Writing content for your lead generating website is how you will attract more leads. It’s as close as you can get to free probate real estate investing. What I have learned is to be specific with what you are writing about. General content, written to be a catch all, just doesn’t work. Pick a niche, and then niche it down even further.
This post is part of a 5 post series were I break down how I would target Probates, Foreclosures, Tired Landords, Out-of-State Owners and Code Violations. I’ll take you through the brain storming, the research and even the keywords to use as topics. My SEO guy won’t like this because I’m pretty much giving away my keywords, but It’s all in the name of helping.
Be the Master of One, NOT the Knower of All
Attracting Motivated Probate Leads Online
What would an executor or a person inheriting a house be searching for?
Executors and beneficiary of a Last Will and Testimate will all have certain questions pertaining to any real estate involved in the probate process. I’ve said before that you don’t need to know the probate process to invest in this area. However, when it comes to coming up with content it really helps.
As a real estate investor you are interested in purchasing a property involved in an estate. With this in mind you’ll need to learn when and how a house can be sold. This information will give you great topics to write about. Can you sell real estate before the probate process is complete? What is the process for doing this?
When real estate is involved in the probate process there are typically 3 outcomes…
Outcome #1: The house will pass through the probate process and be inherited by one (or more) of the beneficiaries.
Outcome #2: The house will be sold during the probate process in order to pay off estate debt.
Outcome #3: The house will be sold during the probate process because either nobody wants it or their are multiple beneficiaries. The result is they split the proceeds.
What ever the executor decides to do, you can be sure they will have questions. Your job is to figure out these questions and write a great article that answers them. Hopefully with this article I can help you put together some great content that will rank high and bring in leads.
Looking to learn more about your local probate laws? Free resource page
What Questions do Executors/Beneficiaries Typically have?
Here is where the serious thinking starts. Put yourself in the shoes of an executor or a person inline to inherit a house. If you know someone who has gone through this, bend their ear. If not, it’s also good to have a fresh perspective. You will have many of the same questions as your target market does about the Probate process.
Below is my brain storming. I broke up the topics in to 4 different types of questions. This will help group the articles when I’m done writing as well as which articles I will interlink.
General questions about Real Estate involved in a Probated Estate…
What if there is no will?
What can I expect during the probate process?
Do I need insurance for vacant house?
What happens if there is an Existing Mortgage?
Does real estate always need to be probated?
What happens when their is a surviving spouse?
What must an executor due with real estate during the probate process?
What will happen with any liens on the property?
What happens to the house’s content?
Questions when selling real estate during the probate process…
Will the proceeds pay off debt in an estate?
What to do with a Reverse Mortgage on house?
What are the Estate Taxes?
What are the Federal Taxes?
What are the State Taxes?
Questions someone who has inherited a property might have…
Will there be any Capital Gains Tax?
What is the Step-Up provision?
Can’t afford to pay taxes on house, now what?
The property title is not clear, is this a problem?
I live too far away to maintain the house, what is the minimum that needs to be done?
The house is collecting Code violations, how can I stop them?
House is in terrible condition, do I need to fix it up?
Inheritance taxes..how much is it and can I avoid it?
Questions about real estate when multiple beneficiaries are involved…
House was inherited by multiple people, is selling the best option?
Siblings can’t decide what to do with the house and we are all fighting…no what?
These 26 article topics are a great starting point for how to find probate leads online. What I’d do next is to schedule them out in some sort of editorial calender. Then tackle them one at a time. Every time you come up with new questions, come back to your master list and write them down. I’d do this ASAP because you are likely to forget the topic. Trust me, I can’t tell you how many times I thought there was no way I’d forget a topic…and I did.
Keyword research for these problems
Writing a probate article that answers some glaring question is great, congrats for getting that far. However your work isn’t done. To optimize the exposure and traffic to that article you need to make sure you use the words people are searching with. These words are called Keywords.
The best way to find these keywords is to use a free tool from Google….The Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Catchy name I know!
It’s a very simple process and should really only take you 10 to 15 minutes. It’s really a no brainer. This is one of those Most Bang For Your Buck type of tasks. Here is a quick Google Adwords Keyword Tool tutorial that I recorded while researching keywords for Probate Estate Taxes…
A couple of guidelines that I use when picking out keywords…
- Do it after writing the article. You never know direction the tone of the article will take until after you are done. Then you can go through and place the keywords in spots where they make sense and sound natural.
- Take Keywords that have the highest average monthly searches. Although the caveat is I usually don’t go over 2000 monthly searches because I find that those keywords are really hard to rank for. It’s not a hard rule, but just what i like to do.
- Choose a handful of long tail keywords and scatter them around in your article. Doing this will make things more natural sounding and also attract more searchers. Just pick one as your Main Keyword.
While I do my keyword searches I keep a look out for other article topic ideas. When I find a few good ones I add them to my list. If there are keywords being searched for a lot then you can be certain it’s a good article to write.
It’s your potential leads telling you what they want to know.
In the video tutorial above I searched for keywords related to Probate Estate Taxes in my target market. The keywords that I chose are the following…
- capital gains tax on real estate
- federal inheritance tax
- how much is inheritance tax
- inheritance tax federal
- inheritance taxes
- tax on inheritance
- taxes on inheritance
Where to Use These Keywords in your Articles?
There are strategic places you should place these keywords. Google is always changing the way they calculate your page rank. Even if things do change these placements are still a good idea because they help emphasize the questions you are answering.
Title. The key here is to make it sound normal.
Slug. This is the last bit of your pages url after the slash…http://strugglingInvestor.com/<slug>
H2 Tag. A well organized article will have subheadings. Make these subheadings as Heading 2’s. Find a heading that you can use your main keyword in and added.
2 to 4 times in your article. Use a combination of your selected keyword throughout your article. I like to make sure I have it in there between 2 to 4 times. You can add in a few more if it’s natural, but don’t over due it.
When back linking from related articles. One of the most important SEO things you can do on your site is link between articles. Make sure to go to related articles on your site and link to your new article. Use your main keyword as the linking text.
Here’s a great resource on how to build an effective lead generating website – How To Build An Awesome Website For Lead Generation
Final Words
For some, the thought of writing 25+ articles about real estate in probate seems like a lot of work just to get some probate leads online…and it is. I actually hired someone to do the content writing for me. I provide the article topics/headlines though. So basically I did all the above things and then emailed off the topics to be written about. When I get the articles back I insert the keywords and back links.
As Google gets smarter with their algorithms for ranking websites, it’s getting more important to write good content and keep your sites active. You should be at least doing what I outlined above, but for sure there is much more. Like publishing some of your articles to third party sites, creating citations with all the business listing services, etc…
What are some of your strategies to attract probate leads to your website?
Resources
Related Articles on Struggling Investor.
- How I Write Articles that Attract Motivate Seller Leads
- How I got a Probate Deal Without Doing Any Direct Mail Marketing
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