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The Simple Website Fix That’ll Transform Your Real Estate Business

Antonio Coleman
9 min read
The Simple Website Fix That’ll Transform Your Real Estate Business

No need to waste time this week on getting down to dominating our local real estate market. We all should understand now how important it is to start building that online presence in your local community to get those leads coming in from all sorts of marketing avenues. The only way to do that in my personal opinion is by setting up the foundation and then going out there in the market to dominate.

Last week I talked about the real estate marketing mistake that could be costing you millions over time. That costly mistake was not having a website set up to work for you day and night — so that you can spend time on more important things instead of answering phone calls, etc.

Today, I want to show you how to create a website that will have a chance to dominate any local real estate market. Your eventual website setup will be something so intuitive and brilliant that even Albert Einstein would be proud. Most everything I go over in this blog post will be simple, easy and straight-forward and will guide you to creating the most useful local real estate website in your city.

Notice that I said the “most useful” local real estate website in your city. I never said anything about the best-looking site, which is something that most people fall for. You see, the real estate people who get sold on buying pre-created websites are mostly taken advantage of by people who know little about the marketing side of real estate.

The Basics of a Great Website

Last week I jumped on the big brand real estate companies who give out these horrible websites to their agents and think that they are what supposedly works to close deals. Many don’t understand that those sites are extremely useless when it comes to educating leads about their buying and selling options.

Besides those, most people just go out and get websites set up from all sorts of places. Many of the places I search online have decent ways for you to set up your websites.

They will mostly include the things I find most important, such as:

  • Great Theme
  • Good Content
  • Nice Logo
  • Contact Information
  • Opt-in Box
  • Lead Magnet

You see, most websites you come across are created in this fashion. They are pretty much on point with how I create real estate websites for my clients. They have to include all of the bells and whistles to get the leads to opt in so that we can market and educate them on our services later.

But Wait! Something is Missing

What is missing is the element that hurts about 98% of people who have real estate websites. This little missing element is hurting your business completely when to comes to leads finding you locally and is likely the reason why your market isn’t in the palm of your hand.

In short, the missing element is the “Local SEO Marketing” factor. Many of you may be asking what this is, and why you haven’t been told about this factor when you first started your site.

Local seo marketing is when you go after a targeted local market centered around the keywords that we are trying to dominate. I talk about it in my earliest post about how to find 8,3,00 buyers and sellers in 10 minutes. What I was trying to do was find keywords that I could put into my website as pages in order to get them ranked locally so that I could reap the benefits of getting free traffic.

Related: 10 Killer Tips For Getting Unlimited Leads For Your Real Estate Business Through SEO

Below, you will see the research that I did and the possible keywords that I could be going after.

1,600 – Shreveport Real Estate

1,900 – homes for sale in Shreveport La

1,900 – apartments in Shreveport La

1,300 – houses for rent in Shreveport La

880 – homes for rent in Shreveport La

720 – Shreveport apartments

390 – rent houses in Shreveport La

As I continue to say, if you wish to dominant your local real estate market, you first need the foundation. The website is what will separate you from the rest of the pack, but not only that; it needs to be the right kind of website, which is what I’m looking to help you with today.

Again, local seo marketing is nothing more than creating content-targeted pages centered around your keywords. This can be in the form of blogs, articles, videos and local profiles. Just for today, we are only focusing on the basic website portion of getting your marketing right and ready to capture leads, all on auto pilot.

The Truth about Your Website

Most of the time, if you go out and get a website created by anyone who is not a specialized real estate marketing company, you risk falling into a big bowl of what I call monkey-see, monkey-do.

What I’m getting at is that over the last three or four years, I’ve been working closely with all sorts of people in the real estate industry. What I’ve noticed is that the ones who come to me to analyze their already-done websites are in big trouble.

Meaning, I’ve realized that nearly 95% of all real estate websites, besides the ones coming from the big brand guys (and you know them by name), have the same “SEO” formula going on with them. Now, I know that you might not know what I’m talking about, so let me explain this the best way that I can.

What I’m referring to is the pages on many of these sites that are highly generic. At this time, I’m not even going to talk about how most of them are only static websites that have no blogging platform on them. This is extremely sad, as this kind of site has been outdated since the early 2000’s. Also, those sites are really hard to rank in the search engines due to the fact that they often miss out on tools such as back-links, algorithms, updates and more. But this is something that I will dive deeper into in up-and-coming blog posts, where I will teach you all about how and why we rank in the search engines.

For now, let’s get back to why the websites that most of you have are not nearly as valuable as they could be. Here is what I’m seeing on a national level when it comes to sites that I’ve viewed through the lens of search engine ranking.

The Issues I’m Seeing With Real Estate Sites

“Home Page Titles: Sell Your House Fast in 48 Hrs”

“About Us Page Titles: About Us”

“Contact Page Titles: Contact Us”

This is what I’m seeing when I view a number of websites that people are using to gain leads in real estate. In fact, most pages on the site are pretty much as general as these main pages. So you may be looking at this and saying to yourself, what is the big issue with this website?

Realize that if you want to dominate your local market, you must target your website around that local market. I’m going after the Shreveport, La market, so how in the world those very general titles bring my site up on local search engines when someone searches for “Shreveport real estate” or “Houses for rent in Shreveport”?

These titles are nowhere near optimized for my local market. Heck, we haven’t said anything about the content on the page (that likely doesn’t include any keywords either). In other words, there is no way that I’m going to be able to get any local real estate leads from sites like these.

Related: Stop Paying Useless SEO Companies to Promote Your Website!

If you have a website that’s not in the local SEO marketing format, then we have to get that corrected before you’ll be able to dominate your local real estate market. This is just the basis of getting ready to take over your local market. It’s not the complete formula to getting ranked; however, it’s a preliminary step on the path to success.

So take a moment and look at your website titles — and see if they are optimized for your local real estate market. If not, then we have lots of work to do to get your site to rank whatsoever on search engines.

This Leads Me to the “Why”

Let’s take a look at how and why sites are created like this that are mainly useless for the local market. Generally, they are fine for gathering leads from all over, so don’t worry about that. But they’re not of value in the community that you’re trying to dominate.

The most common reason these sites are created is that many real estate website companies want to pump out more generic sites for the end user. They don’t care too much about your local SEO marketing; they only care about you getting a website that gathers leads.

Their job is not to help you rank locally for that site — and to be honest, the sites are mainly the same templates they use for all of their clients. So all of them are the same no matter what market you’re trying to target. There is nothing wrong with this — I do this also with my clients. The key is to go a step further and optimize the entire site for any given location. Thus, the design may be the same, but the local SEO marketing is totally different.

However, I’m here to help you overcome that tragic mistake by briefly showing how your site needs to be set up to gather local leads — and how easy it is to do it. By doing it this way, we can position ourselves in front of thousands of potential — and LOCAL — leads each and every month.

The Albert Einstein of Websites

Your website must include all of the right settings and formats to become the leading real estate website in your local market. It doesn’t have to be the most attractive site on the web, so long as it has just the right qualities.

Most people get stuck in the mentality that the look of their site determines their popularity. Truth is, the search engines couldn’t care less about how your site looks; they only care about content, links, authority and online presence. If you can master all of these over the local competition, you will be in the driver’s seat of controlling the market.

First, before getting anywhere near that, we need to have a website that is equipped with the settings that will make the search engines happy and bring us some of those thousands of possible leads.

Now, I’m not going to go over getting a domain and hosting, as I believe most of you already know how to do that. You probably already have a website — you just need to tweak it.

Step 1

What I will do first is center everything around my homepage — and name that page something like this:

Antonio’s Properties LLC | We Buy and Sell Shreveport Real Estate

With this title I just told everyone my company name and decided to go after the highest-searched real estate term in my local market. Basically, I’m killing two birds with one stone by branding my company, and targeting those who may be searching for “Shreveport Real Estate.”

Plus, this title will represent all of the other pages on the website, such as the “About Us” and “Contact Us” pages.

Example:

About Us | Antonio’s Properties LLC | We Buy and Sell Shreveport Real Estate

Contact Us | Antonio’s Properties LLC | We Buy and Sell Shreveport Real Estate

Now, every page that you create will be centered around this format and should be targeted to the local market. This is something that 90% of the real estate websites in any given market are lacking.For this reason, they will mostly not get leads from the search engines due to misleading, non-specific titles.

Step 2

Next, I will take the other keywords I’m targeting and create a page for each one of those words.

Why? The reason again is to build up a website that targets my whole entire market, so no leads will slip pass my fingers. Those other page titles will look something like this to you (and the search engines):

Homes for Sale in Shreveport La | Antonio’s Properties LLC | We Buy and Sell Shreveport Real Estate

Apartments in Shreveport La | Antonio’s Properties LLC | We Buy and Sell Shreveport Real Estate

Houses for Rent in Shreveport La | Antonio’s Properties LLC | We Buy and Sell Shreveport Real Estate

Homes for Rent in Shreveport La | Antonio’s Properties LLC | We Buy and Sell Shreveport Real Estate

These are the base pages that will be on my website; I will go over some more next week. But just understand that your pages need to be optimized just like these if you plan on building any online presence.

If your website is not in this format centered around your targeted keyword, then make this week your mission on getting this done.

Believe me, this is not all when it comes to fully optimizing your website pages for SEO purposes. But for this week, I think that this is enough to get you started on making the right changes and implementing these into your new real estate website.

Next week, I will go over not only the other pages, but also how you need to write your content to make the search engines happy. Remember: the search engines are easy to please if you know how to get on their good side. The way that you do that is by producing highly quality content that people will love to read and share.

Does your site target your local keywords? If not, will you be implementing this method into your site soon?

Don’t leave without joining in on the discussion below!

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