Author: Brendan Holmes

One question a lot of people have when they’re starting or thinking about doing SEO as a way to generate leads for your business is they think, “Well, how long is this going to take?”

Once I launch my website and I start performing the tasks or someone starts doing it for me, is this a week? Is it four weeks? Is it a year? What’s the timeline?”

In this quick post, we’re gonna walk you through, with real-world examples, what you can expect as far as the timeline for search engine optimization to take hold when you’re implementing things that we teach in this training.

How Long Does It Take to See SEO Results?

SEO for real estate investors can be a long-term play, and I’m not gonna lie. If you’re in a more competitive market, as we’ll show, you’re not gonna get ranked in the top three in Google for a very competitive phrase like, “well my house fast” or, “we buy houses,” or, “investment properties in … ” you get the idea. It won’t happen within a matter of days or weeks.

You really have to have a short-term traffic plan to be able to drive traffic to your websites with AdWords, Facebook, or Craigslist marketing using our Craigslist training, in the short-term.

If You’re Already a Carrot Member, Check Out These Premium Training Courses:

Posts2Profits Craigslist Training
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Long-Term SEO for Real Estate Investors Strategy

Over the long-term, especially if you’re in a larger city, you’ll want to really focus on building that SEO because when SEO takes hold, it is insanely worth it. So how long it’ll take to rank well on Google, and by ranking well, what I’m talking about is the top three positions for the right keywords? A lot of people say, “Hey, what will get me ranked on page one on Google?”

And really, page one doesn’t really matter a whole lot. It’s really the top five positions, in particular, the top three positions are where you’re really gonna get consistent traffic and leads. That’s what we’re aiming for is the top three positions, one of the first three spots in the organic search result for sellers, buyers, tenants, whatever you’re looking for.

But it depends on things like the competition in your market. So the more investors or the more agents that have websites that are going for the same keywords, obviously the harder it’s gonna be to rank there.

But I want to put your mind at ease that every single market in the country can be overtaken by someone setting up their website today. We’ve had people in every single, and many of the biggest markets in the country.

The Future of SEO for Real Estate and 5 Signs you’re Under-prepared

Either they went and set up a fresh website or have had one there for years and years, but they implemented the things in this training. They leveraged our system and they were able to outrank their competition over a period of time.

It depends on how well your on-page is optimized, how well that content is optimized for those exact keywords. If you’re wanting to rank well for investment properties in Las Vegas but you don’t have the keyword phrase optimized on your page using our SEO tool for that, then it’s gonna be really hard to rank for that.

Also, how well your off-page optimization is done. Are you building some backlinks? Are you doing some social media stuff where you’re getting people to Facebook like or Google Business your page? It doesn’t have to be a lot. You don’t need many backlinks and you don’t need a lot of social media activity in many markets to rank very, very well.

If you just bought your domain recently and just launched a website, you’re definitely gonna have to build Google’s trust in your website, over the next several weeks, next several months.

Then Google will start to notice that you’re going to be around here for a while. So we’re hoping that as you implement the things we’re teaching you, your ranking will continue to increase and then once you lock-in the top three positions for search phrases that matter, your leads should start to go up.

Here are some real-life examples. Here’s one in the Houston market.

This is arguably one of the most, if not the most competitive market in the entire country for motivated sellers online. This particular Carrot customer retained a search engine optimization vendor in our marketplace to do the SEO for them because they didn’t have the time to do the SEO.

It took about 10 months. It took 10 months to go from page 3 or page 4 where they started for, “We buy houses Houston and Sell house fast Houston.”  Now, they’re at the number one position. So if you were to go to Google and type up, “We buy houses Houston,” they’re in the number one position. Google does kinda change their mood, so every now and then it’ll bump back down, it’ll bump back up, but it’s been holding there for quite a while.

[cta offer=”seobible”]

They stayed at the number seven and number five position, they bounced between those positions for literally, probably, three to five months.  This screenshot here is a timeline over about six or seven months of what it took to get them ranked high.

As you can see, it stayed there steady, steady, steady, really wasn’t moving. It actually took a dip down when Google made an update. Google was kind of readjusting things, and it jumped back up and it’s been settling in at number one ever since then. For them, it took 10 to 12 months to really, in one of the most competitive markets in the country, hiring an SEO team to do it, and they’re crushing it.

So how they got there, they had a domain that they brought to Carrot. They had already been aged a bit. So they had already bought that domain.

Are you Sabotaging your Real Estate Website’s Rankings With These 3 Black Hat SEO No-no’s?

They’d owned it for years before they ever came to Carrot and they had already had a website on that domain before. So they had already done some things that kinda gave them a jump start.

They had a few backlinks and they had their citations or their business directories already on there. And then just bringing that over to Carrot really put on the afterburners. That’s what took it from page three, page four on Google to rising up in the rankings pretty darn high in the most competitive market in the country.

I thought it was gonna take longer than the 10 to 12 months that it took. It took 10 months. Honestly, I thought it was gonna take well over a year but because they already had the domain purchased and they had some other backlinks and some citations already built, it made it happen quicker.

Here’s another one in the Baltimore market.

Again, very, very competitive market. It took them four to five months to rank on page one for phrases like, “We buy houses Baltimore and Sell house fast Baltimore.” Then it took them another four to five months of working this training, building some backlinks, getting some citation going, some social media action, to get to the number one result. The person who had held the number one result before was literally there for three or four years.

Learn how David Brown leveraged the Carrot real estate investor websites to generate his motivated house seller leads and get more traffic.

This Carrot member came into a market with a fresh website, brand new domain name, and within eight to nine months, they overtook that number one position, started to get really, really consistent leads and deals and ended up closing over 20 deals within the next 12 months after that. 100% from SEO, netted almost $100,000. They were very, very low-profit margin deals but they closed a lot of them.

Here’s how they did it. This customer-focused on the on-page. They really focused on making sure that the content on the page that we provided was unique to them. They used our SEO tool and then quickly shifted gears to building quality backlinks and social media boosts through our training. You can see, it took a while. It bumped up, it bumped back down, then all of a sudden, bam. It bumped up and it’s stayed there ever since.

The Birmingham, Alabama market is a pretty decently competitive market. This person hired the SEO firm to do it as well, through our marketplace. It’s a really competitive seller search phrases like, “Sell my house fast and we buy houses Birmingham.” It took about four months to get to the number two to number three position in Google with a fresh domain name. Then another couple of months, they hit the number one for several of the top search phrases.

8 Easy-to-overlook PPC and SEO Ideas That Will Skyrocket your Real Estate Investor Marketing ROI

So how did they do it? They hired our team to do the SEO, and all we’re doing is implementing exactly what we teach. We started off with just further tweaking the on-page factors. We tweaked up their content a little bit more so it was more different than any of the other Carrot members in their market.

You want to make sure your content does stand out.

We added some more high-quality content, some blog posts and changed some of our pages a little bit, and then added some specific information for Birmingham.

We also built a few backlinks and citations and that’s it. Literally, there are less than 5 or 10 backlinks pointing to this website. We did build the citations, which, if you don’t have the time to do that following our training, we can do it for you and that’s all that we did. So very minimal stuff.

It was mainly just focusing on making sure the content was tweaked to them. They had testimonials on there, built some blog posts in there, and then we built a few backlinks and citation, and it crushes it.

Here’s another one in California.

They focus on medium-sized cities within California, Fresno, Bakersfield, things like that. They also tweaked their own content so it was unique from any other Carrot member in California.

It took them a few hours to do, so it was all a very good investment of their time. They added in specific information for their city. So they created city-specific landing pages, which we teach in our training, and we also teach in our Carrot Coaching Calls.

He built a few backlinks and about three months later they’re sitting on page one. Then after another two to three months, they’re in the top three, and a month or two after that to level-off in the number one position for their main keywords in several cities around the state of California.

Riding the SEO Roller Coaster

You might see your website slowly, slowly rise, bumped up, bumped down a little bit, and kinda steady stayed up. Or, you might see a slight decrease in your rankings at a period of time, just hold tight. Don’t worry about it. Sit there for two or three weeks and see what happens. Often times, it’ll bump back up.

Here’s another real-life example on the flip side of this.

Those ones I mentioned before were all in pretty competitive markets. The most competitive ones took 10 to 12 months of good SEO work, actively having someone do the work for them. The kind of medium cities took four to six months to do some good work, then they did the implementation or had someone do it for them.

See here, this is in Detroit, another competitive market, but he focused on different keywords. He focused on keywords that weren’t the main keywords, and he literally had his web pages ranked on page one and in the top of page one within two weeks of launching his website. Here’s an email that Dennis sent. He said,

“Trevor, holy crap. Got my first lead from my metro Detroit home buyer site and I haven’t done much, if any, customization yet. A person on the West Coast with several properties here to sell. Very cool.” – Dennis Fassett

So it can happen very quickly.

Here’s my general guideline: if you’re in a small market or you’re going after a small market, and I’m talking a population under 100,000 people, you can legitimately get your web pages ranked on page one within 2 to 12 weeks and often times in the top five in Google, on cities with populations under 100,000, within 2 to 12 weeks.

As an example, we’re working with a client here in Oregon right now and we literally just launched their website last month, did the customizations that we teach here, we added some city-specific pages, used the SEO tool to make sure that they are optimized for that phrase.

Within three weeks, they were on page one.

Now, he’s ranking number one or number two for a couple of the phrases in some of the cities and the top five for others. I expect those ranking to climb. The reason that it happened so fast is that it was smaller cities, and the content on each one of those individual city-specific pages was tweaked and customized a little bit.

This isn’t just launching a website and sitting there. This is someone working the SEO, doing the things in the Carrot training and allowing two to six months to get onto page one in the top five or so.

In large markets, a population of a million-plus, we’re talking six-plus months to get onto page one. Sometimes, you might have a miracle and have it happen quicker.

If you have already brought some domain juice with you, if you’ve owned the domain for a while, if you already have some backlinks pointing toward it, if you already have some social media activity pointing toward it, that’s gonna help you accelerate the process.

But if you bought a domain brand new and you’re in a large market and someone’s actively doing the SEO for you that we teach in here, it’s going to take six or more months to get onto page one in the top five.

It can really vary, so even if you’re in a very large city, even if you’re in Houston or if you’re in New York or LA, it can really vary in how long it takes. So if you’re going to go after a broad term like, “Investment properties in Chicago,” that’s a pretty broad term where that’s more competitive.

There’s a lot of people going after that, it’s gonna take longer to rank for that than what’s called a long-tail keyword phrase that has four or more full words in it. “Fixer-upper investment properties in North Chicago,” that phrase, even though it’s still in Chicago, it’s a longer phrase, it’s more targeted. There’s gonna be less competition. It’s gonna be easier to rank for that, a lot easier.

SEO in Different Market Sizes

Here’s a general guideline. Smaller markets under 100,000, if you’re going after strong keywords, 2 to 12 weeks to get onto page one if you’re doing the right actions.

Medium markets, population 250,000 to 1 million, 2 to 6 months if you’re doing the actions to get those rankings.

Larger markets, six-plus months to get onto page one if you’re doing those rankings. And then from there, it can take several months longer potentially, depending on your market, to get into that top two or three positions if you’re doing the right actions in here.

SEO for Real Estate Investors: ROI

The ROI on SEO is huge if you do it right. So even if you’re in a competitive market and you’re going, “You know what? I don’t have six or seven or eight months to get the leads coming in,” what you do is you go to our other trainings and you get some paperclipping going.

You get some YouTube video marketing going, which is going to rank very quickly if you do them right, within weeks, even in competitive markets potentially. You get some Craigslist marketing going. Get that stuff going in the short-term.

In the long-term, if you’re in a competitive market, you or have someone work on the SEO for you. This is that first example that I showed you where it took about 10 to 12 months. I emailed him … This was several months ago at that time and they did four deals that month alone. Got bid out on a few, sat down, started building up some more city-specific pages, so they’re working it by splitting out city-specific pages and getting articles written up. They closed four deals and netted well over $30,000 that one month. The next month, they closed deals again.

So the long-term ROI, being patient, especially if you’re in a competitive market and the implementing or hiring someone to implement for you, is gonna be a big, big deal. Be patient and you’ll get the results.

[cta offer=”seobible”]

Did you launch your website within the last 6 weeks and your website isn’t showing up anywhere on the first few pages of Google yet? Are you not quite sure how Google really works? Then this post is for you.

We get this question all of the time… “I have had my website up and I can’t find it in Google yet”… in this video we’ll walk through how search engine’s like Google work, how search engines find websites, and how they rank your website in the search results.

Understanding how search engines like Google work is essential for real estate professionals who want their websites to rank higher in search results and generate consistent leads through organic traffic.

Key Takeaways

• Google finds websites by “crawling” through links on the internet, which is why getting links to your site from other sources is critical for being discovered and indexed.
• Being indexed by Google (appearing in their database) is just the first step; ranking high for specific keywords requires ongoing optimization and quality content relevant to those search terms.
• SEO isn’t a quick marketing solution like PPC, but it offers superior long-term ROI if you’re willing to invest the time in building quality backlinks, creating relevant content, and following best practices.

By understanding the basics of how search engines crawl, index, and rank websites, real estate professionals can develop effective strategies to climb the search rankings over time, generating increasingly valuable organic leads for their business.

Table of Contents

1. Did You Launch Your Site Within The Last 6 Weeks and It’s Not Showing Up In Google?
2. Not Ranked On The First Few Pages Of Google For Your Ideal Keywords?
3. How Search Engines Work
4. How Relevant is Your Website?
5. Need More Online Leads For Your Wholesaling / House Flipping Business?

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Did You Launch Your Site Within The Last 6 Weeks and It’s Not Showing Up In Google?

If so, this video below is for you. The video is from Module 1 of 6 in our premium 3 Lead Per Day Training where we’re diving into the basics of SEO for those new to SEO. So we decided to yank this video from the course (just $99 for 40+ amazing training videos on PPC, SEO, and YouTube marketing) so it can be a resource for anyone.

Basically, go through the steps I show in the video to check and see if your website is being indexed by Google first… if it is, then your work to climb the SEO rankings has begun! If it isn’t, follow the steps in the video to let Google know your website exists by doing a quick Google + posting that tells people about your new site and links to it and find some other ways to get a link to your new website online so Google can find the link and spider your website.

We also suggest setting up a free Google Webmaster Tools account and submitting your sitemap to Google so it can make it that much easier for Google to always know when you have new content posted on your website.

Give it a few days or a week and do the test above, again, on your real estate website and if it still isn’t showing up on the first few pages of Google for your company name and location, then it may not be indexed yet. But odds are, unless you have some penalties on your domain name from building spammy backlinks, you just need to give it a bit more time.

Not Ranked On The First Few Pages Of Google For Your Ideal Keywords?

Now, being indexed in Google (i.e. – Google has your site saved in their database) and ranking high for the specific keywords you want to go after are two completely different things. If you show up using the test above but not for the keywords you’re looking to rank for… now it’s time to “optimize” your website for the specific keywords you want to rank for.

You can use some of the FREE resources we’ve already created to help you get your website ranked higher in Google. Or, if you’re an Carrot member you can dive into the advanced 3LPD training program ($99 and only available for Carrot members) and it’ll walk you through step by step how to increase your ranking and beat out your competition.

Some free SEO resources for real estate investors and agents to get you started on your climb to the top of the rankings:

• On-Page SEO: 12 Key Steps to Optimize Your Real Estate Investor Web Pages 
• Want Fast SEO Results? You Rush It You Ruin It
• 4 Parts Of SEO: How To Achieve High Rankings In Google (video training)

Those will get you rolling and always feel free to hit us with questions over here on the blog! Or if you’re a Carrot member, reach out to us on our next weekly Carrot Mastermind call.

If you plan on getting your website ranked high in Google to ramp up your leads over time with SEO you should also really understand the basics of how search engines like Google work.

That way as you’re working through the steps, you better understand it.

How Search Engines Work

So, if you’re wanting to dig in and learn a bit more about how Google navigates sites by crawling the web… this section is going to be perfect for you. Overall, ranking results are calculated using over 200 factors which sounds intimidating… but if you understand how Google works and how to play by its rules… it makes ranking your real estate investing website in Google a heck of a lot easier and more fun.

Carrot helps you focus on a few factors that have the most power to help you rank where sellers, buyers, tenants, private lenders, etc. are searching online. This short video is one of the “Module 1” videos in our 3 Lead Per Day training. So if you’re newer to SEO and ranking websites in Google, this will be a great bit of foundational knowledge to soak up. If you’re experienced in SEO… then go ahead and skip this video.

A Brief “How Google Works” Run Through…

The text below is from the video above, so if you learn better by reading, dive into the content below to learn how Google works. If you already watched the video, great! You can skip this section and get to work on your real estate website and get it climbing in the SEO rankings.

So how do search engines actually work? In this module, it is going to walk you through the basics of how search engines work…from the time you put in the search in there to what they are doing in the background to determine how to rank them.

So, first of all just to reiterate the basics here, if you’re newer to SEO what we are talking about here is the things in the Google search or Yahoo or Bing search that show up in the main section of the search results. At the top of the section that’s ads, you can see the ads are indicated with those little orange ad tags. And on the right side, those are ads as well.

So how does Google determine what shows up in that main section which is called the organic search results section?

First of all, let’s understand search. Here’s a graph that we pulled directly from Google. Kinda talks about how Google goes out there and crawls different websites. So, Google navigates the web by crawling from website to website. That means that they follow links from page to page.

So, if you have a website up there and you have a link on one page that leads to another, Google’s robots are crawling through all of those links trying to visit every page they can possibly make it to on the web. And, they have these big huge massive servers that are continually, around the clock, crawling the web. And, the cool thing, is the website, owners can choose whether your website is crawled or not. If your website is not crawled, if we do not allow Google to see your website, then it doesn’t show up in the search results.

Of course, by default Carrot members websites are not set to be hidden from Google. They are set to be crawled and we make it to where it makes it easier to be crawled by Google. Which is a good thing.

So one way that Google finds your website and the pages on your website is by going through links on other web pages that link to your site.

As an example, if you made a post on your Google + account that links to a page on your site, Google will find that and go through that link and land on your site… and magically now Google knows about that page and it’s in their index. Pretty cool, eh?

And then Google begins sorting the pages along the way by the page content and hundreds of other factors.

As Google spiders the web, they’re saving all of this data. They know what this page is about, what links that point to the page, and what it feels is the authority and relevance of that page to what you just searched.

This is why so SEOs spend so much time building, earning and winning backlinks. If you want to get started on this, check out our guide on how to use HARO to get backlinks.

Then they rank those results so someone goes online and they type in a phrase, it could be… “sell my house fast in Baltimore” or it could even be “local plumbers”. Google then determines that based on all of the web pages that they’ve crawled and saved in their database according to 200+ factors where your web page should fall in the rankings.

How Relevant is Your Website?

And they’re really looking at relevance. They’re looking at how relevant is your web page or your website to that exact search that person just made.

And, the way that they determine the relevance, is the website quality of the content, or how relevant it is to that search phrase. We also want to make sure we have those keywords that we’re going after in the content.  We also want to make that our website has fresh and unique content so Google sees it as relevant.

source: Neil Patel “Advanced SEO“

Basically, the Google bots are continually scouring the internet and “spidering” through links on pages to find other pages and other websites, then it determines what the page is about, it’s authority, and where it should fall in the rankings compared to the millions of other websites all in a matter of nanoseconds.

Pretty amazing stuff.

With that said, don’t let any of that scare you. It’s very easy to get on page 2 in Google just by following basic things we teach here on this blog.

Then to climb onto page 1 and the top of page 1… you’ll want to focus on building some quality backlinks, having robust solid content on your website that is relevant to the keyword phrases you want to rank for… and you need time. SEO isn’t a fast marketing solution like PPC.

It can take months and months to even get on page 1 with a solid SEO plan. But the ROI over the long-term is why we LOVE SEO so much around here :-)

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Watch: SEO for Real Estate: Introduction to Search Engine Optimization or check out Carrot’s SEO for Real Estate playlist.