to determine is what people are looking for in the first place. What terminology do people use when looking to sell their home?

Some of the most obvious keywords, using Detroit as an example location, are the following:

• Sell my home in Detroit
• Home buyers Detroit
• Cash for homes
• Sell my home fast
• Sell my home without a realtor

A great way to perform basic keyword research is to type some version of the above keywords into the Google search bar and see what Google suggests for alternatives.

Google suggests these variations because it knows users are often searching for them. This will give you a huge list of ideas for what to rank for and how to optimize your website around them.

The 2 Components of Search Engine Optimization

There are two aspects of SEO known as On-page and Off-page.

We’ll be covering both to give you a crash course in basic optimization.

• On-Page SEO: Refers to everything involving your website, from the content to the structure, down to the code. It is crucial to organize your website in the proper manner so that Google’s crawlers can effectively know what your business is about.
• Off-Page SEO: Refers to everything outside of your website that helps it to rank higher. Google needs to know that your business is trustworthy and authoritative before it will rank you high in the search results. Google mostly determines this by how many other high-authority sites are pointing back to yours with links. These links are essential ‘Votes’ in Google’s eyes. Another version of on-site optimization is by getting your website listed on important business listings and major directories. These types of listing are what’s known as, citations.

Both On-Page and Off-Page play an important factor and getting your website to rank so we suggest placing equal focus on each.

Sometimes On-Page alone is enough to rank you on the first page of Google depending on the competition in your area but more often Off-Page will be required to give you that extra push.

On-Page Optimization for Investors

On-Page, also referred to as, On-Site SEO, is the process of optimizing everything that exists on your website.

Hopefully by now, you’ve aggregated a big list of all the search terms people are looking for when selling their home.

Step 1 – Website Structure

Now, it’s time to take those keywords and use them to map out your website structure.

Each page of your website should be optimized around a particular service/keyword as well as the geographic area you’re looking to rank in.

You’ll likely have several pages, a home page, an about, contact, and a few other supplementary pages around financing, the process, FAQ, and reviews.

The above website is a great example of on-page SEO structure for real estate investors.

The main home page is optimized around the keyword, ‘we buy houses’ while all the other pages are supplementary.

The navigation bar at the top of the website shows the user how their process works, give free resources about selling their home (blog posts), reviews from happy customers, and a little more about the company. Notice as well, the trust signals in the top right header over the button indicating that this company is experienced!

The website also has strong calls to action (CTAs) which tell visitors what to do next. 

Hover over the ‘Why Sell to Express’ and you’ll find multiple pages that are optimized around the various reasons why someone would be selling their home for cash.

All of these are what are known as long-tail keyword phrases.

People are searching on google for phrases such as ‘sell my inherited home’ and ‘sell home to avoid foreclosure’.

By dedicating and optimizing pages of your website to these specific searches you’ll improve your overall rankings.

Map out your top navigation before even developing your site and you’ll be one step ahead of the competition.

Step 2 – Page Content

A general rule of thumb is the more valuable content you have on your site the more authority it will have in its market.

Make sure to build out dozens of pages with quality content to increase the chances of being ranked high.

The above example has pages for every reason why someone would want to sell their home. It also talks about the process of selling and answers all the users potential questions with FAQ and blog posts.

Another content area to think about is your footer which should contain all your contact information; name, phone, and address (NAP). 

It should also mention the different areas you purchase homes. This will help immensely when someone in that particular area is searching in Google. 

Step 3 – Optimize Your Page Content for Search Engines

For each and every page, there are several optimizations you’ll want to make to ensure your website is valued by Google.

Some of the more important On-Page items are listed below:

• A page title tag with the main keyword and location you’re targeting for that particular page. The home page should mention your brand name somewhere in the title tag as well
• A meta description that describes what your service entails and encourages the user to click to your website
• H1 tag on the page content to state clearly what the web page is all about. This tag should contain your major keyword
• URL path should contain the primary keyword that page is targeting or some variation (without looking spammy)
• Content should be broken up into H2 and H3 subheadings to make it easy for users to scan and to help target long-tail keyword phrases
• Images should have descriptive alt tags
• Other rich media such as embedded YouTube videos will help your authority
• Internal links from one page of your website to another with descriptive anchor text to help Google better understand what each page is about

Title Tags

The title tag of your pages is what users will see in the Google organic search results section so plays a major role in your rankings. The meta title is important for telling Google what your page is about as well as encouraging high click through rates (CTR) which is another ranking signal.

As mentioned before, make sure to place your main keyword, your location, and your company name in the title of the home page. Apply the same to each page of your site but you may or may not need to include the location and brand in the title of the supporting pages depending on the content.

One thing not to do is to over-optimize for your keyword. Don’t repeat the keyword too often or Google will likely penalize you for spamming.

Meta Descriptions

The meta description doesn’t directly play a large part in rankings but it can and should be used to increase CTRs of your pages. Add some variations/long-tail keywords to the description, not because Google is looking for keywords here but because the terms get bolded for users. Bolded text is just another thing to make your listing stick out from others and will likely increase your websites CTRs.

Think of the description as a short sales pitch to get people to click.

We suggest including benefits of your services, trust signals, as well as numbers and symbols in the description area to make it pop out.

H1 Tags

The H1 tag is a headline on any page of your website. It’s important to note that there should only be one of these per page or else you run the risk of confusing Google.

Try to repeat your major keyword in the H1 as well as provide some sales copy to encourage people to reach out and or continue reading on your site — the longer people are on your site and less they leave immediately, the better your site will rank.

H2-H3 Tags

People usually don’t read every word on web pages. What they do instead is scan.

You want to use H2 and H3 headlines to break up the text of all your web pages so that users can quickly scan through the site for the specific information they’re looking for.

Users who see huge blocks of text will usually leave the site so you want to make it easy for them to find what they need.

These headlines are also good spots to place long-tail keywords and or synonyms to help tell Google what the page is about.

URL Permalinks

The URL path of each page on your website matters for rankings.

Ideally, you include the exact keyword or some variation in the URL path of the page you’re optimizing. However, keeping your URLs clean and short is also important so don’t worry too much about stuffing keywords in these locations.

A good URL path would look like:

https://website.com/foreclosures

This page will talk all about home foreclosures and how you’ll pay cash for the home instead.

Rich Media – Images & Videos

Rich media is essential images, video, gifs, and audio.

Make sure to include rich media on each page of your website that are relevant to the page content. Make sure the images are for commercial use if you take them from offline channels.

Second, you’ll want to write alt tags for each image on your website. The alt tag describes what the image is showing and is useful for Google because it’s algorithms are still not very good at determining image content. Make sure not to spam the alt text with keywords and instead just naturally describe what’s being shown — if the keyword happens to end up in the text, great, but don’t force it!

Also, if you have videos of your own make sure to upload these to YouTube and embed them on your website. Google owns YouTube so they love to see this done.

Quality Content

The content on your website needs to be informative, sales focused, and compelling to a) keep people reading and b) get them to reach out for a cash offer.

Not only is the quality of the content important but also the quantity.

Most real estate investment websites with strong SEO have at least 750 words on most of their pages. The more meat you give Google the more it will prefer your website.

Now, of course, this doesn’t mean you should keyword stuff your pages. This used to work back in the day but Google is privy to this type of manipulation.

Your content should be sales focused.

The goal of your website is to sell the visitor on reaching out.

Think about what that person must know before reaching out to you. A lot of this can be found in the keyword research you’ve done. Look through the search queries and you’ll find out what questions people have.

Also take into account what questions people ask you while on call and address these on the page itself.

Many companies are afraid to give away too much information out of fear that the visitor will leave the site once satisfied but this isn’t the case.

Properly inform the prospect and you’ll be rewarded with trust, engagement, and qualified sellers calling your phone.

Recap

Okay, now that you’ve written all your content and structured your website, let’s answer these 3 questions.

• Are the main keywords in your title tags and scattered throughout each page?
• Have you built out supporting pages such as reasons why people would sell their home, process information, reviews, FAQs, blog posts, about, etc.?
• Do you have clear calls to action throughout each page to encourage the visitor to call?
• Are you linking internally between pages with keyword rich anchor text?

If you answered ‘no’ to any of these questions, make sure to circle back and make any necessary changes.

How to Optimize Off-Page SEO for Real Estate Investors

The next piece of the puzzle is to begin building off-page authority for your brand.

Ultimately, you want Google to see your website as the “go to place” for everything regarding selling a home in your particular region.

When Google sees you as the “authority” in the home buying industry, they are more likely to rank you high in their results.

Google determines authority both from your on-page as well as off-page optimizations.

The more ‘popular’ your site is around the web, the more likely it is that you are an authority in your industry.

For this reason, links back to your website play an important role in ranking.

Even today, links still are the #1 off-page ranking factor.

So the question then is, how do you get high quality links to your site?

The answer to this question is long so deserves a post of its own. That’s why we’ve gone deep into detail about the process of building links to your real estate investment website here.

SEO for Real Estate Investors: Make Your Brand Visible Online

SEO campaigns are an exceptional way to increase traffic and fuel growth of your real estate investment business. A Strategic campaign can ensure your brand is the first thing local homeowners see when they are looking to sell their property.

An effective real estate investor SEO campaign takes deep industry knowledge and patience in order to perfect but the end result is worth it. Get House Deals has been building successful real estate investment SEO campaigns for the past 5 years.

Contact us today to get a Free Audit and Strategy Session. We’ll provide you with a complete game-plan to ensure you’re the #1 investor in your local area. 

Grab Your Free Copy!

Enjoy a complimentary copy of our book, “The Complete Guide To Internet Marketing For Real Estate Investors” where we lay out all of our marketing tactics on how we drive floods of distressed home sellers to our clients!

Download

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Struggling to rank your real estate investment website on the first page of Google?

It may be the case where you need link building for real estate investors website to give it that final push.

Of course, the first thing you should check is the on-page SEO of your real estate company’s website.  Make sure that your website is structured correctly, has quality content, rich media, and optimized meta tags. On-site optimizations are 70% of the game but if this still isn’t enough you’ll likely need to invest in some off-page SEO campaigns.

Your site’s authority is significantly affected by the quantity and quality of websites linking back to it. Build backlinks and overtime your website will begin to rank in the organic and map sections. Link building for real estate investors is king.

Links are what will really differentiate your site from competitions’ (in Google’s eyes). However, has the best combo of authority links, citations, and mentions around the web will likely win.

The most important thing to remember is that you don’t just want 1000s of garbage links from unknown websites. This will hurt your rankings and potentially drop your entire site from Google’s search results.

Google’s algorithms have become increasingly good at finding spammy links so it’s important to build a clean profile.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the text that makes up a hyperlink on a website. When clicked, this link will direct users to another website or another page on the same website.

Anchor text plays an important role in backlinks as well as the internal links on your own website (from one page to another).

Anchor text is crucial for SEO because it describes (to Google) what the page linked to is about.

Links labeled as ‘real estate investors’ tells Google that the linked website is about real estate investing. A link with text such as, ‘sell your home fast’ is much more powerful than ‘click here’ and will help you to rank for that specific keyword when users search for it in Google.

At the same time, the distribution of anchor text is important to authority. You want to make sure that no single keyword is overused in the anchor text pointing back to your website. Over-optimized anchor text can get your website penalized — hurting overall rankings. 

This is why it’s important to analyze high ranking competitor websites to get a sense of their anchor ratios.

Build similar anchor ratios to those of the high ranking websites in the real estate niche and your website will be bound to rank high as well.

We suggest reverse engineering anchor text ratios using tools such as ahrefs.com and majestic.com.

Let’s cover some of the various categories of anchor text:

• Target Anchor Text: These links contain the precise keywords you’re looking to rank for such as ‘cash for homes in Detroit mi’. These anchors are very strong but should be used sparingly in most cases.

• URL Anchor Text: These are just raw URL links back to your website such as www.yourbusiness.com. URL anchors are common for local business directories

• Brand Anchor Text: This is an anchor with the business name such as ‘Detroit Realty Group’.

• Miscellaneous Anchor Text: This encompasses any text that doesn’t fit into the previously mentioned categories. You’ll find common words such as ‘click here’ and ‘website’ as the link text.

How to Get High-Quality Links for Your Real Estate Investment Business

What makes a link high-quality in the first place?

Well, when it comes to link building for real estate investors there are a multitude of factors but it can be boiled down into two metrics; domain and page authority.

The power of a backlink depends on the strength of the website and the particular page linking back to you.

The strength is determined by the same factors that improve your own SEO authority; number and quality of backlinks, website structure, content depth, domain age, etc.

Get links from authoritative websites and some of that authority will pass to you.

Here are some links you’ll want to build out for your real estate investment website for better rankings:

• Directory, Social & Citations: These are the first links you should build out for your company. Social, directory, and citations are foundational because they are links that all real businesses build. Make sure that your NAP and website link are on every related website possible (Facebook, Yelp, BBB, etc.)

• Local Associations: Partake in your local associations and they’ll likely provide links to your business on their own websites. These associations could be the local chamber of commerce, networking groups, local trade shows, charities, etc.).

• Information Content Building: You can take link building to the next level using informative content pieces. Reach out to your local newspapers, radio stations, etc. and write a free piece of content for them. You can do the same thing with industry blogs and forums. Make interesting content online and people will naturally share and link to it.
• Reverse Engineer Competition: Use the above mentioned tools such as ahrefs.com to analyze your competition’s link strategies. This is a great way to find outreach opportunities to get your links on the same sites.

Let’s look at each one of these in a bit more detail.

Directory & Social Links

Links from these types of websites are ‘low hanging fruit’ and should be the first thing any business focuses on.

Directory and social links don’t hold much power in terms of ranking but they do build trust with Google.

In the real estate investor SEO community, these links are known as pillow links because they help to increase generic anchor text ratios to avoid Google penalization.

Platforms such as Google My Business, Bing & Apple Maps, Yellow Pages, BBB, Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, and countless other sites are great places for links back to your website and NAP citations.

These links create a foundational blueprint for your off-page SEO campaign so make sure not to skip this step.

Google wants to know that you have an established identity across the web so will be looking for these types of links alongside some of your more targeted anchor links.

Local Associations

It’s highly likely your investment firm is involved in multiple groups and industry associations in the local area. These are great opportunities to get strong, local links pointing back to your website.

Many associations such as the Chamber of Commerce will list members on their websites with contact info and links to business websites.

You might also be involved in networking groups and or charities which may also have link opportunities for you.

Business Affiliates & Shoulder Industries

Other opportunities for links exist among business affiliates and other industries associated with real estate.

Look for relevant businesses to team up with and list each other on your websites (it’s a win win).

Scholarships

An advanced link acquisition technique is by offering scholarship opportunities to local schools and colleges.

Offer $500+ to students who meet certain qualifications and reach out to educational institutions to list your scholarship details on their site.

This method will cost some money of course but is a great way to get multiple links from notoriously authoritative domains (.edu websites).

Competitive Link Acquisition

Leverage competitive spy tools to reverse engineer who is linking to your top competitors.

It is highly likely that is a business is linking to your competitors they will also be open to linking to you.

Competitive backlink reports can be a gold mine for link outreach opportunities so we highly suggest doing some research.

Content Marketing

Another advanced method for acquiring backlinks to your real estate investment website is through content marketing.

Consider creating viral content around local news, interviews, and industry reports which you can easily share local bloggers, news websites, and forums.

Upload these pieces either directly to your site and begin outreaching to local businesses or write guest posts to place directly on the prospects websites.

The internet runs on content so much businesses will be happy to accept free and engaging content in exchange for a link back to your website.

Parting Words

As you may have noticed, there’s a ton of ways to get creative with link building.

Most of the SEO for real estate investing process isn’t rocket science but it does take time, effort, creativity, and testing to get right.

Fortunately, we’ve already discovered what works best for the real estate investment industry and can apply the same strategies for you.

Reach out to us today to schedule a call where we’ll layout an entire blueprint for your real estate investment SEO campaign.

Grab Your Free Copy!

Enjoy a complimentary copy of our book, “The Complete Guide To Internet Marketing For Real Estate Investors” where we lay out all of our marketing tactics on how we drive floods of distressed home sellers to our clients!

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Google My Business (GMB) has become increasingly important for real estate investor SEO over the past several years.

A properly optimized GMB listing ensures your business shows up in the map area when homeowners are searching for cash offers on their property.

Office and service location tend to be less important in the investment industry as compared to let’s say, a dentist.

However, a single property deal can land you $20,000 on average so every additional lead counts.

You’ll notice the map results section appears on some seller-intent phrases such as ‘sell my home fast’ and shows three business listings.

This location of the Google search results is so valuable because a) the section stands out and b) users can click straight to a call to your landline when they are using mobile devices.

The map listings can be a powerful tool to increase the amount of motivated seller leads your firm gets so it’s definitely an area to place some of your marketing budget.

This article will show you how to setup the perfect GMB listing so that your business shows up in that oh so valuable 3-pack.

1. Getting Google Verified

The first step in this process is getting your GMB listing verified with Google.

Head on over to https://www.google.com/business/ to claim your business listing.

You’ll need to input your business name, address, phone, etc.

Google will then send a postcard with a verification code to the address of your business. This card can arrive within a few days or up to a month. 

You’ll just have to input the verification code on your GMB page and you’ll be good to go.

2. Business Name

Once you’re verified you can change your business name as needed. Just make sure that the name listed on your GMB is the exact same as any other listing online (your website, yelp, BBB, etc.)

Make sure your business name is consistent across the web as this will play a part in how well your listing ranks in the map section.

3. Category Selection

This is likely the most important part of your GMB account. You want to make sure you have the proper category selected so Google knows when to present your listing in the maps area.

You’ll likely fall under the categories of ‘real estate agency’, ‘real estate developer’, and ‘real estate consultant’.

4. Service Area & Radius

Another crucial component of your listing is your service area.

Set either the cities/states you purchase homes in OR a radius around your office location.

We highly recommend that you also select that you serve customers at your business address (even if it is your home). This option will display your address on the map area and make it more likely you’ll rank.

5. Hours, Phone Number & Website URL

Make sure that your hours of operation are accurate and consistent to what is displayed on your website.

Use your main office phone line for the phone field. Once again, make sure this is consistent with your website and around the web.

Use your homepage as the website URL and place your contact page URL in the appointment URL box. 

6. Services

Be as detailed as possible with this step and split up your services by categories and subcategories.

Include a description of the services as well if this offered since the more info you give Google the better.

7. Business Description

The description area for your business is another opportunity to add specific keywords you would like to rank for such as ‘cash for homes’, ‘we buy houses’, and ‘real estate investor’.

However, don’t overstuff this area with keywords.

Treat this section as an opportunity to sell your business to the prospect and fill it out in as much detail as possible.

8. Images of Business

Photos are another crucial aspect of your GMB listing.

First, make sure your logo, profile photo, and cover photos are added to the account. Make sure these match the branding of your website and other profiles.

You should then upload as many photos as possible of the interior and exterior of your office, photos of the homes you’ve purchased, and the employees of your company.

Lastly, name the photos before uploading them with descriptive titles. Occasionally slip in a keyword or two when appropriate.

9. Reviews

Reviews are one of the biggest ranking signals for your listing.

Make sure to outreach to all your past clients for reviews on Google. Consider even incentivizing the review as the more 5-Star ratings the better your business will look to Google and potential leads.

You can use this review generator to get a link to send to clients for a review on your GMB listing.

We suggest making a habit of a) requesting a review for every new client and b) responding to ALL reviews on your listing (good and bad).

In today’s world, people read reviews before doing business with a company, so it’s important to show prospects you care by replying to people who support (and don’t support) your services.

10. Google Posts

This is a new feature that allows you to make posts on your GMB account.

The post section is another opportunity to stand out in the search results so you should at least have a couple posts on the account.

Use this section for press releases, company updates, special offers, market trends, etc.

You can mix images and videos as well with your posts which can help grab attention in the map area to encourage clicks to your site.

11. Website On-Page SEO

Although your website isn’t necessarily a part of your GMB listing they are still intrinsically connected.

Make sure to optimize your real estate investment website for search engines as this will play a part in how well your listing ranks in the google maps area.

As mentioned earlier in this guide, double check to ensure the NAP and hours of operation are congruent between your GMB and website.

Grab Your Free Copy!

Enjoy a complimentary copy of our book, “The Complete Guide To Internet Marketing For Real Estate Investors” where we lay out all of our marketing tactics on how we drive floods of distressed home sellers to our clients!

Download

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Real Estate Investor SEO

Over the past several years of testing we’ve found that Google Map rankings do not always directly correlate to organic real estate investor SEO efforts.

There are, of course, lots of overlap between Real Estate investor SEO and ranking your Google Maps listing property but there are several strategies in particular you’ll want to implement on and off your website to ensure high map rankings.

We find countless real estate investors and long-lasting brands but still can’t seem to break into the infamous ‘3 pack’ of Google results.

This is why we’ve put together this article to explain what really makes the difference when it comes to real estate investor SEO and ranking in maps vs. the normal search results section.

Real Estate Investor SEO Optimized GMB Listing for

We covered the basics of optimizing a GMB listing for real estate investors already so highly recommend checking that article out.

Make sure everything is fully and correctly completed on your listing FIRST before continuing through the rest of this article.

NAP Consistency Around the Web for Proper Real Estate Investor SEO

One of the most important ranking factors for your real estate investor SEO listing is to have consistent name, address, and phone number (NAP) citations around the web.

You’ll want to make sure the NAP info you use in your GMB listing is exactly the same on your website, social profiles, directory listing, and anywhere else someone can find your company on the web.

Consistency is crucial because it establishes trust in Google’s eyes.

Google will make it extremely hard for your GMB map listing to rank if you have different business names, addresses, and phone numbers distributed around the web so make sure these are clean first.

Best Practices with Online Listings

Image credit: moz.com

First, make sure to use your actual business name exactly how it would be written on a tax return.

Second, don’t use 800 numbers in your listing. Make sure you have a local number since this will increase your chances of ranking locally. 

Next, make sure to use your actual business address rather than a PO Box or Virtual Office. These have been abused over the years so Google will look for them and potentially ban your listing if used.

Consider also uploading relevant images and videos to all directory sites your business is listed with. Better yet, make these the same images you added to your GMB listing.

Lastly, keep consistency between all other aspects beyond just NAP.

Keep your service categories, hours of operation, and website links the same all across the internet. 

Make sure to add the right URL protocol such as https:// (if your site is secure) as this will also improve all-around trust with Google.

Google My Business Landing Page & Website Content

The on-page SEO for real estate investors website plays an important role in how well your GMB listing ranks.

Your website URL listed in GMB should be directed to your website’s home page.

The home page should clearly cover the primary service you have listed in GMB. Make sure that the page title tag and H1 headline mention the main keyword.

Second, ensure that the page has quality content that uses H2 and H3 text. Sprinkle in the main keyword as well as synonyms throughout the home page content.

Directly link your home page to other service pages to help rank for the other service categories you have listed in your GMB dashboard.

Embedded Map & Schema Markup

Standard real estate investor SEO practice is place a map section in the footer of your site that indicates your business location.

This can be done by searching for your address in Google Maps then copy and pasting the embed code into the footer of your site.

Alternatively, you can take a snapshot image of your location and hyperlink the image to your address in maps.

Adding a link or embedded map creates strong local signals for Google.

Second, make sure to add local address schema somewhere on your website (the footer).

Local Backlinks

The more signals you can send to Google that you’re in a particular area the better.

That’s why you’ll want to look for backlink opportunities from websites also based in your local area.

Get links from local associations you’re part of and or the chamber of commerce! Maybe consider writing a post for your local newspaper which they’ll redistribute on their website.

We talk more about building backlinks for real estate investors in another real estate investor SEO article so would suggest checking that out.

Neighboring Cities/Areas

Another local signal to Google are service area pages and or mentioning the specific areas you purchase homes in.

We suggest mentioning the various towns/cities/zip codes you service in the footer of your site and or creating entire pages for particular areas.

Another strategy, mentioned in our search engine optimization for real estate investors article, is to upload case studies of the properties you’ve purchased. These posts can mention the particular area the home was purchased in, creating more local signals for Google.

Reviews

Another huge ranking factor for Google Maps is the number and quality of your reviews.

The more reviews your listing has the more it will stick out and the more users will click it.

Higher click through rates (CTR), will lead Google to rank you higher in the map area because it shows them you are a trusted and popular brand.

GMB reviews should be a heavy focus for you. Get as many 5 star reviews as possible and respond to each and every review (despite rating) to show activity on your listing.

If you need some help with your Google ads management and Real estate investor SEO please reach out. We’d love to chat and show you what we can do for you.

Grab Your Free Copy!

Enjoy a complimentary copy of our book, “The Complete Guide To Internet Marketing For Real Estate Investors” where we lay out all of our marketing tactics on how we drive floods of distressed home sellers to our clients!

Download

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Is your website getting traffic but still not receiving the amount of leads you want?

Not all people are ready to sell when they land on your website — some people are just in the research phase of selling their home.

One way to approach this situation is to re-market to those leads long after they visit your site.

Stay in front of every visitor and by the time they are ready to sell your company will be at the top of mind.

In this article, we’ll show you how retargeting for real estate investors advertising works and some ideas on how to properly set them up for your real estate investment firm.

Why You Should Be Retargeting Visitors as A Real Estate Investor

Even with a perfectly setup website, only a certain percentage of visitors are going to reach out for a cash offer.

For standard real estate investor websites, you’ll likely see anywhere 15-30% conversion rates. This means 70% or more of your visitors are not contacting you.

Retargeting ads help you get higher ROI on your marketing budget because it pulls prospects back into your marketing/sales funnels.

Have you ever searched online for something you needed and saw images of that product/service everywhere around the web?

These are retargeting ads.

Retargeting ads for real estate investors keeps your brand name front and center for when the person is ready to buy.

Retargeting website visitors with ads like these is extremely economical because you already know they are interested in getting a cash offer for their home. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have visited your site in the first place.

The lead costs you can get with retargeting are sometimes 2-4X cheaper than if you were to market to cold traffic on Facebook or Google.

The Mindset of a Homeowner Looking to Sell

The good news is, most homeowners looking for cash offers have urgency behind their need due to the situation they may be in.

However, selling a home is still a big deal.

Most people will research their options for weeks before deciding to pull the trigger.

Timing is everything when it comes to buying homes and as you may know, multiple variables have to line up for you to secure a profitable deal — people’s life situations are complex.

However, real estate investors still make the mistake of focusing on one-touch marketing approaches.

Retargeting ads solve this by keeping you top of mind.

The power of online marketing is amazing! You can tag every visitor to your site and follow them anywhere they go around the web.

Retargeting ads can be shown on…

• People’s favorite news sites
• Their favorite blogs
• Facebook & Instagram feeds
• Instagram stories
• YouTube videos
• Email
• And many other places

Even better, you can place highly relevant ads in front of people based on the specific pages they visited on your website. Your ad text can mention precisely what it is that that person was searching for.

Retargeting ads are the most cost effective form of advertising known and that’s why we suggest every real estate investor take them seriously.

Crafting the Perfect Retargeting Offer

As alluded to earlier, it’s helpful to retarget website visitors with a highly relevant ad.

We suggest creating a specific offer that will entice users to stop what they’re doing and click back over to your website.

Strong offers and sales copy is key!

Don’t just place generic information about your company. Instead, treat your ad as an opportunity to re-sell the homeowner. 

Example ad copy: 

Need to Sell Your Home Fast?

Get a Cash Offer Within 48 Hours

This ad copy is relevant, specific, and enticing.

The more you can speak directly to your ideal prospect the more qualified seller leads your campaign will produce.

Ad Landing Pages

The second thing to keep in mind is where you send people who click your retargeting ad.

It’s important to send traffic to a dedicated landing page rather than your standard website.

It’s crucial to direct people to a web page that aligns perfectly with the ad text the user clicked on. You also want to make sure the landing page answers questions, mentions the benefits of working with your company, and clearly states what the person needs to do next.

We talk more about creating solid landing pages in our Google Ads for Real Estate Investors article so check that out for more information about design and structure.

Where to Place Retargeting Ads

Here are several platforms you’ll want to set up retargeting ads on:

• • Facebook/Instagram – 90%+ of the US market has a FB or Instagram page so it would be ludicrous not to re-engage people on these platforms. Social ads are quite cheap as well so you’ll get a great ROI here.
  • Google Display Network – Google allows you to display ads across 90%+ of the major websites across the web. You’ll notice these ads as various sized images that show up in different locations on certain websites. With a click of a button you can get your ads showing across the majority of the web to show on your prospects favorite websites.

• YouTube – YouTube has become bigger than TV. The majority of the US population watches Youtube at least once a day. You can place retargeting advertisements before, in between, and after videos to encourage people to come back to your website to reach out.

Questions to Ask Yourself Before Setting Up Ads

Before moving forward, make sure you ask yourself these questions:

• Do you have a Facebook pixel installed on your website?
• Do you have the Google Re-marketing code installed on your site?
• Do you have a strong offer to lure prospects back into your sales funnel?

With these things in place, you’re all set to retarget past website visitors.

Retargeting for Real Estate Investors: The Best Way to Get More Bang for Your Buck

Retargeting campaigns for your real estate investment business is essential to get the best ROI on your marketing efforts. Most people are not going to reach out the moment they land on your website but this doesn’t mean they won’t at some point.

Stay in-front of your competition who is relying solely on single-touch marketing strategies.

Before the internet, retargeting was limited to only the biggest brands with 6-figure marketing budgets. With the rise of the internet, advertisers with only $10000 a month to spend can unlock the very same power of re-marketing that was once limited to the big fish.

We’ve had 5 years experience with the real estate investment industry. We’ve ran dozens of successful advertising campaigns over these years and have truly figured out what works best.

Contact us today to get a Free Audit and Strategy Session. We’ll provide you a blueprint of how we can use our system to make you the #1 ranked roofing business in your local area and steal a majority of the leads from your competitors.

Grab Your Free Copy!

Enjoy a complimentary copy of our book, “The Complete Guide To Internet Marketing For Real Estate Investors” where we lay out all of our marketing tactics on how we drive floods of distressed home sellers to our clients!

Download

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Real Estate Investors Google Ads

“We already tried real estate investor Google ads but didn’t get any results.”

“It didn’t work, it’s a complete waste of money.”

I’ve talked with countless real estate investors and wholesalers from around the country and 90% of them described a similar experience with Google Ads.

Is Real estate investors Google ads really that ineffective for getting more motivated seller leads?

Just last year (2018), Google’s made a staggering $116 billion dollars in revenue mostly generated from Google Ads.

AdWords would have to be the most elaborate scam in history to be pulling in numbers such as these.

Let’s look a bit further…

AdWords isn’t as simple as most people make it out to be.

There’s a 100+ ways a Google Ads campaign can fail.

We’ve been running Google Advertising campaigns now for over 12 years and we’ll be the first to tell you it’s both a highly lucrative and dangerous tool.

We’ve heard multiple stories of real estate investors and wholesalers burning 10s of thousands of dollars on ads with little to no return.

We all learn from mistakes but there’s no rule they have to be your own.

In the game of Google Ads, you pay for your mistakes with a credit card.

This isn’t to say you shouldn’t being using it to generate motivated seller leads.

Google Ads is a lead generation beast for real estate investors.

It’s equivalent to a Learjet.

It can instantly take your business from ground zero to 30,000 feet in the air.

Place 9/10 people in the cockpit of a jet and say to them, “start flying…”

This scenario isn’t going to end well.

A Leerjet is a high-powered machine that can fly over the competition and allow you to travel from point A to point B in a matter of hours rather than days.

But it needs an experienced pilot.

Someone who knows how to fly, someone who’s certified, someone who’s been in the air for thousands of hours.

Advertising on Google is no different.

The pilot needs to know AdWords like the back of their hand. Better yet, it helps when the pilot has navigated your exact space (real estate investing). Otherwise, a lot of money can be burned in the process with little to show for it.

Don’t worry, we got you covered and have reduced virtually all the risk in flying.

But what about those investors that make a killing with Google?

Well, there’s a lot that goes in to it; too much to cover in a single article.

But, you can learn a lot about what to do by looking at what not to do.

Successful players avoid these 3 common mistakes made by real estate investors using Google Ads.

Mistake #1: Sending traffic to a home page

What’s good for ranking your website isn’t always good for running ads.

Websites are filled with distractions; things to interact with, click, read, and watch.

It turns out, the more options you give people the less likely they are to choose the one you want; to reach out for a cash offer!

Instead of sending ad visitors to your homepage send them to a landing page.

You can think of a landing page as a written sales letter that sells your offer. It lists out some benefits, process information, handles objections, and then asks the visitor to reach out to you through phone or email.

There are no links or other pages to distract the visitor from the goal.

You may get 1-5% of them contacting you but we’ve built landing pages that get 20-50%!

That’s shitload more motivated seller leads without spending any extra money.

Reason #2: Ads that are easy to ignore

As mentioned earlier, Google makes most of their money from Google ads.

For this reason, they give preference to ads that generate a lot of clicks. The more people are clicking your ads the more money Google makes.

This is why it’s so important to write a good ad that sticks out.

Your ads should stick out from everything else on the page, have a powerful message, and entice people to click through to your website.

An effective ad talks about the benefits you offer and differentiates you from the competition.

The better your ads are, the more clicks you’ll get, and the more seller leads you’ll generate.

Mistake #3: Running the campaign themselves

We’re not saying you shouldn’t run Google Ads campaigns yourself but understand there is a downside to doing so.

You’ll just have to be comfortable knowing there’s a learning curve and you’ll likely spend a significant amount of money and time figuring it all out.

Every second dedicated to learning Google Ads steals your attention and resources away from closing deals.

You’re chances of succeeding with Google skyrockets when you hand the controls over to an experienced pilot.

Ideally, someone who has navigated the investor space before.

Everyday, for the past decade, we’ve dedicated long hours to building and improving Google Ads for real estate investors.

Interested in our Google AdWords for Real Estate Investors program?

Want to learn how we do it?

Want to get serious about your real estate investor marketing and take your business to the next level?

Click here to schedule a free 1-on-1 Seller Lead strategy session.

The strategy session is a 45 minute call where you and I will go over what is and isn’t working in your marketing campaigns.

At the end of the call, you’ll walk away with a proven strategy to generate a dozen plus new seller leads this month (at least)!

The strategy session is 100% free and there are no strings attached.

Schedule Now

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Grab Your Free Copy!

Enjoy a complimentary copy of our book, “The Complete Guide To Internet Marketing For Real Estate Investors” where we lay out all of our marketing tactics on how we drive floods of distressed home sellers to our clients!

Download

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