Think-Realty-Magazine-November-December-2016

THE BIG PICTURE

LEAD GENERATION

Leading Question A WELL-DESIGNED, WELL-MANAGED WEBSITE IS THE KEY TO GETTING MORE LEADS FROM ONLINE SEARCHERS.

professional social media accounts to your website, and vice versa. The more you can interlink yourself, the better. Get circulating. Remember to be mobile-friendly. The majority of internet users are using mobile devices for searches, so be useful to them as well. And always have an SEO strategy. Be searchable and accessible for your targeted clients. If your website has optimized all of these qualities, then your leads will be coming in no time. Get out there!

presence and being usable on all platforms. If you’ve noticed that your website might not be getting enough clicks, the answer probably leads back to one of those issues. However, another problem that people tend to face is not marketing themselves correct- ly. SEO is one of the biggest ways Google will determine if you’re searchable or not. Basically, the strategy behind SEO is to make sure the content on your website is relevant to what a potential lead is searching for. Take, for example, my house-buying website, Danny Buys Houses (www.danny- buyshouses.com). Because the area where I buy and sell houses is San Antonio, the home page of my website has to do with the city. In fact, the header of the website says, “We buy houses in San Antonio,” followed up by “Sell your house fast.” Those keywords are specific to what my clientele will be searching for. If a lead living in the San Antonio area is looking to sell a house quickly, the phrase that person will be most likely to search in Google is “sell house fast San Antonio” (or some- thing very similar to that). Because that’s my primary market, I have made sure to make my homepage as searchable as possi- ble for my targeted demographic. Aside from just being searchable, your website needs to be easy for potential leads to use. Return On Investments LLC, based in Michigan, is a good example of an easy interface for leads. In the site navigation, Return On Investments LLC has included a tab that redirects lead traffic straight to a simple online form for those people to fill out. The easier it is for a potential lead to use your site, the more leads you will generate. So, to answer the question, your website is generating leads for you as long as you optimize all of the things we’ve talked about. To start, if your website is brand new, it just hasn’t been indexed yet. Give that time. It will happen. To help your website be more searchable, build your web presence more. Link your

2. Mobile-Friendly Platform: Can People Find You on the Go? While web presence is essential, being mobile-friendly in today’s digital market is equally crucial. “Not surprisingly,” says Search Engine Watch in an article about mobile platforms, “67 percent of mobile users will leave a website if they become frustrated with the site’s navigation.” Having a website that is difficult to use on mobile devices will cost you 67 percent of your potential clients. And, sure, there’s the argument that most potential clients are searching for you more often on a desktop or laptop, but that school of thought is no longer correct. In 2015, comScore’s research on

by Danny Johnson

B

efore we can assess the question, “Why isn’t my real estate investor

searchable in Google. We’ll take a look at effective SEO later in this article. For now, let’s look at your web presence.

but not stuffed. While you do rank per keyword, keyword stuffing can cause your site to be penalized by Google, making Google either contact you to change it, or by not ranking your site well. However, you can avoid this by adding keywords to your website’s content at a 2 percent to 5 percent density rate. WordStream, an on- line advertising journal, suggests “instead of using the same keyword a hundred and one times, try using long-tail keyword variations ... in your content.” This strategy is particularly helpful in avoiding keyword stuffing while still adding important key- words to your content. Keywords are important in helping your clientele find you. You want to make sure your keywords are words or phrases that are frequently searched by your target demographic. For a real estate investor, that could include key- words or phrases such as: •  We buy houses [your city, your state] • Sell houses fast [your city] • Need to sell my house [your city] You will notice that [your city] has been appended to the phrases. This is be- cause it’s much easier to rank locally with these keywords than it is to rank nation- ally. If you were wanting to buy houses in Boston, it’s much easier to have your website show up when someone types, “I want to sell my house in Boston,” if your website is clearly targeting Boston.

website generating leads?” we have to de- termine a few things about your website. One of the most important things for any real estate investor to have is a website that covers all of your informa- tion—location, contact information, other online accounts, etc. But even more important than that, your website has to be accessible and searchable. Let’s say, for example, that you just published your first real estate investing website last night. You wake up this morning expecting to see leads flooding your inbox, but that isn’t the reality. It can’t be the reality, because your website hasn’t existed long enough to be indexed in Google yet. It will happen; you just need to be patient. However, while it is crucial for your website to appear near the top of someone’s search, you don’t have to be the No. 1 result. 1. Web Presence: Ranking at the Top Business 2 Community, an online business-building journal, conducted a case study and found that “while the top Google listing still gets about one-third of all clicks, the organic results earn- ing the second, third and fourth spot now receive the other 63 percent of the clicks, leaving only 4 percent of clicks to anything lower.” One of the key points of SEO (search engine optimization) that is overlooked by people just starting out is how important it is for your website to be

Don’t Have the Time For All of This? As a real estate investor, your time is best spent getting out there converting leads into deals. Hundreds of real estate investors use LeadPropeller for their websites because of the ability to set one up within minutes—no need to know how to code and no need to come up with what the website should say. We also provide managed pay-per-click and SEO services so that you don’t have to become an expert in all of these areas. Check out LeadPropeller.com or call us at 210-999- 5187 to discuss getting your web presence going and working for you. •

It’s Easier to Rank Locally Aside from just having a stunning, easily searchable website, you also need to have a presence online. Your web presence can range from professional social media accounts to a blog on your page that stays current. In fact, “companies that blog have 97 percent more inbound links,” HubSpot found in a 2015 annual marketing report, “[and] 92 percent of companies that blog multiple times per day have acquired new customers [as a result].” Being sure to post relevant updates and staying current with your clientele will not only direct traffic back to your site and ultimately your services, it will also help increase your presence online. Ranking can also depend highly on keyword usage. Keywords should be dispersed throughout your web content,

mobile usage produced results stating that by March of that year desktop-on- ly internet users were at 10.6 percent, while mobile-only Internet users were at 11.3 percent. Those results showed that the trend in platform usage was going to continue to grow in favor of mobile-only users. With that as the case, having 67 percent of your mobile users become so frus- trated they leave your website is costing you a lot of leads. 3. SEO and Marketing: The Work Behind the Scenes OK, so we’ve talked about giving your website time to get indexed, building a web

Danny Johnson is the founder of LeadPropeller and REImobile. He does a weekly podcast at FlippingJunkie. com. You can download his best-selling

book, “Flipping Houses Exposed: 34 Weeks in the Life of a Successful House Flipper,” for free at http://flippingjunkie.com/freebook.

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