SEO for Real Estate Investors in Edgewood, Maryland

DOUBLE or even TRIPLE Your Real Estate Investing Profits

---

Whether you are wholesaling, flipping, buy and hold, the BRRRR (Buy, Renovate, Rent, Refinance, Repeat) strategy, or anything in between in Edgewood Maryland, it all starts with lead generation. Real estate is a tough and competitive business. None of the investment strategies that any guru, mastermind, or coaching program teaches work without getting real estate seller leads. It all starts with motivated seller leads!

Any path to success for a real estate investor in Edgewood Maryland starts with having a way to generate motivated seller leads.

Why Should Every Real Estate Investor in Edgewood Maryland Care About SEO?

The menu of traditional REI (real estate investment) marketing is endless – mailers, driving for dollars, probate filings, foreclosures, etc. This trend extends to digital marketing efforts as well – cold calling, buying lists of phone numbers to spam them with SMS text messaging, and buying email lists to blast them with 10-30+ unwanted emails.

Facebook, and Google Ads as paid advertising marketing models – collectively known as Pay Per Click or PPC marketing – are no different.

All of these methods have you chase the leads and require that you keep pumping time, money, and usually both to keep producing results.

SEO (search engine optimization) is different by definition. When was the last time you waited for a postcard to come in the mail to help you solve an issue? Or when was the last time that you waited for a call from someone to find a solution for a difficult situation?

If you were waiting around for a solution to materialize itself in front of you, then you really weren’t ready to take action.

The same is true for motivated sellers in Edgewood Maryland! When they are facing a real estate issue with their property, they are not waiting around for an investor to call them or get a card in the mail to take action in solving their problem.

When sellers in Edgewood Maryland are ready to sell, they take the initiative. Sellers search for a solution to their problem.

So what I really do is …

Everybody goes to Google to find a solution to their problem, including motivated sellers. Most often, that search happens from a mobile device.

If you don’t have an established, credible online presence, you are losing leads, losing revenue, and losing the chance to convert off-market, motivated sellers into highly profitable deals.

SEO is an investment that pays dividends for months and years to come. Unlike PPC or any other type of marketing, hard work, and doing things right with search engine optimization pays off long after the time and money has been invested in putting in the work.

The Quality of the Leads You Get from SEO is Better

When motivated sellers in Edgewood Maryland are coming to you and searching for a solution to their dilemma, they are ready to move forward. You still need to act with urgency and speed – they wouldn’t be searching for a solution now, if it wasn’t urgent and speed-to-lead will always be important. However, you will have a much better success rate of getting to connect with them and offer a solution, than if you were chasing them!

Warp Drive Program to Accelerate Your Growth

I help clients across the United States and Canada build profitable and sustainable lead generation machines and I can do the same for you.

My Warp Drive program combines paid ads with search engine optimization. It leverages the power of immediate seller leads in Edgewood Maryland with paid ads, and over time reduces the ad spend as our search engine optimization efforts start paying off.

The program is performance based, has a fixed initial cost, and a guaranteed number of leads within a predetermined time frame. If we don’t generate the expected number of leads, we will refund you the difference.

We are extremely dedicated to the success of our clients. We accept only ONE customer per month into the program and we NEVER take on more than one active customer in the same geographical area.

Something Curious About Edgewood Maryland

Edgewood is a small town located in Kenton County, Kentucky, with a population of approximately 8,700 residents. One unique aspect of Edgewood is its history as a “sundown town”, a term used to describe towns that enforced racial segregation by barring African Americans from being in the town after dark. In the mid-20th century, Edgewood had a reputation for being unwelcoming to African Americans, with signs at the city limits warning them to leave before sundown. In recent years, Edgewood has worked to overcome its segregationist past and promote diversity within the community. The city has made efforts to become more inclusive and welcoming to people of all races and backgrounds. Today, Edgewood is known for its well-maintained neighborhoods, excellent schools, and strong sense of community pride. Despite its small size, Edgewood is also home to a vibrant arts scene, with local galleries and studios showcasing the work of talented artists from the area. The city hosts regular art walks and cultural events, providing residents and visitors with opportunities to engage with the creative community. Edgewood’s commitment to celebrating diversity and promoting the arts makes it a unique and welcoming place to live or visit in the Greater Cincinnati area.

Real Estate Market History Edgewood Maryland

In the city of Edgewood, real estate prices have experienced a steady increase over the past few years, driven by a growing population and demand for housing. Economic conditions have generally been positive, with low unemployment rates and an expanding job market in various sectors such as technology, healthcare, and education. There have been notable periods of growth in the city, particularly in the past two years, with new businesses opening and existing ones expanding. This has led to an influx of job opportunities and a more competitive job market. The city has also seen an increase in commercial development, with new shopping centers and office buildings being built. Despite the overall positive trends, there have been some periods of contraction, particularly during the global economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the city has shown resilience and has quickly bounced back, with the real estate market and job market recovering swiftly. Key economic indicators such as GDP growth, job creation, and consumer confidence have remained strong in Edgewood, indicating a healthy and growing economy. Overall, the city of Edgewood has experienced positive changes in real estate prices, economic conditions, and the job market over the past few years, positioning it as a desirable place to live and work.

What We’ll Cover

What is SEO? And What It is Not!

SEO is optimizing your site to try and rank – show up – when your target customer makes searches related to what you do. In the case of wholesalers, flippers, and real estate investors, it is when motivated sellers search for a way to solve an issue related to owning, selling, or inheriting a property – or any other property-related issue.

Search engine optimization is a marathon and not a get-leads-quick scheme. It’s not a quick checklist of things to do. It is not simple, nor easy, despite what you have read online. It requires consistent, systematic, and meticulous effort to make your site usable and found when people use a search engine.

Its goal is to increase your organic traffic (the number of website visitors you have) from Edgewood Maryland. More specifically, it is a way to help motivated seller leads in Edgewood Maryland find you, and ultimately a solution for their situation.

Over time, SEO can produce consistent, highly motivated seller leads, who are ready to act now, and are actively looking for someone to buy their house.

Hand-in-hand with good search engine optimization practices is the need for good web design, great usability and fast load times, and the inevitable increase of brand awareness and credibility of your business.

The best part is that search engine optimization (SEO) can produce lead, after lead, after lead, months and even years after the initial work has been done. This makes SEO, when done right, have one of the most impressive ROI (return on investment) rates of any marketing channel for wholesaling, flipping, or any other type of real estate investing.

Pros and Cons of SEO in Edgewood Maryland

Pros of Search Engine Optimization in Edgewood Maryland

People tend to trust organic search results more than sponsored ones.

Let’s break this down. Imagine you are searching for “REI mentor” online. When you notice that the first three results say “sponsored,” it means those coaches paid to appear at the top of your search. This might make you wonder if they are truly the best or just good at online advertising.

But, if you scroll down and find the top one to three results that don’t have “sponsored” next to them, you probably think that those coaches are listed because they are genuinely good at what they do, right? It gives the impression that they earned their spot based on their skills and reputation, not just by paying for it.

You can attract potential customers in Edgewood Maryland consistently and naturally without having to spend money regularly.

When you pay for advertisements, you will only receive leads as long as you continue to pay for those ads. However, if you work on improving your website’s search engine ranking, you could keep receiving leads for months or even years after your website reaches a high position in search results. The key is to maintain that top position so that people can find you easily over time.

Leads are the lifeblood of any business.

Leads are incredibly valuable – especially in competitive markets like Edgewood Maryland. For example, let’s consider the phrase “sell house for cash Edgewood Maryland.” If your website ranks in the top three search results for this term, it could bring in about 500 visitors each year. Out of these visitors, if 100 of them fill out forms to request a cash offer (which means your website has a 20% conversion rate), you might successfully close 10 deals.

Depending on how much money you make from each deal, this could mean earning between $30,000 and $100,000 annually (depending on your structure, market conditions, and margins).

This example shows just how important it is to rank well in search results, as it can lead to significant profits for your business.

Cons of Search Engine Optimization in Edgewood Maryland

It takes a lot of work.

Ranking in Google is harder than it’s ever been and it is not going to get any easier. It takes work, persistence, dedication, consistency, and knowing what you’re doing.

It’s competitive.

Because of the incredible potential of SEO and how profitable it can be in Edgewood Maryland to occupy top search results, every real estate investor with good business sense is competing for those spots.

Some factors are out of your control. 

Ultimately, it is Google and other search engine providers that determine how they will rank your page. Domain name age or domain name registration length for example, is one ranking factor that is believed to be used by Google. What this means for your website is that, if a domain has been registered for longer, without showing spammy behavior, it’s likely going to rank higher because of the perceived reputation for longevity and good behavior it has demonstrated. Going up against competitors that have had websites 5 years before you, more links than you, and more traffic than you, makes it that much more difficult to outrank them.

It takes time.

Ranking won’t happen overnight, no matter what some agencies or gurus will tell you. We’ve seen clients get organic leads in anywhere from 3 months to 6 months, while some need even more time. Depending on the competitiveness in your market, it may take over a year to start seeing meaningful results.

When Should You Add SEO To Your Marketing Channels in Edgewood Maryland?

Yesterday! The sooner you start with SEO, the better off you will be in the long run. Search engines, like Google, consider the length of time they have seen a website as well as multiple other factors for ranking.

If you are already closing 1-2 deals per year, it’s time to add SEO to your marketing channels in Edgewood Maryland. Because it takes time to build momentum, you want to start investing in SEO as soon as possible once you have the time to spend or the budget to hire a professional like me.

Even if you only do mailers, SMS, and cold calling, most people you reach out to will check to see if you have a website to get a sense of your credibility as a company. This is usually their first step in deciding whether you are a legitimate business or potentially a scammer.

Having a website is a must – regardless of whether you do SEO or not. Use your website to build credibility and brand awareness with your target market – motivated sellers in Edgewood Maryland and the surrounding area. Adding SEO on top of other marketing channel will provide a steadier flow of motivated leads.

Should You Hire Someone for Real Estate Investing SEO or Should You Do It Myself?

The answer is a little more complicated than a simple yes or no. The bottom line decision, as it often is, comes down to time and finances, but also where you are in your investment journey.

I always advocate for being an informed client, which generally means I steer most of my prospective clients to educate themselves on the basics of search engine optimization and try their hand at it first, so that they know what they are buying. This might be a surprising thing to read coming from someone who wants to do your SEO for you!

When You Should Do Your Own SEO

I recommend that you learn how to do SEO for your own business when all of the following is true:

• You are just starting out OR you don’t need leads now, because real estate investing is still a side hustle for you.
• You are not relying on SEO (at least currently) to be your primary source of finding deals.
• You are diligent, dedicated, and can stay consistent when the effort you put in will pay off months from now.
• You have more time than money.

Those last two are very important. SEO is hard. It takes a long time to see results and if you are used to getting leads immediately like you do with paid ads, it is easy to get discouraged and disappointed, and quickly conclude that SEO is a scam.

Because search engine optimization is a long-term strategy that pays off in the long-run, if you don’t have the capital to invest in paying someone else to do SEO for you, but you do have a lot of time to work on SEO for your business in Edgewood Maryland, you absolutely should learn how to do SEO for yourself to improve your brand awareness.

No one, not even me, will have a higher stake in the success of your business than you. Generating motivated seller leads is the lifeblood of any business and when you, the business owner, has the capability to keep the leads flowing with a strategy known for stellar return on investment, you are setting up your real estate investing business for success.

What Platform Should I Use for My Real Estate Cash Buyer Website?

We use Carrot for all of our real estate investor SEO clients and we recommend Carrot for every real estate investor wanting to grow with SEO because of the all-in-one infrastructure it provides out of the box. The platform is very solid and takes care of a lot of the background infrastructure that is needed. The forms they provide are flexible and come with an auto response feature for a better user experience.

The fast platform Carrot provides reduces bounce rate that usually results from a slow server. Their platform also generates XML sitemaps and the web design choices they have made, facilitates strong home page content and readability. They provide a ton of learning tools for those that want to do their own SEO and if you subscribe to a plan that includes their SEO tools, you get fine-grained control of your meta description and keyword density on every page.

What’s the Best Way to Learn SEO in Edgewood Maryland?

If you have made the decision to learn SEO and you are not yet on Carrot, here is your chance to get both the Carrot platform and a fantastic beginner SEO course thrown in for free. We believe so strongly in Carrot and their ability to help investors succeed with SEO that we have adopted them as our exclusive partner on which we build SEO for real estate investors websites.

We have an exclusive offer for new Carrot members that provides Carrot’s 3 Leads Per Day training completely free – a total of $246 dollar value for just $99.

When You Should NOT Do Your Own SEO

I recommend that you do NOT do you own SEO when any of the following is true:

• You are doing at least 3+ deals per year.
• You do not enjoy long hours of pouring over keywords, researching competitors, evaluating what posts to write, or the writing process itself.
• You know you will not enjoy the work and will not stay consistent.
• You have more money than time.
• Your time is more valuable in other parts of the business than working on lead acquisition.

If you already have an established business that requires your attention and your time is better spent following up with leads, closing deals, managing projects, delegating, and crafting strategy for the future and growth of your business, my recommendation is to outsource your search engine optimization efforts. Let SEO professionals carry out the strategy and planning, as well as the execution of your SEO campaigns.

How to Hire the Right SEO Agency To Manage Your Search Engine Optimization in Edgewood Maryland

Hiring someone for a job that you know how to do is hard. Making the right hiring decision for a job that you do not know how to do is even harder. Search engine optimization involves a significant investment and a bad hire can cost you. Quick wins obtained by shady tactics and questionable practices can seem tempting, and may work for a time. Eventually however, Google and other search engines catch on and usually penalize bad actors who employ these tactics to game the algorithm.

If you do end up getting hit with a penalty, it can take more effort, and long weeks and months of effort to undo the damage. Such shortcuts are not worth the risk, which is why I don’t use these tactics and I don’t let anyone on my team here at REToolkit use them either.

We do things right, using tried and proven strategies which take longer to produce results, but ultimately add up over time to produce work that is not emperilled search engine changes and the dreaded algorithm update.

At REToolkit, we have a simple philosophy – don’t try to game the system for short-lived gains. Rather, we create content and do work that is designed to help users find solutions to problems and match our client with motivated sellers in their area. Operating this way makes algorithm changes irrelevant to our work, because it aligns with what Google and other search engine providers ultimately want – to satisfy the query the searcher entered.

Avoid Unrealistic Promises and Gimmicky “Secrets” Claims

Without a basic understanding of lead generation, link building, search engine optimization and how all of these relate broadly to online advertising in real estate in particular, it is far too easy for unscrupulous SEO – so-called “professionals” – to sell pipe dreams and make belief stories of success.

Stories of”guaranteed ranking”, the”magical and mystical power of purchasing thousands of backlinks”, and how”with this one weird trick, you can have hundreds of blog posts that will rank” and “you will soon will have so many leads that you won’t know what to do with them all”! All the while, supposedly, bypassing the weeks, months, and depending on the market years, of hard work, discipline, and consistency that it takes to catch up and rank higher than competitors who have been working on search engine optimization for years.

Of course, you can have all this “secret magical sauce/formula/strategy/ebook/mastermind” that they have “used for years and no one else knows” for the “low, low price of $9,995” (or some other ridiculously, outlandish number), and “if you act in the next 2 hours, you get a 97% discount and get it for $299”! And, of course, you must “act now, because the price will never be this low again”.

I bet a lot of this sounds familiar 😀!

The unfortunate reality is that real estate investors, desperate for leads, fall for these advertising gimmicks and waste what little cash they have for getting motivated seller leads.

These shortcuts and tricks that don’t work and never get them any leads. I find that kind of predatory selling tactics abhorrent and refuse to participate. These tactics take advantage of people and give the honest and dedicated SEO professionals a reputation of crooks and cheats.  

This may be painfully familiar to you. It is no different than how wholesalers and flippers that engage in contracts with predatory, weasel-out-of-anything scot free, if I can’t find a buyer terms and other unscrupulous practices give the honest investors who are genuinely trying to help people, a bad reputation.

Ask to See Actual Results

Any reputable agency or SEO professional should be able to reference specif a specific brand and/or domain name they have worked on. They should be able to demonstrate live what some of their current customers are seeing in terms of metrics and results.

Do not settle for screenshots of Google Analytics and Google Search Console showing amazing growth without also confirming the specific website to which these screenshots. During a discovery call, ask the agency or professional to pull up current metrics for a client website.

While it may sound plausible they can’t show you specific client’s results to protect their privacy, as long as they are not showing data on a competitor, there is absolutely no reason why they can’t show you live data.

We only work with real estate investors and agents. During a discovery call with me, you can expect to see live data, from current clients, showing you exactly the results I am getting for them. I can do this, because we never take on more than one client in the same geographical area and therefore avoid any conflict of interest.

Strategic Planning and Execution Requirements

Competent agencies and professionals will have a process in place to plan and execute your search engine optimization campaigns.

A full-service provider such as my team and I at REToolkit, will provide you with a multi-step, multi-pronged approach that covers technical SEO, on-page and off-page SEO, backlink management, keywords research, local search, analytics reporting, link building for backlink growth, mobile device optimization of your real estate website and much more.

Whether you choose to learn and do SEO yourself, or you hire a proffesional, the below 9 steps outline the minimum set of steps to execute SEO successfully.

We go much further than these 9 basic steps at REToolkit. If you would like to learn more about how we do things, and would like to apply to be one of the three new clients we onboard per quarter, book a discovery call to apply.

Common myths & misconceptions

I heard this phrase used by Neil deGrasse Tyson first –“One of the great challenges in life is to know enough about a subject to think you are right, but not know enough about a subject to know you are wrong.”

SEO is no exception. There are lots of people out there who know too little about SEO to think they are right, but don’t know nearly enough to know they are wrong. Most of the time, this is through no fault of their own.

Search Engine Optimization for real estate investors is a topic that many people have heard about, but there are a lot of myths and misunderstandings surrounding it. It’s likely that no other marketing method is filled with as many misconceptions as SEO.

Buzzwords like link building, keyword phrases, content marketing, local search, and more float around the internet and there is a dizzying amount of blog posts, guides, articles, cheatsheets, etc. The sheer volume of information makes it extremely difficult to sort through what is accurate and what is not.

Here is the uncomfortable, inconvenient truth of SEO …

FACT: SEO has never been harder and more complicated as it is now.

And it is not hard to see why. Google is interested (or at least so they claim) in delivering the best possible search results to answer the question the searcher typed. If the searcher doesn’t find an answer, or finding that answer is difficult, or the website for the suggested answer is slow, the searcher may decide that Google is not a good search engine and move on to a competitor. If that happens, Google loses money – people stop searching, which in turn reduces Google’s ad revenue – not good.

Which brings us to the infamous (and often hated) algorithm. Over the years, Google has gotten better and better at sifting through content, detecting poor content, detecting sites that are unhelpful and spammy, and all around gotten better at (or at least so they think) of determining what drives good results.

MYTH: All it takes to optimize and rank my site is sprinkle some keywords in.

Very wrong. Google search employs over 200 ranking signals-all with varying weight in the final determination. There is no magic trick or formula to beat the algorithm. Back in 2024 there was a leak of Google internal documents which provided some insight into just how complicated and sophisticated their search engine actually is.

MYTH: More Links = Better Rank

Google is much more interested in the quality of the backlinks than the number of backlinks. Think of backlinks as an endorsement. The website that is linking to your (assuming it is a dofollow link) is vouching for the quality and accuracy of the information on your website. The more reputable the website that is endorsing you, the more impactful that endorsement will be on your search engine indexing.

MYTH: I can follow a simple REI SEO tutorial and rank.

SEO is not rocket science and we at REToolkit firmly believe that with enough time and dedication, one can learn to do seo for real estate investing. However, claiming that it is simple is an oversimplification.

SEO is always changing and evolving, because Google is always changing and evolving. Just because someone out there did some simple steps, for a long time, and won big with SEO, doesn’t necessarily mean the results are repeatable. Your experience with SEO will vary based on market, competition, existing rankings, and other factors outside of your control.

MYTH: I am going to hire ABC agency, who promises to rank me on position #__

Run. No, seriously – run. No professional in the industry should ever make that promise. It is unrealistic – they can’t promise specific results, because they do not have the final say about how your website will rank. They don’t control Google or the websites of your competitors.

If they are promising specific results, it may be that they are employing tactics that run contrary to Google’s goal of providing good search results. Such tactics can work for a while, but as we have seen in the past, Google eventually catches on and the consequences can be devastating.

MYTH: If I get 200 blog posts (or get them from somewhere cheap) I’ll rank fast.

Well, probably not. Google is interested in useful content. If your content is the same as 50, or 100, or 200 other websites out there, what value are you adding to the user searching for an answer? Why should Google show your blog post versus a website which had that post on their site for the past 3 years?

How to measure your ROI (return on investment).

No matter what type of marketing you are doing, it is important to keep track of how what you are spending is paying off. For paid ads, or direct mail, that’s fairly easy. However, for SEO and your content strategy it is a little more complicated, due to the long-term outlook. So you for you as a real estate professional, what does measureing ROI with SEO look like?

If you are just starting out with a brand new site, how you measure SEO performance will be different than what it would look like later on when you have an established presence. Initially, you are looking for percentage of your pages ranking, visibility through search impressions, and ranked keywords. Later on, you can start paying more attention to actual clicks and eventually, leads.

If those first months you want to focus on building brand awareness with your target market.

Here are the key elements we consider and set up for clients when we run their real estate investment content marketing:

• Google Search Impressions. This metric indicates how many times your cash buyer website showed up in search results. The metric is provided by Google Search Console. This metric does not include paid Google Ads.
• Keywords Ranked. This metric indicates how the efforts of your keyword research and content marketing are paying off. We use our proprietary REToolkit SEO Automation tool – SKIPPER. It provides everything you need to automate your SEO, keyword research, relevant phrases, determining user intent, and technical SEO, content editor and more.
• Clicks. Another metric provided by Google Search Console. Google defines this as “the number of clicks on your website URLs from a Google Search results page, not including clicks on paid Google Ads search results.” This tells you how many people click to go to your website when they find it in search.
• Leads. If you have a Carrot website (and if you don’t, you should) this would be the number of times someone visits your Carrot website and submits their information to get a cash offer to sell their house. Other than deals, this is the primary metric that real estate investing professionals want to track. Carrot makes this very simple, because they track leads for you automatically. If you are not on Carrot, you can still set up Google Analytics and set up events tracking.
• Deals (of course 😀). At the end of the day, this is why real estate investors use SEO to grow. This is the ultimate measure of your REI SEO investment. It may seem obvious, but how your value your SEO investment, must be inevitably linked to how many deals you get out of it. If you are getting 2-3 leads per day (yes, it is not easy, but possible) and you are able to close 1 deal from every 20 leads – a modest 5% close rate – that equates to up to 4 deals per month. How much are those 4 deals worth to your business? When you put things into perspective, investing thousands into SEO each month starts to make sense, doesn’t it?

There are always more factors to consider, but these are the main measures and the ones we track most closely here at REToolkit. Now that we have covered the basics of how to measure ROI, let’s look at the specific steps you need to take to rank your real estate investor website.

Step 1: Analytics & Event Tracking

Do not skip this step. You need to have analytics and event tracking set up so that you can actually measure your website’s performance. You don’t want to do this after you have optimized your website. This data is invaluable when it comes to understanding how the changes you make to your web design, content, or landing page affect your website performance.

To set up basic analytics and event tracking:

1. Configure Google Analytics. Register your website, integrate the tracking code, and that’s it! If you are on a Carrot, all you have to do is copy and paste the measurement id from Google Analytics. It’s that simple! Other major platforms probably have a way for you to do this as well without having to modify your website code. On WordPress, plugins like MonsterInsights are available to make the setup easier.
2. Set up event tracking. This is an advanced step that requires additional effort, but is invaluable in the long-run for tracking ROI to your REI SEO efforts. Once you have analytics configured, set up events to track specific things happening on your website – such as someone completing a form or visiting a specific page.w For example, if a motivated seller fills out a form, track that as an event. If they fill out the 2-step form, which usually indicates they are even more serious about selling, and go to the “thank you/next steps” page, track that too.
3. Connect to Google Search Console (GSC). This step is critical to understanding how your SEO efforts are paying off. Make sure you use the same Google Account for both Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Or at least have access to both accounts. This will allow you to connect your domain in Google Search Console without having to modify the DNS setup for your domain name. It is a little less technical, and can be faster if your domain provider tends to be slow to propagate domain name configuration updates.
4. Connect GSC to Google Analytics (Advanced). This connection allows you to inform your Google Analytics metrics with GSC data. This can help you determine which keywords contributed the most to your lead generation and ultimately the number of deals.

If you are a client, we set all of this up for you and you don’t have to lift a finger. In fact, we go a step further and integrate data from Google Analytics and Google Search Console with SKIPPER so that you have a complete view of your data.

With tools like SKIPPER leading the way in innovation, and centralizing the reporting you need, managing SEO becomes less of a burden.

Step 2: GBP (Google Business Profile) Setup

Once analytics and event tracking is in place, it’s time to set up and optimize your Google Business Profile. This is what allows your business to show up in Google Maps search.

There are specific guidelines and policies that you need to follow and only certain types of businesses are eligible to have a Google Business Profile. For example, if the primary purpose of your real estate / cash buyer website is to generate leads that you sell to other investors, your business is not eligible for a GBP.

Before your website shows up in search results, you will need to verify your business. You will need your physical address. This needs to be the actual place of business where you operate. A temporary, or a shared office address (like a UPS Store, etc.) will not work. This is because the main reason people search on Google Maps is to get directions and visit a business.

If you want to avoid listing your physical address, you can choose to configure your business as a service area business. You will still need to provide the physical address from which you operate, but your address won’t be shown in search. If this is what you choose to do, keep the cities in which you operate within 50-100 miles from the business physical address that you provided. It is unrealistic to claim that your service area covers a radius larger than 100 miles.

You will also want to describe your services in detail and begin asking past sellers for review – we will talk about this a bit more later).

A few words of advice:

• Use your actual operating business name or LLC name – not something spammy like “We Buy Houses Phoenix – Sell Your House Fast Phoenix – XYZ Buyers”.
• If you are using a DBA (doing business as name) make sure that you first register it with your state. This will prevent someone else from using it within the same state.
• Set up actual service hours if you show your address.
• Be prepared to jump through some hoops to get verified. It is absolutely worth it!

Step 3: Local Citations

Building all basic local citations is best handled by paying a service to do this for you. We recommend doing this after you have verified your business, because it is imperative that your name, address, and telephone number match all your citations and your Google Business Profile. This is vitally important to boosting your local search rankings.

If you are our client, we handle this on your behalf. You can also do this yourself with SKIPPER. You can do this during the 7-day SKIPPER trial, but please keep in mind that there is an additional cost for submitting the citations. You can also use a service like Moz Local.

Step 4: Research

Analytics setup – check! Event tracking – check! Google Business Profile – set up and verified! Nice! Before you start working on getting things optimized, you need to start with keyword phrase research.

Whether you are wholesaling houses or flipping homes or mobile homes, there is no better place to start your keyword research than our Hyper-Localized Keyword Generator. Enter your market city and market state, select if you are buying houses or mobile homes and in a few minutes you will receive a list of keywords that includes every variation of relevant keywords, localized to specific cities within a 200-mile radius from your market city.

Our Hyper-Localized Keyword Generator answers these three questions:

• [Keywords List] What phrases motivated sellers in your area are actually typing in to look for solutions you can provide (vs. ones that are tire-kickers or looking for a Realtor, not selling for cash)
• [Monthly Search Volume] Of those local search phrases, how many searches/month does each get, and which should be the primary phrases you target and go after.
• [Keyword Difficulty] Which phrases you can get competitive with in local search, that may be unique to your geographical area (market city).
• [Keyword Gap Analysis] This is a bit more advanced, but with SKIPPER snooping on your competitors and outranking them for keywords they are already ranking for becomes easier.

Another great tool you can start using for free to continue your research is our keyword phrase research tool in SKIPPER. During the 7-day trial we offer for new customers, you can research and identify keywords that are within your reach for ranking. The tool also offers search intent to help you target the specific type of content to create with the keywords you identify.

SKIPPER provides a complete workflow for competitor analysis, content creation, and PPC campaign management offering complete tooling for all of your real estate SEO needs.

If you want to get even more analysis done, with free tools, for your real estate investing keywords research, you can get started with Moz’s Keyword Explorer or the keywords volume checker by Semrush.

After you have identified 2-3 primary keywords and 5-10 supporting keywords with high relevance to your primary keyword, you will need to add them to a keywords tracking tool. This is built into SKIPPER, but you can use any other tool of your choice. This will help you measure where your site is ranking for these keywords when you start your SEO work, and you can keep track of your progress.

Step 5: Content Creation

Once you have finalized your keyword research, have a list of keywords for which you want to rank, and have set up tracking for those keywords, it is time to sit down and get some copywriting for your site done. Do not neglect to include long tail keywords in your list.

These are keywords like “sell my house fast Houston”. As the name implies, they are longer phrases which generally have a lower search volume, but are less competitive and it is therefore easier to rank for them. This is especially true when you pair them with a geo location by adding your target area in the keyword – Houston in this example.

On your home page and any landing page, make sure that you include a clear and deliberate call to action. On your pages where you are prompting the visitor to become a lead, a call to action above the fold (visible without having to scroll down) can significantly increase the results you see from your real estate SEO efforts and provide a significant boost to the number of SEO leads. Any web page that lacks a call to action usually focuses on the overall credibility of your business. And while important to your overall marketing strategy, it doesn’t hold merit the same targeted approach as pages you want to rank in organic search results.

The one exception to that may be the reviews web page. We recommend that a dedicated Reviews page is prominently featured in your web design’s navigation menu. It is what we consider a core page (one that must exist) and must be a central piece of your content creation strategy. It supports your reputation management and strengthens your overall digital marketing efforts.

The Reviews page will still need a call to action, but that can come after the fold. The primary goal of the Reviews page is to enhance your credibility and show that you are a seasoned, expert professional, who genuinely wants to and knows how to help their target market.

Determine which Pages Should Rank for What Terms

This step is very important. It is unrealistic, and counterproductive, to try to rank every page for every keyword. Search doesn’t work like that. Your site needs to be organized with a logical structure and you need to decide which page to optimize for which term. This approach will avoid keyword cannibalization. This occurs when multiple pages on your site compete against each other for search ranking diminishing the ranking power of both pages. You should focus your energy on ourtanking your competitors – not competing against yourself.

Focus on one main keyword per page and one, maximum of two, supporting long tail keywords.

Create the Actual Content

Now that you have a plan for the structure of how the pages you want to rank are mapped, it is time to start writing your actual content.

The Content Editor in SKIPPER is perfect for this, but you can use any platform you choose. SKIPPER can help you research the content from top search results for the keywords for which you are trying to optimize and provide you with suggested terms to use in your content to help it rank.

If you have access to pre-written content, such as the Content Library from Carrot (something you likely won’t have if you built your site with a website builder or on vanilla WordPress), you still need to modify the content of any article you post – or throw out the stock content entirely and write from the ground up.

While pre-written content, or content written with AI may sound good, if the content already exists on the Internet, and provides no new insights or angles, there is simply no reason for Google or any other search provider to rank it.

You must modify any stock article you use, with at least 30% to 50% unique content to have a chance to rank for it. If you simply schedule the automated content, without modification, there is almost zero chance that any of those pieces of content will rank.

A Word of Caution on Artificial Intelligence (AI) Content

Google has announced that they are not strictly against using AI to help write content. However, you must use caution.

The nature of large language models (LLMs) that artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT and Claude provide are based on predicting the next chunk of characters that is most likely to come after the previous set of characters for it to make logical sense.

This is an extreme simplification, but serves to illustrate the point. AI does not create content. It simply finds a neat way to rearrange content it already knows about. With the exception of hallucinations – a phenomenon where an LLM makes some fact up that isn’t true – LLMs are not (yet?) capable of original thought.

Because of this, AI content does not produce content that adds something new of value that isn’t covered by content somewhere else. This is why it is necessary for you to read through the content and add a unique perspective or provide a more well-rounded and more comprehensive article than what your competitors have published.

The Content Editor in SKIPPER is designed to give you the best of both worlds – the power to create content quickly with AI and the power to stack it against your competitors and create better content than what they have.

Step 6: On-Site Optimization

In a nutshell, on-site means exactly what you may have thought – everything that is on your site. There is no excuse for skipping this work, because all of it is within the control of whoever is managing the work. If you are doing SEO yourself or have it outsourced, on-site optimizations are essential for search engine indexing.

Some examples of what this entails are keyword density, H1, H2, and H3 title (heading) tags, image alt tags, internal and external links, and more. We recommend using tools like the Content Editor in SKIPPER to help power your content creation strategy. The Content editor will help keep your content strategy top of mind and help you develop content that checks off on-site optimization items and is worthy of showing up in organic search results.

The Content Editor incorporates artificial intelligence to provide suggestions for metadata and inserting relevance terms within your content. It can also help suggest url links to internal content to improve the internal linking structure of your website and help Google and other engines understand how your content connects together.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO can be daunting at first, but it is really not all that scary with the right tools. This part of the process is not the most glamorous and it can be tedious. Technical SEO involves making sure that your pages have a valid HTML structure, your url structure makes sense and represents how your content is organized, you have properly formatted xml sitemaps and metadata, a working robots.txt file, descriptive alt tags for every image, among other things. Making sure that your site is secured with an SSL certificate and every resource served through HTTPS and not HTTP is another important factor.

If you try to manage all of this manually, it will take far too long and be far too expensive. The good news is that not every item on the list has the same effect on your website and therefore you can prioritize certain things over others.

There are plenty of tools available on the market that will let you perform an audit to see what improvements you can make. We may, of course, be a bit partial, but SKIPPER’s Audit tools are phenomenal when it comes to catching issues with broken links, malformed sitemaps, missing alt tags on images and more. If your website is on Carrot, most of technical stuff required is handled by the platform, which makes it a lot easier to manage your web page quality and provide a great user experience to drive hier rankings.

Having a sound strategy and tooling for building a quality website ultimately gets you better real estate SEO and a higher number of SEO leads.

Aside from these, mostly behind the scenes fixes, creating a mobile device-friendly website is a must for all websites, because improving user experience counts. Google measures the user experience and the usability of a website, and uses those metrics when determining rank.

At RETookit, we understand the importance of on-site SEO and we handle the on-site SEO process for our seo services clients.

Step 7: Off-Site Optimization

In contrast to on-site, off-site optimization generally lies outside of the direct control of the website owner. These are factors that Google considers as “signals”, alongside your content, about the Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) of your website.

Like we mentioned before, Google uses over 200 of these signals and even with the leaked documentation on how their algorithm works, no single person or company has the entire picture. And while it is impossible to turn real estate investors reading this article into SEOs in 8,000 words, we will focus on the two major signals – reviews and link building.

These are core building blocks to real estate SEO success and one aspect of our multifaceted digital marketing strategy for our SEO services clients. The REToolkit team handles this with a 100% off-hands approach for our clients so they can focus on closing more deals and growing their real estate business.

Step 8: Review Building

Increasing the number of Google Business Profile (GBP) reviews you have is the first off-site signal you need to focus on. While getting reviews on Yelp, or Facebook can be useful and Google is taking note of them, by far the best use of your time is to get reviews on Google.

The best way to do this is to find your “leave a review” link and send it to past clients. Treat this process with the same importance and follow up on any lead. Have a strategy in place for follow up and make sure that you include the url to where they can leave a review in every communication. People have a lot going on, so make it easy for them. Gathering reviews is imperative to building credibility and needs to be a central element of your digital marketing.

Obtaining reviews for your GBP is central to your reputation management and your success with local SEO.

Ask for Reviews Link and QR Code

An easy way to find the url to leave a review is to search for your business on Google and click Ask for Reviews. In the pop-up that opens, copy the Review link.

On the same screen of the pop-up that opens, you will also find a QR code. Save that to your phone and have it with you at every closing.

The best way to get more reviews is to ask the seller to do them right after you have finished closing. They will never be more accessible to you than when they are at the closing table and there is a good chance they are very happy with you at that moment.

The goal isn’t to get 30 reviews in one day – that will be suspicious. The goal of getting into the habit of asking for reviews is to build a consistent and sustainable stream of an increasing number of reviews over time. Steady stream of reviews signal that your business is still active and that you are helping motivated sellers have a great seller experience.

Responding to Reviews

Review responses are mandatory. It is all about taking control of your business’s public-facing content and reputation management. Responding to all reviews – both positive and negative – gives your business a voice in what sometimes feels like a one-way street.

Responding to reviews can also lead to increased number of reviews and overall better review ratings. According to a study published in Harvard Business Review, ~33% of the businesses in the study increased their rounded rating by half a star or more within six months of their first managed response.

For a complete guide, check out this widewail guide to handling Google reviews.

If you are still reading, it will probably come as no surprise to you that at REToolkit we handle all aspects of local SEO for our real estate SEO services clients. We believe in a fully-comprehensive approach to SEO services and given the value of responding to reviews, we feel it is critical that we include it in our suite of services.

Video Testimonials

One of the most powerful ways to build trust is through video testimonials. As with getting a Google Review, the best time to ask sellers to do a video testimonial is at the closing table. Gathering video testimonials is a very powerful marketing strategy and can significantly enhance conversion rates, which makes your real estate SEO efforts even more effective.

This doesn’t have to be a big, elaborate production. You can record it with your phone. In fact, the less produced it feels, the more genuine and believable it will sound. Every time you buy a property from a motivated seller, you should try to get a video review from them.

Start with asking them to do a Google Review and once they have done that, appeal to them to spread the word that you can help and ask them for the video testimonial.

To make this process as simple and as quick as possible for you and them, have three questions prepared that you ask them to answer.

Here are some example questions:

• What made you choose [company] to help with your real estate situation?
• How was your experience working with [company] during the sale process?
• Would you recommend [company] to others?

These are simple, effective, open-ended questions that are easy to answer and leave the seller with the freedom to provide a response that is at least one sentence, but can be longer if they have more to say.

Once you have that footage, you can format it and cut it so that you don’t ask the questions in the video, but rather display the questions as an overlay, while the seller is answering them.

To go a step further, make sure that you record the video in landscape mode, with enough margin on the side to be able to turn it into a vertical, and a square video. Adding closed captioning will enhance user experience on social media. Most users watch videos from their social feed with the sound off, so adding closed captioning is a must.

Step 9: Link Building

I wish I could tell you that there was a fast, easy, inexpensive, and effective method to link building. The truth of the matter is that link building is slower and more expensive today than it has ever been. The value of a backlink is relevant to the reputation of the referring website. And earning quality backlinks is getting harder. As more and more publications and blogs become more reputable, the time it takes to reach them and provide a guest post or other form of content that will entice them to link to your website becomes more and more of a daunting task.

The competition on social media for the attention of your target market is getting more intense every day. With the help of AI, content is being pushed out faster than ever! I am not saying you should not try better social media strategies. But at some point, the juice is not worth the squeeze.

There is, however, some good news. There are businesses entirely built around helping businesses build backlinks. They have vast networks of publishers and partners who you can use to outsource the entire process.

We leverage several of these providers for our clients and we have had great results at reducing the effort on our team trying to manually reach out to bloggers and focus more on the things we are really good at.

Press Releases

Publishing a press release is another valuable strategy of link building. The links are usually nofollow, so you won’t get as much value from them as dofollow links, but the higher value of a press release comes from the trustworthiness boost you gain from being featured in a major publication.

If you need help building links or sending out a press release, reach out to our team and we can help you build a custom strategy and a plan to outsource the process.

FAQs

More in Maryland