Category: Search Engine Optimization

It’s been about two months since we launched free SSL integration for Carrot customers. As of this article’s creation, 2,327 Carrot websites have made the switch from HTTP to HTTPS. And here’s what some of them are saying.

“Setting up SSL was so easy. I have been waiting for this and I am glad you all implemented this in such a simple way!” — Lamar Cannon from Lamar Buys Houses

“Although a boring update for most, I’m glad to see this added. Also, bravo on the execution. Easy to use, and rolling it into existing offering was way to go versus having us mess with renewals and certificates. Appreciate the hard work and continued improvement!” — Tyler Weinrich from Tyler Buys Houses

“Thank you! Implementing SSL properly can be difficult and I’m impressed by how easy you guys have made it on us users. Everything worked perfectly per the instructions.” — Jeffrey Miller from AE Home Group

We’ve seen lots of websites increase in ranking already (it could be a coincidence in the timing or a small part could be SSL… too soon to tell) and those clients are already seeing the other benefits of SSL.

But we’ve heard from some members that after making their site SSL they experienced a drop in Google rankings… so we’ve created this post to address that concern and to walk you through things you can do if you experienced a drop… and to dive into the reasons a site could drop after adding SSL.

If you did, don’t worry — that dip is actually quite common and almost always temporary. Here’s what you need to know.

“Why did my Rankings Decrease after Integrating SSL?”

Unfortunately, it’s hard to know the exact reason(s) that your ranking fell.

It’s possible, for instance, that you noticed a dip in your rankings after integrating SSL and yet, the dip had nothing to do with the transition. From on-page SEO to SERP competition to backlinks, the world of SEO is complicated and discovering the reason for a sliding website isn’t a simple matter.

Still, it is possible that SSL made your website slide a bit. So now let’s deal with the follow-up question: “Why the heck would you recommend that I integrate SSL if it’s going to hurt my rankings?”

The answer to that question is this: because while SSL might dip your rankings in the short run, it will secure or even increase your rankings in the long run.

Here’s what Google has to say about this:

“Expect temporary fluctuation in site ranking during the move. With any significant change to a site, you may experience ranking fluctuations while Google recrawls and reindexes your site. As a general rule, a medium-sized website can take a few weeks for most pages to move in our index; larger sites can take longer. The speed at which Googlebot and our systems discover and process moved URLs largely depends on the number of URLs and your server speed. Submitting a sitemap can help make the discovery process quicker, and it’s fine to move your site in sections.”

In simpler terms, this means that if your decrease in rankings was caused by SSL integration (which it might not have been), then it will most likely be temporary until Google has a chance to index all of your new pages.

Think about it this way. When your website moves from HTTP to HTTPS, in Google’s eyes, all of those HTTPS pages of your website aren’t the same pages at the HTTP version, but duplicates. With SSL integration, then, all of those HTTP pages redirect to HTTPS pages. And Google takes time to register and index all of those redirects.

Here’s what Rand Fishkin, the founder of Moz, has to say in one forum:

“You can see many folks chimed in (both on G+ and on Twitter) noting that they’d had similar experiences. HTTPS is like any other redirection – it takes time for Google to pick up and count all the redirects, and in the meantime, you can lose rankings/traffic. We found that it all came back within ~3 months.”

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Said another way, a slight and temporary dip in rankings after SSL integration isn’t out of the ordinary.

How to Speed Up Google’s Re-indexing Process

Still, there are a few things you can do to speed up the recovery process and help Google re-index your website faster than they might on their own.

1. Update your Google Search Console URL – Since Google sees your HTTPS pages as a new domain, you should definitely take a minute to go change your URL in the Google Search Console. You can learn how to do that here.
2. Change old backlinks to the new HTTPS URL — If your backlinks profile is weak, you could lose up to 10% of the “link juice” from a given backlink because of the redirect from HTTP to HTTPS.  If your backlink profile was weak, this alone could be enough to see a dip in rankings. After the change, most backlinks will point to your HTTP pages, but, ideally, you want them to point to your new HTTPS pages. For obvious reasons, fixing those backlinks can be a tedious process. Do what you can here, but don’t sweat it if you can’t get some of them changed.
3. Build new backlinks these next 2 months to your HTTPS URL — You’ll get the most SEO benefit from backlinks that point to your SSL certified URL, so make sure that any backlinks you get in the future have HTTPS in the URL (just copy and paste the URL from your website).
4. Point internal links toward the HTTPS URL — Similar to what you’re doing with old backlinks, make sure that all of your internal links between pages point to HTTPS versions of the page rather than HTTP versions.

Ultimately, SSL integration is a big positive over the long term, but don’t be surprised if you see a slight decrease in your rankings over the next couple months. In the meantime, take the above four actions and Google should correct itself — eventually giving you back your original rankings and maybe even increasing your rankings.

Why Making the Change from HTTP to HTTPS is Still a Good Idea

For Carrot customers, we’ve made switching to SSL as easy as clicking a few buttons. You can learn exactly how to do it here.

Maybe you’re not convinced, though. Maybe you’re still wondering why you should make the change from HTTP to HTTPS. After all, your current website is pulling leads and driving traffic. Why rock the boat?

Well, there are a few reasons that we want to encourage you to add SSL to your website if you haven’t already — even if your website is already performing like you want it to.

First of all, websites that have SSL certification tend to rank better than websites that don’t.

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This, of course, can take some time to actually have an impact on your rankings, but adding SSL to your website is a long-term play. It might not increase your SEO right away, but it prepares you for a future where search engines will increasingly favor HTTPS URLs.

In the words of Google, “We encourage you to adopt HTTPS in order to protect your users’ connections to your website, regardless of the content on the site.”

Google even uses SSL integration as a minor ranking signal when choosing which websites to list and which to leave unseen.

Of course, SEO isn’t the only benefit to SSL integration. The most obvious advantage is website security…

“SSL exists to make the connection between you and a website private. Without this, the data you send over the network could potentially be spied on by someone else on your network. This is something web visitors, your web browser, and even Google are looking for more and more and we wanted to get you ahead of the curve.” — Carrot’s CTO, Chris Carr

And even website load speed is a consideration…

“SSL creates a different type of connection on the web that allows for some new technology that can speed up page loading. Future proofing Carrot websites and allowing for more performance in the browser is always a win for us on the tech team. This equals less work, less expense, less hassle, and increased performance for you. Oh, and all of that means peace of mind.” — Carrot’s CTO, Chris Carr

In the end, the long-term benefits of SSL integration outweigh the possible short-term dip in your rankings. If you’re not a Carrot customer, then you might experience a decrease in your SEO after transitioning for one of these reasons:

1. You didn’t install the certificate properly.
2. You didn’t properly implement redirects to your new HTTPS pages.
3. You have canonical tags on HTTP page versions.
4. You’re using a bad SSL certificate.

Fortunately, if you’re a Carrot customer, you don’t have to worry about any of those things. We take care of all of that for you :-)

Conclusion

If you’ve integrated SSL and you’re loving it, awesome. :-)

If you’ve integrated SSL and you saw a dip in your rankings, take heart — this is normal and the dip should be temporary. Sometimes, Google just takes a bit of time to re-index your website. And you can do the four things mentioned in this article to speed that process up.

And if you haven’t integrated SSL on your website yet, then we recommend you do so. In the long run, it will help your website’s rankings, it will increase your security, and it will even make your website faster.

As always, though, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to leave a comment on this post or contact our world-class Customer Success team.

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You may know that Google uses about 200 factors when ranking a website. Some factors have been confirmed, others are speculative. We’re not going to dive into all 200, but we are going to focus on the most important real estate website SEO factors.

I’m going to break down the real estate SEO strategy into five main groups:

• Content
• Backlink Profile
• On-Page SEO
• Technical Factors
• Website Traffic & User Behavior

But first…

What Does SEO Mean In Real Estate?

Maybe you don’t know this, but SEO is not a real-estate specific term. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it refers to the act of trying to optimize your website to show up in search engines (like Google, Bing, and Yahoo) according to the algorithmic, semantic preferences of the targeted search engine.

SEO is usually achieved by including specific keywords on a web page that quickly tell search engines what the page is about, generating high-quality links to a specific page, using relevant anchor text, and producing consistent long-form pieces of content.

In the end, search engines want to deliver high-quality, relevant, and trust-worthy results to searchers. Now, I’m going to break down five things you need to consider for your own real estate website’s SEO — so that you can fall among the few who actually show up to searchers.

1. Content

We have all heard the phrase “content is king,” and as much as I dislike that phrase, it’s true. Content is still extremely relevant in 2018 and there seems to be a direct correlation between unique and relevant content and ranking well in Google.

That’s why Zach with Nexus Homebuyers consistently posts relevant content on his blog.

Not only does your content need to be both unique and relevant, it needs to be lengthy. An article’s length, or word count, provides the user with in-depth information and therefore appears more trustworthy. And the larger the search volume for your target keywords, the longer your content needs to be.

The exact ideal length of an article is debatable, but the research indicates a word count of at least 600 words for low search volume keywords (1-100) and 725 words for high volume keywords (10,000 plus) is workable.

If you want to find out which real estate SEO keywords to target and how much competition each keyword phrase has (without doing any of the work), you can download Carrot’s free SEO Keyword Bible for Agents or their SEO Keyword Bible for Investors. 

Additionally, Google is focusing more on keywords within your content as opposed to the title tag, H1 tag, and meta description. According to a searchmetric’s study, keyword inclusion in the title tag, H1 tag, and meta description is decreasing year over year, which indicates Google is giving more weight to how relevant your content is. There is a very strong correlation between the pages in position 1-6 and content relevance.

Two key takeaways:

1. Optimize your content length for the competitiveness of your target keyword phrase.
2. Create relevant and genuinely helpful content (not just content created for search engines).

4 Real Estate Content Marketing Strategies You Can Actually Use to Grow Your Business

2. Backlink Profile

For many years, backlinks were the foundation for a website’s rankings. A strong backlink profile used to be the main focus for real estate website SEO, but lately there has been a decline in backlink relevance.

Today, backlinks are important but they are also just one of the many contributing signals when ranking a website. Looking forward, I expect to see a continued decline in backlink relevance in the coming years.

Just because backlinks are declining in relevance, though, doesn’t mean you should ignore them. According to a study performed by SEMrush, there were 6 main factors of a backlink profile:

• Number of referring domains
• Number of follow-backlinks
• Number of backlinks
• Number of anchors
• Number of referring IPs
• Low keyword presence in the anchor text

Their study confirmed that the number of referring domains, follow-backlinks, backlinks, anchors, and referring IPs all had a direct impact on rankings. In other words, the greater the number of these factors, the higher the webpage ranked in the SERPs.

Also, note that spamming links to a web page is not an acceptable practice. Instead, create a natural link building profile using only white-hat link building techniques such as guest posting on relevant and high domain-authority blogs.

Keyword presence in the anchor text rarely occurs in web pages ranking in the top position. This is true in both high and low search volume keywords. Of all the backlink factors, this has the least effect on domain rankings. But, again, that doesn’t mean you should ignore it.

In fact, if you want the best chance of ranking in Google, then pay special attention to all six backlink factors — not just the pretty few.

How Many Backlinks Does it Take to Start Ranking Your Real Estate Website in Google?

3. Real Estate On-page SEO

In today’s age, keyword stuffing will no longer work to rank your site for a particular search phrase. Instead, the research shows that including your target keyword phrase in your main on-page elements such as your title, meta description, and body of the page does have a positive correlation to ranking your site.

The data shows that the top-ranking sites include their keywords in these items, but it is not a significant factor when ranking a site.

However, just because something is not a significant factor, does not mean you should ignore it. Google still uses your title, meta, and body to determine what the page is about, so you still need to include your main keyword in these items.

According to SearchMetrics, research has also been shown that it is more important to create content focused on your keyword as opposed to using your exact match keyword itself. Google evaluates content on its relevance, and not by the inclusion of individual keywords.

The bottom line, make your content relevant to your topic instead of keyword stuffing.

On-Page SEO: The 12 Key Steps To Optimize Your Real Estate Investor Web Pages

4. Technical Factors

If you are a Carrot member, then most of these real estate websites SEO technical pieces are already taken care of for you. If you’re not a Carrot member, though, these technical factors are something you will need to pay attention to. The technical factors that we are going to focus on are:

• Existing H1/H2
• HTTPS
• TLD Rankings
• Site Speed
• URL Length
• Mobile Responsiveness

Technical factors remain an extremely important prerequisite to ranking a webpage. Even if the content is extremely relevant to the user, it is very difficult to achieve a top ranking in Google if the page is not easily accessible, easy to read, and technically optimized.

Existing H1/H2

Year over year, the existence of an H1 and H2 code has risen for the top ranking pages. This may seem obvious, but if you’re not making use of H1 and H2 tags, you could be leaving a valuable advantage on the table.

Try your best to include your target keywords within these tags — but be careful not to ruin a compelling title for the sake of a keyword phrase.

HTTPS

HTTPS is growing year after year and this year is no different. With cyber security becoming a main focal point, encrypting your page will be a huge advantage.

Google has even stated that websites that have not switched to HTTPS will be marked as unsafe in Chrome. This will continue to push the web toward HTTPS encryption, and those who don’t adapt will fall down the SERP.

Fortunately for Carrot members, Carrot allows you to integrate SSL certification (or HTTPS encryption) on your website for free and with a single click.

TLD Rankings

TLD rankings, or Top-Level Domain rankings, focus on the most important component of a domain name. For example, in http://www.nexushomebuyers.com, the .com indicates the TLD.

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In the last couple of years, the presence of .com pages in Google’s top 20 rankings has increased significantly. According to SearchMetrics, this is attributed to the fact that Google tends to give more significance to .com TLDs, increasing their ranking.

This chart shows the most common TLDs in the Google Index:

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The bottom line, try to use a trusted TLD such as .com on your site if possible.

Site Speed

Site speed, not to be confused with page speed, is measured by “time to first byte,” which means how long it takes for your browser to receive the first byte of information from the web server. Site speed is important because a slow website will result in the search engines crawling less pages with their given crawl budget. This can negatively impact the indexing of your website’s pages.

Which is why Carrot does everything they possibly can to deliver speedy real estate investor websites and real estate agent websites to their clients.

Going along with a slow site speed, slower page speeds tend to have higher bounce rates and a lower average time-on-page. SEMrush has come out with a study stating that three out of the four highest factors for ranking a webpage are time-on-site, pages-per-session, and bounce rate. All of which can be negatively affected by a slow site and page speed.

Your webpage should also be mobile friendly and load faster than your desktop site.

How Page Speed Can Help Your Real Estate Website Rank Higher

URL Length

URL length has increased an average of 15% since last year and this is probably due to Google choosing specific landing pages for more relevant content as opposed to home pages. The big thing to take away from this is that almost all URLs in the top 20 rankings are under 60 characters in length. Make sure you are shortening your URLs as much as possible while still keeping your keyword phrase in the URL itself.

Mobile Friendliness

We can’t talk about technical factors without touching on mobile-friendly web pages. As our society continues to rely on our smartphones more and more, the importance of mobile-friendly websites increases.

Google has announced that it is switching to a mobile-first index which will mean it is no longer optional to have your website mobile-friendly. A mobile-first index means Google will create and rank its search listings based on the mobile version of the content, even for listings that are shown to desktop users.

This means that the consequence of having a site that does not perform well in mobile searches could also negatively affect desktop searches.

You can test your site for mobile friendliness here.

5. Website Traffic and User Behavior

As Google is shifting toward ranking sites that give the user a better overall experience higher, we are seeing a huge focus on user signals. These user signals are now considered one of, if not the most critical ranking factors for real estate investor websites and real estate agent websites alike. The user’s signals can be broken down into 5 main elements:

• Website Traffic
• Click-Through Rate (CTR)
• Bounce Rate
• Time-On-Site
• Pages-Per-Session

These signals are so important because they reflect a direct way to assess how relevant the content is to the user. Search engines can now draw conclusions about user satisfaction in regards to whether or not the search result was able to fulfill the searchers need. In essence, it helps Google show the most relevant pages for the user and improve overall user satisfaction.

Real Estate Marketing Guide: How to Drive Traffic, Generate Leads, and Land Deals

Website Traffic

According to SEMrush, direct website visits is the one of the most important factors when ranking a website. Since website traffic is a good indicator of how popular a domain is, Google seems to give priority to domains with more website traffic.

This also means you should focus on more than organic rankings. Since direct visits are driven by brand awareness, building a strong brand image should be an essential focus in your SEO strategy. You can see the result of SEMRush’s research on ranking factors below.

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Click-through Rate (CTR)

Click-through rate or CTR is the average percentage of users who click on a result at each position in the search engine rankings. The higher the CTR, the more users find that that particular website meets what they are searching for.

According to Search Metrics, the number one position received a 44% click-through rate, while the number 3 position received a 30% click-through rate on average. They consider CTR to have the strongest correlation of any other ranking factor to ranking high in Google.

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Bounce Rate

The bounce rate refers to the percentage of users that click on a URL in the SERPs and do not visit another page on the site before returning to Google. This can be deceiving, however, because once a user’s intentions are fulfilled, they can leave the page. So in and of itself, bounce rate is not a strong indicator of a page’s relevancy (unless time-on-page is also low, of course). As Google and other search engines continue to focus on providing relevant content to the user, the bounce rate may continue to go up as users find exactly what they are looking for on one page.

According to Google Analytics, the average bounce rate for the real estate industry hovers around 50%.

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Time On Site

The length of time a user spends on a site can indicate how well the site is serving the needs of the user. If the site is providing information to satisfy the user’s query, the time on site will be longer. This also needs to be taken with a grain of salt, because as Google’s algorithm gets better and provides users with more exact information, the average time on site will decrease.

Results that fall on the first page of Google for their target keywords see an average time-on-page of three minutes and ten seconds.

Pages Per Session

Pages per session shows how many pages a user goes through on a website during one session. This is a good indicator of how engaging your content is and how relevant your information is to your user. There is a direct correlation between ranking higher in Google and an increased page per session. On average, the pages per session for high-volume keywords runs from 3-3.5 pages.

Wrapping It Up

Whew….I know that was a lot, but that is an in-depth look at 5 of the most important ranking factors for a real estate website.

If you take only one thing from this article, understand that Google and other search engine providers are moving toward an increase in positive user experience. Users want the correct information without sorting through multiple web pages to find it.

As Google continues to provide more relevant information to users, you as a marketer and real estate entrepreneur need to continue to provide AMAZING content. If it isn’t amazing, don’t post it. Plain and simple.

What do you think is the most important SEO factor for ranking your website on Google?

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You might have launched your website, and you looked the next day, the next week, maybe even a little bit after that, and you’re like, “You know what? My website’s not anywhere on Google. It’s not ranking anywhere.” We tend to get that question a decent amount.

We get that question probably a time or two a week where a newer member launches their website and says, “Hey, why is my website not ranking on Google?” Our first question is, when did you launch your website? Is it something that’s a brand new website you just launched in the last month, or is it something that you launched a year ago?

Now, if you just launched your website within the last week or two or even the last month, part of the issue is that it’s so darn new. Depending on how competitive your market is, just like we mentioned in the previous training, depending on how competitive the market is, it can take longer to get up there in the rankings.

If you’re in a competitive market and you just launched the website, odds are you’re probably not going to be anywhere in the first three pages within that first month potentially if it’s a very competitive keyword phrase. Now, if it’s a less competitive keyword phrase, something that’s a long-tail keyword phrase like we mentioned before, of four or more words in the search, then you can definitely rank a lot more quickly.

We’ve literally seen websites launched and on page one within eight to 10 days of launching it. Being very intentional and going after keywords that weren’t very competitive in a smaller city.

Why Is My Website Not Ranking in Google Yet? What You Need to Do

If your website is not showing up on Google yet, what do you do? Here is a little bit of homework.

Number one, see if it’s just that your website’s not in anywhere, or if it’s going after a competitive keyword phrase you need to do some more work on. The first thing I would do. If you’ve launched your website within the last two to three weeks, don’t worry about it. It takes a little bit of time sometimes for Google to recognize your website.

If you haven’t done this yet, what you should do is go to Google and search your company name and then your city. What should come up if Google has indexed, is your website.

If you type in Quick Sell Buyers El Paso, you can see here their Carrot websites are popping up, and the reason it’s popping up is that it’s their exact company name, Quick Sell Buyers, then I put in their city in there. You want to make sure that the exact city that you’re in is in there. We can try to really narrow it down to see if Google has our website anywhere in their index file.

That’s all we’re trying to do here, is we’re trying to make it locate. Is our website in the index at all of Google. All that we mean by in the index is has Google looked at it and had Google saved it and said, “Okay, we found this website.”

If it’s not, what you need to do is go and open up your Google Business account. What I would do is hop in there and I would write a quick post saying, “Hey, guys and gals, check out my new website.” Then, I would put your website in there, with its full URL. Whatever your site is dot com. Then share it. Make sure it’s public.

Now, the reason we’re doing this is that, if your website has not been picked up by Google and you just recently launched it, we want to make sure Google recognizes it and this website is online.

We already built some things into InvestorCarrot that goes out there automatically and pings Google and pings some other things that will let them know when new content is created, but we can help it along.

We can help the process along oftentimes just by going to the social media places like Google Plus and posting our link to our website or our new blog post and getting Google to recognize that this page or this website or even this blog post is new and that they should go check it out.

Don’t Panic If Your Website Isn’t Showing Up Yet

Don’t fret if you’re asking yourself “why is my website not ranking in Google” or you’ve set up your website within the last few weeks and it’s not anywhere that you can find. Do the first thing and go to Google and type up the exact name of your company that you put on the website and then the city and/or state that you invest in. If your website pops up, awesome. Google has crawled and indexed it.

If it has not popped up yet, I would go to Google Plus or some other websites out there and post the link to that new website so Google recognizes that it’s there, and they can get it in their index.

Next, number two is to be patient. If your a Carrot member, go through the rest of our 3LeadPerDay modules and start to implement things. Go through and tweak your content. Go through the build some backlinks according to the way that we teach, and get those rankings to come up over time.

Do not fret if you just launched your website and it’s not showing up in the search rankings anytime soon. That’s a part of the process.

Learn More Beginner SEO Strategies for Real Estate on Our YouTube Page

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One question that we get a lot from Carrot members and people looking to use the internet to drive leads for their business is, “Does my real estate domain name really matter for search engine optimization?”

Even if they’re not looking at search engine optimization a lot of people have that question. You know, what should my domain be? Should I have my keywords in it? Should it be location-dependent?

That kind of thing.

In this post, we’ll go through some suggestions on when you’re thinking about buying your domain, what you can go through, and help you make the decision.

Guide to Choosing the Right Real Estate Domain Name

First, does your domain name matter for SEO?

Yes, it does. You want people to recognize your brand, your business, or what your real estate website is about. An SEO-optimized domain name is one that breaks through the search engine results clutter and becomes more likely to be clicked.

So you think about your branding and your keywords and how they can impact your search rankings.

Exact Match Domain Names

What an exact match domain is, is when you use the exact same words all in a row, all in one phrase, in your domain as the phrase you’re looking to rank in Google for.

For example, if you’re looking to rank well for Las Vegas foreclosure properties, and you own the domain LasVegasForeclosureProperties.com, which I do, and I actually had a domain ranked very well for LasVegasForeclosureProperties.com … Las Vegas foreclosure properties at one time.

After a 2012 Google update came out, that website, which was a very low-quality website, it didn’t have much content on it, was immediately banished from the search results because it was a low-quality website. It had the same keywords in the domain as the keywords I was looking to rank for.

Google’s stance, is an exact match domain, your exact keywords for the phrase that you’re looking to rank for, or in your domain, will not help you with SEO unless you have good quality content on your website. Good quality, unique content on your website.

How Do You Choose the Right Real Estate Domain Name?

How do you choose domain names? Well is the way that I choose domain names, and I own well over 100 domain names in the real estate market, I own some insanely great domain names like LasVegasForeclosureProperties.com, like some other really great ones.

If you’re thinking, “Hey, there’s not any good domain names anymore.” Every month, I buy some insanely great domain names just off this one website I use. There are some great domain names out there still.

The way that I like to choose domain names is rule number one, don’t overthink it. Don’t buy the domain name just for SEO, but if your keywords happen to be in the domain, awesome. That’s a kind of a bonus. Do not overthink it and don’t buy a domain just for SEO reasons.

Buy a domain that you like, buy a domain that kind of follows some of these criteria:

• It’s simple.
• It has as few letters as you can get in it.
• Try to avoid dashes.
• Include your location.
• Make it easy to remember.
• Use a .com or .net.

Simple and Limiting Your Letters

LasVegasDiscountForeclosurePropertiesForSale.com, or something like that, would be way, way too long. Las Vegas Foreclosure Properties isn’t too bad. That’s probably about the max amount of words that I would want in one of my own domains.

Make it simple, simple that someone can remember; at least when someone is reading it, it makes sense. Las Vegas Foreclosure Properties makes sense, but Foreclosure Properties Las Vegas might not make quite a as sense when you read it literally.

Just make sure it’s simple and has as few letters as possible.

Try to Avoid Dashes

A lot of people will have domains similar to Buy-My-House-Cincinnati.com. It’s not that you can’t have that, it’s not that Google is going to penalize you a bunch for it, but it’s just hard to read.

It’s kind of clunky if you’re putting it on a postcard, or putting it in some direct mail, or even on Google Ads. We want to make it to where it’s something that people visually can immediately see what that domain says.

When we put a bunch of dashes in it, it makes it harder for people. At the very most, if you had to have a dash in your domain, at the very most just have one dash. No more than one dash, preferably no dashes.

Use Your Location

Including your location can be good, but it’s not required. One of the biggest questions we get from people when they’re looking at getting their domain names, is they say, “Hey should I include my city in it? Should I include my keywords?

If I’m in a Duluth should I make it Sell House Fast Duluth, or Sell My House Fast Duluth?” That’s really up to you. We have a lot of members who use just their company name in there. We have a lot of members who use a generic phrase like that, that’s Sell Your House, and then their city.

It’s up to you on what you like. I’m not going to say that one or the other is going to help you with search engine optimization, just make sure that the one you choose makes sense, it’s as simple as it can be, and it has as few letters as you can make it.

Recall

Ideally, make it easy to remember. Like I said, going back to the Las Vegas Foreclosure Properties, that’s pretty easy to remember. Foreclosures In Las Vegas is a little bit tougher to remember because it’s got an S thereafter foreclosures and it’s got the word “in”, in there. It’s not something that someone is gonna immediately potentially remember. This isn’t a requirement but ideally, make it as easy as you can possibly make it memorable.

Just in case you branch out and do some other marketing. Let’s say you start postcard marketing or bandit signs, and you’re gonna include your URL or a billboard or radio ad. For those instances, people have to remember the domain. Try to find that one that could maybe grow with you, if you plan on doing offline marketing as well.

Go With .com First. If That Fails, Go With .net

Go with the “.com” as much as possible. A lot of people say that there’s not any good “.com’s” out there anymore. That’s not the case. I buy good ones every single month. Go with the “.com” as much as possible or the “.net”. I’m not a huge fan of the other ones. I’m not a huge fan of the “.co” or some of the other ones out there like that. Now the reason for that is, people are just trained to put “.com” in their domain names. That’s kind of the mental default.

If you have a website called BuymyhousefastAtlanta.net and someone sees the ad somewhere, they might remember the “Buy my house Atlanta” part but might put “.com” mentally because that’s what we’re trained to do.

If your competitor has the “.com”, you could be trickling off traffic to them and not even know it. Try to with a “.com” as much as possible, or if you’re gonna do a “.net”, do the “.net” as long as no one’s using the “.com” effectively.

Examples of the Type of Things You Could Look For…

Here are some examples of things you can look for. One great way to do it is to base it on your company name. If you have a company name, it’s decently easy to remember.

Go ahead and do that. As an example, the company name “Real Property Mavens.” That’s not bad. It’s got three words in it. It’s memorable; it’s easy, and it rolls off your tongue. That could be your domain for that, let’s say for your main company site.

That’s one way to do it, or you could base it on your keywords plus your location, as previously mentioned. PittsburghHouseBuyers.com, WeBuyBakerHouses.com, SellMyBakerHouseFast.com, iBuyBakerHouses.net.

Those are all good. They’re descriptive.

They tell the person what you do. Immediately seeing the domain, they can tell what service you provide, that it’s in their location, and that you can potentially buy their house. Those are good examples of domains that include your keywords and location.

You could just base it straight off on your keywords. If you’re going to invest in multiple different cities, let’s say… These examples are just for motivated sellers, but let’s say you’re doing it for cash buyers and note sellers.

The same concept plays here. You could base it off of your keywords alone or just your company name if you are planning on branching off into multiple locations with that same website. FastHouseOffers.com.

That’s a great domain name.

It doesn’t include a location, but it also doesn’t bind you to just one location. You could technically use that website for multiple different states, and multiple different cities, which is really cool. RapidHouseBuyers.net. The same thing; that’s just a good example.

Where Do I Buy Domains [IMPORTANT]?

You might be asking, “Where do I buy domains?” Well, there are a lot of places to buy domains out there, and they’re not all created equal. If you haven’t bought your domain yet for your Carrot website, please, please, please pay attention to this. Make sure you do this because this could save you a ton of time and money in the long run.

We have found that some of those domain providers are insanely unfriendly regarding what they let you do. Some of them actually require you to pay them an extra fee to even do some of the very simple, basic things that you need to be done to attach the domain to your Carrot website.

Do not buy a domain from a provider like this. Buy a domain from one of two sources. They’re the easiest, ones we’ve been using for years, and they’re the easiest to hook up your domain to Carrot.

• Replace “The first one we prefer is a company called NameCheap” with: “We recommend Hover. It has automatic DNS setup, and it’s fast.”
• Feel free to simply swap out GoDaddy or the other secondary domain registrars with Namecheap instead.

We recommend Hover as the first one. It has an automatic DNS setup and is fast.

We would earn a couple of cents if you purchased a domain through Hover. We are not referring you to this website because we earn an affiliate commission. Hover is easily integrated with Carrot websites.

We can earn an affiliate commission off of sending you to any website out for domains, including Namecheap or even GoDaddy. Both of these options make it easy to attach your domain with Carrot.

Can I Switch My Domain Later?

One question we get a lot from people on domain stuff is “Can you switch your domain later?” Let’s say you have a domain and you attach it to your Carrot website today or you have a non-InvestorCarrot website and you attach it to it. Then 6 months down the road or a year down the road you say, “You know what? I’d like to change this” or even right now, while you’re setting up the website, “You know what? I’ve got this domain here, I’m not sure if I want it long-term but for now, I’m just going to attach this one to it and I can change it later.”

Ideally, you stay with the same domain that you set up your website with, and you don’t change it. Technically speaking, yes, you could change your domain name anytime. Just know that whatever search rankings that you were able to earn up to that point, even if it wasn’t high rankings, even if it was page four or five, those are going to disappear.

Those are gonna disappear as soon as you change your domain. All of the backlinks that you may have built with that domain, all of the social media activity that you may have built with that domain, are gonna go with that domain. If you attach a fresh new domain to your website, it’s gonna be starting from scratch.

Just know that if you change your domain, you will start your search engine optimization efforts from scratch. Everything that you did before that is going to go with that previous domain.

Get Started Now!

Just get implementing! Do not get stuck choosing your domain. Do not get stuck sitting there, thinking that you’ve got to get it perfect. Come up with something catchy, good enough, and tied to your company, keywords, or whatever.

Go out there and get creative with searching for domains. If you’re looking for motivated sellers, phrases like “Sell House” and then location or “Sell My House” plus location or “Sell My House Fast” plus location. Location “House Buyers,” location “House Buyer,” that kind of thing. “House Buyers In” location. There are a lot of different variations of ways that you can really build great domains.

Reach out to us if you need help getting started. Do not get stuck on the domain choice. Longer than a day or two … If you’re taking weeks to pin down your domain choice, you’re taking too long and stunting your progress.

There is a lot that goes into search engine optimization, but in actuality, there’s only really a few things that will move the lever for you. The things that will be important and help you get results. That’s what we’re going to focus on in this post.

We’re trying to give you the action items and the understanding of how it works and what you need to do to actually get results.

Watch the Video or Read the Post Below

From a 10,000-foot Point of View, What’s the Most Important Part of SEO?

First of all, there are four main parts of SEO. This introduction is all about really getting your head around what SEO is, how it works if you really want to learn the craft of SEO.

SEO Ranking Factors for Real Estate #1: URL

First of all, you’ve got what’s called the URL factors. The URL is your domain name. That’s things like how long your domain name has been owned by you. How long the website’s been up online. Those are things that matter. The site structure of the website. Is the website set up correctly with your URL?

That’s something we’ve already built into Carrot. If you have a website outside of Carrot, that’s something you might be concerned about.

There’s a bunch of other things, like site structure, like I said, domain lifespan, search engine friendly URLs. All of that stuff except for domain lifespan is built into Carrot to make your life easier. As your website stays online longer, it ages, and Google likes it.

Here’s a screenshot of a website.

Klamathfallsapartments.net. That’s the URL. I have owned that domain for several years, and if I was to go up a different website that Google felt was very similar as far as optimized in content, and my URL was owned for let’s say 10 years, and this one was brand new, I would definitely get a boost and some sort of credit for having a domain that has been owned and up and online longer.

The longer that you own the domain, the more authority that Google will feel that your website potentially has.

That’s one factor to always keep in your mind. That if you just purchased a domain, and you’re just attaching it to a new website, you’re going up against other websites that have been around for longer. We can definitely accelerate the process of ranking well using what we’re going to teach you, but some part of the equation may be that your domain might just need to age a little bit to get that ranking up.

Be patient with some of the things. Make sure that you recognize that if you’re not seeing your ranking crack through and you’re doing everything else right, and your website is new, it may be domain age is part of it.

You want to keep a nice, simple URL structure. That’s a good thing. Complicated is a bad thing. This is the way that we have it built out in our Carrot websites already, so if you’re a member, you don’t have to worry about this. If you’re not a member, if you have another website platform or you built one yourself, this is something you’re going to want to pay attention to.

A simple URL structure will be something like:

• yoursite.com/sell-my-atlanta-house, or
• yoursite.com/how-it-works.

On the flip side, something that’s complicated that Google doesn’t like is too many forward slashes in your URL:

• your-site.com/sell/sellingyourhouse/boston

That’s just not a very friendly URL.

Google doesn’t like that as much. Or having weird characters in your URL:

• yoursite.com/?p25235

Google can’t determine what that’s about. In Carrot, we’ve already made it simple for you. You don’t have to do anything at all to make your URL simple.

SEO Ranking Factors for Real Estate #2: On-Page SEO for Real Estate

The second thing is on-page. On-page SEO are things on your website that you can physically see on the page. Content, pictures, things like that, and how they’re structured. In on-page, really, for your website, it’s kind of like soil for a farmer. On-page for SEO is like soil for the farmer.

If you don’t have good soil and you’re planting a crop, there’s no way that that crop is going to grow very good. On the flip side, if you don’t have the on-page optimization done on your website for SEO, it’s going to be very, very hard to rank well for any keyword phrases, no matter what you’re doing on the back end. The on-page is where it starts. It’s the fertile soil to grow a great crop.

If you don’t have fertile soil with the right nutrients and minerals, you can’t grow a good crop.

Make sure that the on-page optimization is correct. With Carrot members, once again, we give you a jump start. The content that’s already built into your website is already optimized very, very well. We suggest you go in there and tweak it, customize it to yourself, and use the SEO tool built into our system on each page to ensure it retains its SEO grade for the keyword you’re going after.

Part of on-page is content relevance. Let’s say someone is looking for a rent to own home in Birmingham, and your website doesn’t say those words anywhere on your website, but that’s what you’re looking for. How is Google going to know that your content is relevant to that search phrase?

You need to make sure that your content talks about the same things that you’re trying to optimize and rank well for.

Is it high-quality content, or are you just throwing up a few words here and there and moving on? You need to make sure that you have high-quality content on there … It’s robust content. It’s good. It’s valuable and also addresses the keywords and the things that your person, whether they’re a tenant, buyer, or seller, is typing in.

Be sure to have very relevant keywords for search phrases that you know your prospects are typing in in your market. We just suggest you dive in and tweak it up to make it more relevant to you, more relevant to your business model, to you as a person. And, build some credibility in there.

Also, to help make it more relevant in Google’s eyes, we’ve got the Carrot SEO tool. With the Carrot SEO tool, you can tell the platform and you can tell Google what to look at.

With this, if you’ve identified that you want to rank for rent to own homes in Birmingham, AL, you put it in the focus keyword section. You make sure that keyword phrase is in the SEO title, as you can see it is, and you make sure it’s in the description down there below.

What that does, that keys Google into the fact that that’s what that web page is about. It makes it very relevant in Google’s eyes that that web page is likely about rent to own homes in Birmingham, Alabama.

This is a huge factor.

We make it easier for you with Carrot, and we also give you the SEO tool to make sure that you’re following along. Whether you’re an SEO expert or not, you’re going to be able to optimize your pages very well with our built-in SEO tool.

SEO Ranking Factors for Real Estate #3: Choosing the Right Real Estate Keywords

Then next, with the SEO tool, are your keywords used right? Your pages should really have a good mix of your keyword phrases and pictures and structure so Google has the information they need to know your site is very relevant. That’s what we’re talking about here, guys.

This isn’t rocket science.

What we’re looking for is we just want to make sure that the content on the page is relevant to the search phrase that we’re trying to rank for. If we’re trying to rank for note sellers in California or note buyers in California, we want to make sure that the content on that page talks about your note buying service in California, and it has some pictures about that, and your title tag in our SEO tool and your description has those keywords in it. Very, very relevant. Use our SEO tool to help guide you along to make sure you’re staying relevant.

Then like I said, the website structure. Is the website structured right? This is something you don’t have to worry about. If you did not have Carrot, you would have to worry about this, but we worry about how fast your website loads. We worry about all the things behind the scenes in the code.

You do not have to touch it. That alone should make you rest easy at night knowing that you never have to touch this or reach out to a web person and have them do it. Get the on-page parts right, and it makes it much easier to grow a great crop. Bad on-page equals a thin crop. We all want to eat well. We all want to have a great crop.

So now off-page SEO. Off-page basically is everything … It’s kind of obvious, but everything that is away from your pages. What we’re talking about here is off-page stuff that’s kind of like water and the fertilizer for a farmer. You’ve got this soil. You’re hoping to plant something.

Now you’ve got to take something that’s outside of that environment of the soil and put it on the soil to help it grow the seed. It takes that fertile soil, and it adds the extra boost that it needs to grow.

Without watering, without fertilizing a crop, it’s going to be really hard to make it grow well.

One way that you can water and fertilize your website is with backlinks. Backlinks are basically where one website has a link on their website that’s clickable that goes over to your website. Google looks at it as a vote of confidence that your website is a good website according to that one. When other quality websites link to your website, Google really likes that.

Also, your footprint matters. What I mean by footprint is if you just have a website up there, and you’re really looking to dominate in your market, if you only have your website up there and that’s all you’re doing, Google doesn’t really have a whole lot to go off of to see if you’re a legitimate company.

One thing that they look at is your footprint. Do you have other entities, other websites or other social media profiles online, that also link to your website, that also has your company name in it?

They also have your address in it, your phone number in it? So set up a Google Business profile.

Go to YouTube and set up a YouTube profile and get a few videos in there. Go set up some business directories or citations, which we’re going to teach you how to do citations in a later module. Make sure you’re not just using a website only.

Go out there and make sure your footprint is wider and you have your business listed and profiles claimed on other websites.

SEO Ranking Factors for Real Estate #4: Social Media

The fourth part is social factors. You can see here is a screenshot of the bottom of a website where it’s got Google My Business, Facebook likes, and things like that. Google is really looking at the social factors of your website.

They look at that as votes kind of. They figure, well, if someone was on this website and they clicked the Facebook like button or engage with your Google Business content that must be a good thing.

That must be a vote that that person likes the website. We’re going to say that if a website has consistent and good “votes”, then it must be high quality and relevant. They’re going to reward you with a higher search result out of that.

Growing Your SEO

Those are the four main parts, guys. You’ve got the URL factors, which is really the ground. That’s the ground. You’ve got the on-page stuff, which is really the soil. That’s the soil. You’ve got the … The off-page stuff is your water. That’s your fertilizer. Then the social stuff is just kind of good juju. That’s just good stuff, good mojo, to help with everything else.

Next, what we’re going to dive into on the next video is the timeline to expect search engine rankings, to expect results and how to effectively guess what you can expect as far as how long it’s going to take to get results in your market, so let’s see you in the next video.