SEO for real estate investors can be a great source of leads – but it’s not a goose laying golden eggs.

SEO for real estate investors can be confusing – don’t lose your focus on what matters because you’re thinking too much about Google. This post will help guide you to the heart of your best marketing strategy.

Too many investors are approaching it from the wrong mindset. They’re treating SEO like a magic solution to their marketing problems, and that’s leading them to focus on the wrong things.

It’s making them Google-centric. They’re obsessed with Google, and ranking high for certain search terms. They’re forking over tons of money in PPC and raising the bid rates thru the roof in certain markets.

Basically, they’re competing with a whole bunch of other investors for a small amount of lead traffic, and it’s just getting worse.

Plus, it’s a pretty poor strategy for the long-term health of your business, and that’s most important.

Why is it bad to center your business around Google?

See, Google needs advertising revenues from you in order to make profits. PPC is where they make money. They don’t actually make money by delivering organic search results. Search drives traffic for Google, but do you know why people (sellers you want to reach, for example) use Google?

They’re looking to find something.

Customers searching on Google want to find an Expert Community Resource – someone who can help them solve the tough problem they’re faced with right now, give them guidance on where to go, get a cash offer, sell their house fast, find discount properties to buy, etc. Before they trust you, they need to see that you’re credible.

Real estate investors who are setting themselves up as Expert Community Resources are crushing their stuff… that’s what’s at the core of a market domination strategy. It’s not easy to set yourself up as an Expert Community Resource – it takes time and effort to build your reputation, create a powerful story, get your brand recognized, and become the real estate resource of choice in your community.

If you’re focusing your strategy on Google, you’ll never get there.

Listen, one big change in Google’s formula and your rankings might plummet. They can do whatever they want. Google made big changes on the last release that had lots of folks scrambling (not our customers, thankfully) to fix their traffic and leads.

You have to focus on your customers. Google is just one path to reach them. Our sites do a great job converting traffic from other websites too – Craigslist, Facebook, Yahoo, Bing, Yelp, Zillow, and YouTube are all used by our customers every day to build traffic to their sites.

You can reach your audience in all kinds of ways – heck, putting up $400 worth of bandit signs with your web site and phone number can be a great way to get really localized traffic for cheaper than a PPC campaign. You can probably find someone who can drop off flyers for you straight on the doors of ugly houses.

If you’re already doing those things, but you still aren’t getting leads… don’t look to Google to be the magic bullet solution to your problem.

Focus on your audience, not on the pathway to reach them.

Here’s a few critical questions to ask yourself (hint: if these questions are tough to answer, you’re not focusing hard enough on your customers):

– Who is most valuable for your business to reach?

For most real estate investors, it’s finding motivated sellers of discounted property – a.k.a. inventory. 

– What problem is your target audience trying to solve?

Sellers motivation depends on the situation – common highly motivated scenarios include pre-foreclosure, probate, divorce, tenant issues, deferred maintenance, market conditions, and more.

– How can you add value?

      As an Expert Community Resource, you’re providing education on possible solutions to your audience’s toughest problems. You must tell your target customers how you add value (they’ll never know otherwise).

– Where/when do you work?

You add huge value by focusing on becoming an expert on current market conditions, and helping your audience educate themselves by sharing what you’ve learned. Sharing ongoing information with your ideal customers is at the heart of any content marketing strategy… including SEO. Make your news local and timely in order to be relevant.

Just never, ever lose site of the purpose of your marketing: to build a relationship.

If you lose your focus on the relationship with the real person, you’ll start to think too much about conversion rates, costs per click, and the other metrics that we use to monitor results for our SEO customers. For sure, those things are important… they just shouldn’t be your core focus.

Don’t focus your business on Google. They’re just one pathway to reach people, not the only way.

Focus on being the #1 Expert Community Resource in your market by knowing more than anyone else, and educating your target audience with ways that your business can solve their problems – that’s the path to market domination.

If you’re just getting started out with your internet marketing, sign up for an awesome set of websites here and get started… but that’s just the beginning. The real value is in putting the strategy behind these sites to use.

Content marketing is very powerful stuff, and we’re only getting started… we can’t wait to show you what we’ve got in coming up for the future.