In my new found quest to figure out how to get real estate leads off the web, I went a little commando at work the other day and listened to an SEO webinar on my sell phone using the GotoMeeting app. Besides draining my cell phone battery, it worked out great. Trevor Mauch hosted the webinar f
or the people who purchased his InvestorCarrot website packages. I learned a few things I didn’t know and that will definitely help me as I move forward. Knowing the basics…cold…is always important in my opinion.
The Two Things I Learned From The Webinar
1. When using the Google Keyword Tool, “Local Results” actually actually refers to the number of monthly searches for a keyword (I.E. How to get real estate leads) with location qualifier attached. For example, How to get real estate leads in new jersey. I had previously thought the “Lo
cal Results” were related to how many searches where done in your geographical area (i.e. the united states).
2. Not having to use focus keywords on all of my pages. I was going through each and every page that was created and optimizing them for a specific keyword. I’m sure not a complete waste of time, but not really needed. The idea is that you optimize your main keyword “We Buy Houses” for your main/home page and then you select alternate keywords such as….
- Sell Your House Fast
- Cash for Houses
- Investment Properties
…to create subpages/posts designed to pull for them. If you try and optimize multiple pages on your site for the same keywords, those pages will fight each other for google rankings. That will actually hurt your rankings.
Learning the above information helped me understand how I need to setup my website to target multiple cities/areas I want to buy houses in. You basically setup a page for each area/city based off one of your keywords and then localize it by adding the city…
- Sell Your House Fast in Whippany
- Sell Your House Fast in Somerset
- Sell Your House Fast in Phillipsburg
After thinking about this strategy for a little bit, I had another question. I emailed Trevor the next day and he was nice enough to answer…
Q: If I make identical pages for each city/region i’m going after, with the only difference being the title and city that is mentioned on the page, won’t I be dinged by Google for duplicate content? The example website that you showed us had it setup this way and it seemed like the owner didn’t mind this, but I wonder if it could affect my page negatively. Heck, this might be me being things to much but worth a thought I think.
Trevor’s Answer
To answer your question on creating the multiple pages that are similar except for the city name… from everything I’ve experienced and from talking w/ a good friend of mine who runs an SEO company… we’re not seeing that affect SEO… because materially the content topic of the site is different because Google can recognize it’s a different city… hence, on a different topic.
As an example, a lot of our members don’t customize their content at all… #lazy. So the only difference between their homepage and another guys in another city who didn’t cust
Ideally should you try to make each page unique? Ya of course, but there’s only so many ways to say the same thing… where the only thing different from city page to city page is the city name… how many ways can you think to say “we’ll buy your house in [city]“? I think as long as you make the effort to add in some content custom to that city… maybe some names of neighborhoods… put in different pictures… I think you’ll be golden. That’s my opinion anyway.omize… is their company name, city name, phone number… that’s it. And we’re finding both rank on page 1 in Google searches.
Current Website Success
Just thought I’d give you an update on how may pages are doing. I’ve gotten my first lead from my site the other day, it turned out to be a tire kicker but still got a lead. I’ve also had 2 buyer leads fill out the form as well. Not big success, but proof that it’s working.
My seller site (sellyournjhouse.com) is currently on the 3rd or 4th page of Google for a few keywords (we buy houses New jersey, we buy new jersey houses, etc…) so that is not bad, but could be better.
My Company site (ScottyBuys.com) isn’t showing anywhere except when I type in “Scotty Buys Houses”. I suspect this is a setup problem more then anything, or because I transferred the domain from another site to this one. Could just take a few months to recover, but I’m not sure.
My Buyer site I haven’t done anything for and is not on the first 10 pages for “New Jersey Investment Properties”, but I’m sure there is a good reason for that.