Optimizing Your Page for Real Estate Leads

I have used a number of them in getting my REALTOR lead system into the top listing on Google. One of the techniques that I have had some success in recently is creating squeeze pages for specific search terms. A queeze page simply being a landing site designed to generate leads that is optimized for a specific search term. To provide a basic example, let's say hypothetically that youwork in Orem Utah and specialize in executive homes. To date your website has not shown up under the search term “executive homes orem” or “orem realtor executive homes” but through your research you know that those terms are often searched and meet your target demographic. How you would develop and use a squeeze page would be as follows:

• Register for the url of your given search terms. When registering these URL’s use the specific term that you are targeting. As a side note, I have found more success in not including hyphens, but instead having the word run together in the URL; i.e www.realtorexecutive. com instead of www.realtor-executive.com.
  

• When creating the actual landing page, you have a number of choices. If you are versed in HTML, Adobe Dreamweaver and Microsoft Front Page are good toolsl. If HTML is foreign to you, then there is a quick site development tool called XSite Pro that makes creating a keyword optimized site extremely easy with no programming involved. When you develop a squeeze page, create multiple sub pages. Generally the site needs to be more than a single page to get any attention from Google.

• There are a few basic rules that you should consider following when developing your page. The first is that for google, multiple pages with good keyword content typically ranks better. The second is that a privacy policy is smiled upon by both your visitors and your search engines. The third is that you want the visitor to take action within seconds of hitting your landing page so have a strong call to action. Fourth, if your squeeze page is requesting contact information, keep the amount of information that you request limited, and offer value for that information. All too often I see REALTORS who have six or more qualifying questions on their lead generation pages. In order to optimize your leads, capture just name, email and possibly phone. You can qualify the lead at a later date and the more information you request up front, the fewer leads you will receive. The fifth and final rule is that you want to control your visitor’s experience. For these pages, you want to limit the visitor’s behavior to submitting their information, or learning a little bit more about the offer before submitting their information. Choices equal confusion which results in hesitation and inactivity. Create your squeeze page so that you have two or three good pages that are optimized to your target search term. Include your lead generating offer on each of the pages and be sure to include a privacy policy. Where applicable, also link to your home page so that your prospect can get back to your site. This may sound like a lot of work, but if you do this part correctly, you will likely get much more traffic at a lower cost than trying to PPC advertise for your target search term.

Once you have built your site, upload it to the web and start getting backlinks to it. It is important to know up front that backlinks directly impact the page rank of your site, and that they will be necessary to get to that first page for your given search term. Fortunately, creating the backlinks yourself are pretty easy. First and foremost, create a link to your new site from your blog. Also, it would behoove you to create a blogger blog using the same URL (executivehomesorem.blogspot.com for example) and post a link to the new squeeze page from that blog. (Pleasse note that if you create the blog, you will need to post content to it as well.) Post a link to your page from your ActiveRain account, any HubPages or Squidoo lenses that you may have. Essentially post a link on any real estate related site that you can. Remember that each additional link to the site improves the possibility that it will show up on the first page of google.

Now, as a real world example, I have been spending time trying to get traffic to my wife’s business, Bloomen Nutrition and have used this technique over the past few weeks for the terms “while pregnant”, “chewable prenatal vitamin”, and “what to expect when expecting.” She owns a prenatal nutrition company and I have been focusing my talents on getting her up and running instead of focusing on real estate. Regardless, here is the example. If you google those terms what you will find is that chewable prenatal vitamin results in www.chewableprenatalvitamin.com showing up halfway down the page. For the term while pregnant, the site still needs a few backlinks because the whilepregnant.net site is showing up as the 19^th link on page two of google, and I just completed the site for what to expect when expecting, so we will see where http://whattoexpectwhenexpecting.net/ ends up.

Appear Multiple Times on the First Page of Google

Google  “Expired Listing Leads,”  Half of the page  references me through  4MySales, Barrett Niehus, or through my relationship with the RedX Expired Listing Lead Service and its associated savings.  Getting this type of rank can be a good amount of work, but it can also help you attract many many clients.  So what is exactly do you need to do to dominate the first page of google to maximize your web traffic? 

The approach simple, and just requires you to realize that you need to have relatively big presence online, with a keword-narrow focus.  What does that mean?  It’s simple really.  I have lectured for a while that in order to be a successful Realtor you need to serve a niche and create a value proposition that differentiates you from your competition.  That sentiment is reflected online, but with some SEO specific caveats.   

So what are the steps to get your links listed on the first or ten results on google for a specific search word go back to you?  It all starts with picking the right search words.  Depending on the group and cities that you want to target, start creating a list of keywords that you feel that your clients will be searching for.  With this list, use a keyword tool (I actually prefer the Adwords keyword manager for Google) and take a look at the relative number of searches that your target keywords get per month.  

After choosing your keyword, optimize your website for that word.  I won’t go into details on site optimization, but be sure to update your meta tags, description and the keyword frequency in the body copy of your site. 

The next step is much more critical.  Start increasing your online footprint to feature that keyword and link back to your site.  Start a blog on blogger and choose that keyword as the URL (for some reason hyphens aren’t currently searching as well as run-on words so choose URL’s such as realtorleads.blogspot.com  as opposed to realtor-leads.blogspot.com.)  Post a few keyword-rich articles to that blog and add links back to your home page on the blog-roll. Add other links to your blog roll as well, but if possible add nofollow tags to those links as they do affect the pagerank of the blog.  If you have a similar topic with a related keyword, you may choose to two or three related blogs.  However, don’t overdo it as legitimately keeping these blogs up is a challenge and at certain levels it could be considered spam.  For me I have just two blogger sites dedicated to real estate, the most active dealing with viral marketing for REALTORS.  

After completing this work on blogger,  you may choose to do something similar with Wordpress.  The idea is to get five to ten quality blogs that you can legitimately maintain by posting just an entry per day.  After you have created your sites, be sure to ping them to the various blog search networks so that they get indexed promptly.

 

Next, turn to social networks and for each netword, choose a username that is your keyword.  Create your profile using keyword rich text, and use these pages as well as your blogs as selling opportunities.  People in the network will find you and connect with you, so put your best face forward.  Spend time getting to know the community and post information that will help the community grow.  

After creating your presence in the communities, spend some time on Squidoo and Hubpages creating lenses and pages that feature your keyword and link back to your site.  Once again, the idea is that when a person searches a specific phrase, multiple pages from different sites all linking to you show up.

 Once you have done all of the above, it is a matter of maintaining the content on all the sites (I allocate an hour a day for the prospecting expireds system.)  and adding content that serves your target search term.  

It is a fair amount of work, but the system does work.  My current project is Bloom’en Nutrition Prenatal Vitamin Chews.  I just started last week with the search term “prenatal vitamin chews” so there are only two entries on the first page of google that go back to Bloom’en Nutrition.