How To Make Your Real Estate Leads and Google Fall In Love With Your Real Estate Website

I want to share with you a mistake that I see hundreds of real estate websites make. In fact, this mistake is probably costing you a lot of money that you would otherwise be able to collect from new clients. It is one of those mistakes that the search engine spiders from Google, Yahoo and Bing, look for on your website. What’s even worse is that your visitors look for this on your website as well and if they don’t see it, most of the time they’ll leave and go somewhere else. So what is that mistake? How can you fix it? How can you make your visitors and Google to fall in love with your website?

Before I tell you this mistake and how you avoid it, I will say this. The sad truth is that most real estate investors and agents will NEVER, and I mean NEVER correct this mistake. Why? There are several reasons. They don’t have time or it’s too much work or they don’t know how to do that or “the dog ate my homework” or pick a reason why 🙂

Just remember that the investors or agents who DO take action are going to be the ones who will be more successful; they’ll rank higher in search engines because the search engines will love their websites and they’ll drive more traffic and have more RAVING FANS as well.

Alright, enough about the reasons why you need to do it. What is that mistake and how can you fix it/avoid it?

The Lack of RELEVANT Content

That’s right! That’s all there is to it. I know what you are probably thinking right now: “What Peter, content? You’re crazy! I don’t have dozens or hundreds of articles and I get traffic to my site. I rank on search engines.”

That may be correct but hear me out . . .

Remember the Web 1.0 days? You put up a web page, stuff it with dozens of keywords and soon, you get tons of traffic to your website. Well, those days are way over. By the way, if you are still doing “keyword stuffing” on your website then stop it. Google WILL penalize you, that is if it hasn’t already.

Now we are in the web 2.0 world and moving towards the web 3.0. The competition is fierce. The search engines are smarter and having a simple website where you just tell people about your company, what you do, and how you can help them, and have about us and contact us pages is simply not enough.

There are billions of pages on the internet. Hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of pages that you have to compete with just in your real estate market.

People are using the search engines to solve their problems and the search engines HAVE to serve them with RELEVANT RESULTS that will answer their problems. Otherwise, they’ll go somewhere else. Believe me, Google watches their index very closely. If your page comes up in the search result and the person doesn’t click on it, Google will take that into account and push it down into lower rankings so there is room for a more relevant web page.

Also, if the searcher clicks on your site because the link was enticing enough to make them click on it, and after they land on the page they notice that it has nothing to do with what they’re looking for, they’ll leave immediately. That one action adds to what is called “the bounce rate“, Google notices that and lowers your rankings. Do you see what happens here?

Here’s the solution for making your visitors and search engines fall in love with your website

Provide them with a relevant content. For instance, let’s say that your website is targeting out of state owners. What is that out of state owner looking for? What are his problems? How can you solve them? Let’s see here. They might be looking for ways to sell their house or rent it out. Basically, they want to eliminate their headache.

Now, if you write some articles or create videos explaining how they can solve their problems, they’ll be more inclined to contact you and come back to your site again and again. Why? Because you are going to become the solution to their problem.

“But I’m not a Writer. I can’t do it.”

No problem. Here’s how you solve that problem. Before I give you the answers, I need to say this. Original content that you write or record on video is still the best kind of content. Search engines love original stuff and your visitors will get to know you better because your personality will come through your writing and your videos.

Your first solution if you can’t write yourself, is to hire a ghostwriter. You can have someone write all of the content for you for a very reasonable price ranging anywhere from $2-3 to $10-15 per article. There are several outsourcing websites you can use for that. One major problem is that most of these writers are not real estate industry people and they’ll probably will not be as experienced as you would want them to be, so remember that.

Solution #2. Use someone else’s content on your website. I’m not talking about stealing content because that’s wrong and illegal. I’m talking about embedding great content into your website for people to read and watch. For instance, ezinearticles.com has thousands of articles on their website. You can legally take their content and embed it into your website, just make sure that you keep everything intact, including the resource box.

Or you can go to youtube.com or any other video sharing site, find a relevant video and embed that into your website. It’s very easy to do. The only problem is that people will know you didn’t write it and your authority factor is not going to be as strong. However, since you are still providing relevant info your visitors are looking for, they’ll come back to your website.

So, there you have it. In today’s internet world, relevant content is the king. It works, it helps you get more popular and get higher search engine rankings. If you don’t believe me than just ask Joshua Dorkin, the founder of BiggerPockets. 🙂

One last thing. If you are not convinced yet, then let me ask you a question. Why do you come back to BiggerPockets? I bet you it’s not because of the cool website design 🙂

Photo: claudio gennari

Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.