Five Ways To Improve SEO For Your Real Estate Wholesaling Website

When you are looking to improve Search Engine Optimization or SEO, for your real estate wholesaling website, you want to consider what your ideal customer will be looking for and providing them solutions.  Consider their journey, and their problem, and help them solve it. 

If you look at it from their perspective, they may be a distressed seller looking for a quick solution to sell their house.  They might have bad credit or be upside down in the house, owing more than it’s worth.  It might be a house that they inherited and they want to get rid of it without cleaning it up, or its a house that can’t get a mortgage. Whatever the scenario, they have a problem, they are in your area and you need to help solve it. 

One of the things they might do is to search the internet for a solution.  They get onto Google and they will search for a solution to their problem.  What are they going to search for?  Here are some ideas:

• How to sell a house in Columbus that can’t get a mortgage
• Sell a house in Atlanta for cash
• Sell a house fast in Dallas

These are some ideas.  What you are then going to do is to look for keywords that you can show up for Google in.  You want to do everything you can to show up for their search in Google.  Keywords are the works that someone types into Google to find what they’re looking for. You want to write content (or pay someone to write it for you) that solves what they’re looking for.

We are going to give you some ideas of a things that you can do to improve your chances of showing up in Google for your potential customers.  This is a different strategy than you might use with something like a bandit sign or sending out post cards. With those, you are taking a shot in the dark that you’re going to find someone who needs your services.  This is a different kind of marketing.

With SEO, you are trying to solve problems for your audience and show them that you can help them.  One thing to know about SEO is that it usually isn’t quick.  It’s a long play.  You build content that has value. Over time, Google sees that and ranks you for searches.

Let’s talk about a few ways that you can do that.

Ways to Improve SEO on Your Real Estate Wholesaling Website

1. Identify What Your Audience is Looking For

There are people out there that do this for a living.  You want a business focused on wholesaling houses or other real estate investing, so we are going to give you the high-level version.  We are going to focus on how to do this on a budget and without needing to be an expert.  If you want to become an expert, there are definitely great tools and systems out there to use.  We want to help you focus on wholesaling and real estate investing.

To start with, you can use a tool called Ubersuggest, and go to their keyword analyzer.  Type in some of the words that you think your ideal seller (or buyer) could be looking for.  On the report you see there, it will tell you some key things like how many searches were done for those keywords in a month, alternative keywords you can use and what sites are ranking for them.  Here are a few things to look for

• Keywords Your Ideal Audience Would Want – Focus on things that a buyer or seller would be likely to be looking for.  You might be able to rank for “best chocolate cake” but that won’t help you wholesale more houses. 
• Look for Longtail Keywords – Long-tail keywords are really longer phrases and they’re usually easier to rank for.  There will be a lot of competition for “sell a house fast” but not as much for “sell an inherited house fast in Columbus”.  As long as Ubersuggest shows that people are searching for it and it’s a reasonable number, it is probably worth trying for.
• Focus on Your Geography – All real estate is local.  Focus on content in your area, which is a naturally long-tail keyword.  Even if you can rank for “sell a house fast” that doesn’t help you when most people landing on your site are from another state.  You’d be much better off with 10 people landing on your site from your area than 1,000 from another state. 

Following these strategies, you can build some great content to help people with their problems and bring you more leads. 

2. Bring Value to Your Audience

While your object may be to get more houses to wholesale, what you are doing is trying to build a relationship with your audience to do that someday hopefully.  It’s a bit like building a buyer’s or seller’s lists.  They may not buy or sell right away, but you want them to think of you the moment they want to. You have to give them some value in your content to do that.

Once you have identified your keywords, you want to write content that solves their problem.  The keywords can help start you in the right direction, but what these people need is a solution.  They want help. Bring them that help.  Tell them how to solve their problem. Sure, maybe you help them understand how you can help them solve their problem, but this isn’t a sales call, not yet. It’s about getting traffic to your site and building a relationship with them.

If they want to sell their house fast, tell them the options to do that. Some might be through you and some might not.  Tell them what you have learned and what hasn’t worked and why. People like stories and they like honesty.  Give them both.  Your goal here is to help them solve their problem. 

One strategy is to look at what the competition has done and see how you can improve it. Do not copy their content (that’s illegal and Google and your audience will quickly figure it out.)  Here is a way to use their content to improve on what they have done.

• Read through the competition’s articles
• Create a basic outline from the first article, adding to that outline with each other article
  • Capture important points that you like (in your words)
• Decide what they missed and include that in your outline
• Find things specific to your area and add those to the outline
• Read through your outline one more time and reorganize is so that it makes sense and flows well
• Use the outline to write your article

This concept of using the competition’s articles as a basis for writing better content is called the skyscraper technique and is a proven strategy for improving your SEO for your real estate wholesaling websites.

3. Show That You Know the Area

People prefer to do business with real people rather than nameless companies.  Even though you spent all that time creating a beautiful logo and company name, you are a local business person.  Show that to your audience.  People like having a relationship with them. Tell them about your experiences and what you have seen and how you have helped people.

When you show that you know their problem and can solve it, people are much more likely to turn to you to for a solution. If they feel like they’re working with a nameless company, they are more likely to look for someone local.

Show Your Expertise

This is related to number 2, but is a bit different.  Wherever you can, show your experience and what you have done.  Here are a few easy ways to do this:

• Stories – Tell your audience about some of your investments.  You don’t need to share the numbers unless you’re aiming to talk to buyers. In fact, you might not want to share them.  This could turn off a seller.  People love stories and real estate wholesalers have some great ones.
• Pictures – Include pictures. This makes your stuff easier to read and it’s fun.  Wholesaling pictures are amazing stories of their own.  This will also show a seller that no matter how bad their problem is, you’ve probably dealt with it worse.
• Testimonials – Get past buyers, sellers, agents, attorneys, etc. to give you testimonials that you can include on your site. This is called social proof. 

All of these things help show, not tell, someone that you have experience and can help them.  They’re called distressed sellers for a reason. They have a problem and need someone to sell it.

The same strategy works for buyers.  They are looking to make money and want assurance that you aren’t going to lose money.  People invest with people.  Showing that you are a real person, with knowledge and experience helps to open the door to a conversation about how you will protect their money and make them more.

4. Include Video

We aren’t all great writers.  However, Google works mostly off of written content so you’ll want to do some written content.  However, video is really powerful and can help build more of an audience.  Video can be a really powerful tool, especially when combined with a written post. 

Here are some of the reasons that you should consider including video on your site:

• It helps SEO – Video helps SEO in two ways. One of the ways that Google judges you is by how long someone stays on your site.  If someone sticks around, the site must have been worth looking at.  If someone watches your video, that’s keeping them on the page longer, which tells Google that your site has value.  The other way that video benefits SEO is that if you use YouTube, which is a great free option, you can now show up in searches in two ways.  Write a good description and link back to your site from the video and the video can draw people to your site.
• It Builds a Relationship – Video can help you show who you are and what you know.  This will show real estate buyers and sellers that they can trust you and that you are real.
• It Builds a Great Story to Watch – Back to the same idea as the pictures, doing a walkthrough of a property or your techniques or how the process works can be a great way to show your audience how things work and tell a great story. Just make sure you follow the law on what can be recorded.
• It’s Free and Easy – You truly don’t need fancy editing or equipment. You cell phone will work just fine.

Video is a great addition to building a relationship that also helps with SEO.  It’s well worth trying out on your site. 

Link Your Content

An important part of SEO for any site is called link building.  Google takes a look at the links to and from your site and uses that to judge your site and its value.  The web is a giant maze of content and Google assumes (with a few caveats) that interconnected content has more value.  This comes in a few parts.

Internal Linking

Believe it or not, linking from one page to another in your site helps your SEO. It actually does this a few ways.

Like we said before, links help Google judge the value of your content and even internal linking helps here. 

Links also show both Google and your readers other content. How many times have you started off on one page and 20 minutes later you’re still on the same site looking at different stuff?  One of the ways to help make that happen is by giving your reader more things to read that interest them.  There are a few strategies to do this, thankfully, all pretty easy.

• Link to more content in your text – In the text of your article or post, link to content that is relevant to what you’re saying.  For example, if you’re talking about the benefits of a cash offer over waiting on a loan from a bank and how much faster a cash offer is, you could link “a cash offer is a lot faster to close” to an article on the timeline of a cash offer or how quickly you can help someone sell their house.   This helps your reader find more content which helps keep them on you.  Google will also see the other article and index it and relate the content. 
• Add a Related Posts Section – There are plugins like Related Posts that allow you to include links to similar posts. Depending on the plugin and what you want to do, there are a few ways to do this.  Some work by linking to posts with the same tags or in the same categories.   Some of the fancier ones actually look for keyword matches or similar.  Some you can set the relationships manually. Depending on you how your site is set up, you can pick a strategy and include related posts on your sidebar, below your post, or in the middle of your post. 

Including a good internal linking strategy can have a real SEO benefit, it’s cheap and it’s pretty easy.  This will help improve your SEO.

Outbound Links

Believe it or not, linking to related content on other sites can actually help your SEO as well.  Partially, it gives your content credibility and shows Google that you are legitimate (assuming you are adding more value with your links, don’t just link in order to link.)  Amazingly, even linking to competitors can add value, but probably a better strategy for most real estate investor sites is to link to larger sites with related content but that don’t compete. For example, you could link to articles on Bigger Pockets, or a similar site. There are a ton of quality real estate resources out there.  One suggestion is to make sure that these links open in a new tab.   That way you don’t push readers off of your site. 

Inbound Links

These are often like gold in the SEO world. This is when another site links to your site.  This helps to give your site credibility in the eyes of Google and brings traffic from those sites.  There are services and sites out there that will link to your site for a fee. Be careful about this.  Anyone who has been online for long remembers stumbling on sites that are nothing but links.  That’s why these used to exist but Google got wise to that and now fake links can hurt your SEO (a lot!).  You want quality links.  You could work with other companies in your area to link to your content or reach out to other companies who have content where what you have could add some value to their stuff.  For example, maybe a local contractor has a site where they talk about projects and rehabbing houses.  Maybe you could have them link to your page on ways to fix up your house (you could even trade links with them.)  These aren’t easy to get but quality inbound links can really help your SEO.

Add a Table of Contents Plugin

(Oops, we said five, but came up with two more, so enjoy)

There are several free tables of contents plugins out there.  These take the headings from your articles and add a linked list of topics in your post.  They let readers find what they want more quickly and are a small SEO benefit.  This won’t put you on the front page of Google but can have a small benefit, make it easy for your readers, and are easy (and free!) to implement.

Use an SEO Plugin

There are a couple of WordPress plugins that are designed to help you with SEO.  The two major ones are Yoast and RankMath.  There are others but these are the two big ones we typically recommend.  They both have free versions and are good for different reasons.  Yoast can be a bit easier to use, RankMath is a bit more data-heavy.

The important thing to know about ANY WordPress SEO plugin is that they don’t actually improve your SEO on their own.  What they do is help you decide what to do to have a better chance of improving your SEO. 

These plugins give you recommendations and data to help you make the right decisions to have the best chance to improve your SEO.  They’ll give you some suggestions to improve your content, use keywords the right way and do the work needed on your page to get noticed by Google.  In fact, they’ll recommend a lot of the things that we’ve suggested here. 

They are definitely worth the investment (which is $0, unless you want to pay for the additional features. initially, that probably isn’t worth it, with a bigger site it can be.) Is that enough?  NOPE!  We have a couple of more actually.  

Complete Your Google My Business Entry

Google My Business is when you’re searching online and information comes up in a search about the business.  It often shows up as a box on the side and is very common when you’re searching local businesses.  You’ve seen it a bunch of times.  Someone had to claim that business and put all that information into Google about the business.  That information creates the Google My Business entry.  

Improve Your SEO on Your Real Estate Wholesaling Website

It’s important to know that there is no magic bullet for Search Engine Optimization.  SEO is a process of little changes and paying attention to what your audience needs and wants and using good, regular practices.

Suggestions like these will help your SEO which will improve over time.