SEO & Digital Marketing for Real Estate Investors - Real Estate Investors Club Podcast

I had an awesome time on the Real Estate Investors Club Podcast talking about one of my favorite topics: SEO that works 🙌

We covered so much:
 📈 Why SEO is still one of the most powerful tools for real estate pros
 🔎 How to get found without paying for every single click
🛠️ What to ask before hiring an SEO expert
🏘️ Tips for standing out—even if you're competing with giants like Zillow & ReMax
📍 And how local keywords & niche strategies can give you a huge edge

Since 2007, I’ve been helping businesses get more traffic, leads, and clients through SEO—without breaking the bank 💰

If you're in real estate and want to get more qualified leads from Google (instead of fighting for scraps on social), this episode is for you.

🎁 I also shared a free gift—an SEO crash course + free site audit you can grab at seooptimizers.com/gift

📲 Watch the full episode now and drop a comment with your favorite takeaway!

#SEO #DigitalMarketing #RealEstateMarketing #BrandonLeibowitz #SEOOptimizers #OnlineTraffic #LeadGen #SmallBusinessTips #MarketingStrategy #RealEstateInvesting #GrowYourBusiness #GoogleSEO #SEOHelp

Transcript

0:00

It's good to have a presence everywhere. You don't want to just focus on one thing because you don't really want to put all your eggs in one basket. Because if you only focus on Facebook, which a lot of people did in the past, now you're like, alright, well, Facebook doesn't get that same reach anymore and that exposure is really dropped. Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the Real Estate Investors Club podcast. I'm here with Brandon Leibovitz from SEO Optimizers, and Brandon's going to tell us a little bit about his business today and about how that can have a positive income impact for us real estate investors. Thanks for being on the show, Brandon. Thank you for having me on today. So by way of introduction, why don't you just tell us a little bit about your journey through life that has led you to be here on the show with me today. I got my degree in business marketing and just kind of fell into this digital marketing world. Wasn't planning on it, but after I graduated from school, the first job I got out of college was helping a company out with their digital marketing. And I don't really know much about it. They said, don't worry, we don't know much either. We're going to learn alongside with you and take you to classes and workshops and seminars. And this is back in 2007 and after working there for a few months, just kind of realized this is probably the future. Everyone's probably going to have a website in the future. And there's a lot of different ways to get traffic, such as social media, doing paid ads, doing email marketing, doing SEO, which as I was doing initially for this company, was helping out with everything. And it all works to get traffic. SEO is just a way to get free traffic. And I thought over the years, buy some money on paid ads if you could get up there for free. So, worked at different advertising agencies as a director of SEO and also realized that I could pick up freelance clients here or there as long as there's no conflict of interest with my job, which I was able to do before work, after work and on my lunch breaks. I work on my own company and eventually built that up where I was able to quit my job and focus solely on this and been doing that ever since, just helping business owners get more traffic to the websites. Great. So explain to me, like, because we're like a real estate show, why should everybody who's involved in the real estate industry, so that is, you know, investors, brokers people who are looking to do business in the space. Why is SEO important for us? And how have you worked it in an industry specific kind of way? What kind of tips could you give to my, me and my colleagues? Basically, it just depends on what type of what you're doing specifically. But with the SEO, it's all about just figuring out, do people actually search for your product or service? That's where. If you're a real estate investor, you might think, all right, do people search for real estate investing online? You could double check using a tool called the Google Keyword Planner. It's a free tool from Google. It'll show you how many people actually search for your keyword every single month. So they can figure out, is real estate investing a good keyword? Or maybe nobody searches for it, but people search for real estate investment companies. They're like, okay, maybe I should use this or whatever it may be, but you're going to get a list of keywords that gives you ideas of what people actually search for. And if you see that people are searching for your services, then if you're not up there ranking on Google, someone else is taking that traffic away from you. But if nobody's searching for your services with your keywords, then there's not much you could really do for SEO. But anything related to real estate nowadays has really heavily become popular on online. So if you're not online, someone else is up there taking that traffic away. And it's usually some of these big real estate agency companies that are just kind of dominating for local realtors. But if you're an investor or a broker or whatever it may be, there's some more unique niche thing that's going to help you differentiate yourself and stand out against the crowd. But essentially, if you're trying to get more, more leads, more clients, and SEO is a great way because nowadays almost everyone's connected with the cell phone. It's really easy, just pull out your phone, search for something, talk into your phone. It'll speak back to you and give you answers. And that's a great way to just have really good information about investing. Like people might want to know, like, how do I invest in real estate? Where the different types of real estate investments. So if you have content on your website about that and someone asks that question on their web, on their phone, or on Google, then you potentially will show up for that and get that traffic or give that answer, become that authority figure that people are like, okay, this person gave me that answer. They must know something about real Estate investing, maybe I want to learn more about what they have to offer and learn more about their services. So what I want to know or what I'd like you to maybe break down for our audience a little bit is so like, like obviously I have a website you know, as a real estate coach and broker and property manager and when I was going through the process of building that site out, specifically the, the fact that, you know, real estate is so competitive and that there are such big players on the market, you know, be it ReMax or every, anybody else who's dominating their particular space, it's a bit difficult for a small player coming in to think that you can actually get any traction. So I mean, what might you say to kind of the smaller investor who. Or smaller broker or smaller player, let's say in their, in their niche. That's like, okay, am I gonna you know, invest in. Because obviously like, you know, for lay people like myself, like, realistically, I'm not going to be doing my own SEO, I'm going to be hiring somebody who's going to SEO, optimize my site site and I only have so many marketing dollars to spend. How am I going to stand out and how are those marketing dollars going to compare to, let's say, you know, paying for some Facebook ads or like boosting posts on Instagram? Like if that's my choice, I have a thousand dollars to spend or $2,000 to spend,$10,000 to spend. Like how and why am I spending it on SEO to not get buried by Google? Well, you want to get traffic from as many ways as possible. So most important thing is taking a step back and thinking if you're looking for your product or your service specifically, where would you go if you're looking to invest in real estate? Some people might go on Instagram, tick tock. But I feel like most people are probably going to search on Google to learn more about that. But it's different for every industry. So you just gotta figure out who your audience is and how do I get in front of them? Because some people will go on social media, but I feel like the majority of people are probably gonna go on Google. So it's good to have a presence everywhere. You don't want to just focus on one thing because you don't really want to put all your eggs in one basket. Because if you only focus on Facebook, which a lot of people did in the past, now you're like, all right, well Facebook doesn't get that same reach anymore and that exposure is really dropped that I should have focused on Instagram or YouTube or TikTok nowadays because it never really ends. And with social you don't really own any of that stuff either. You just kind of renting space off those platforms that they can take you down, they control everything. Whereas your website, you get full control, you get put whatever you want down there with your messaging. There's no ads to distract people. There's no messages or friend requests to distract people as well. But with SEO, it's all about just finding those keywords that aren't hyper competitive. Because if you're just trying to rank for like Realtor in Vancouver, hyper competitive, lot of real estate agents. But if you could niche it down and find something more unique, flexibility. So maybe finding individual provinces or counties, towns, cities or even communities. So finding little areas like gated communities or neighborhoods and targeting those specifically because those are going to have less competition. So maybe there's a unique gated community that popped up that has 100 homes in there. It's probably not going to be as competitive, not as many people are going to be targeting that keyword. So it'd be create pages on your website about all these different communities, towns, cities, provinces, all these areas and really break it down and get it really granular. That's going to help you become more relevant and not have to deal with these hyper competitive keywords where these bigger cities are just going to be saturated. It's going to be really tough unless you're a big corporation to break through to those bigger keywords. It's going to take a lot of time, especially with real estate. It's a lot of, a lot of Realtors. And the more competitive your industry is, the more time it's going to tank to rank for SEO. So if you can find something more unique and niche and break it down, like maybe only focus on townhomes or condominiums or whatever it may be, ski lodges or winter sports activities or whatever it is, but finding something more unique, that's going to help you really penetrate that market and not just get lost in the sea of thousands, tens of thousands of other websites competing for those same keywords. And the other kind of challenge that I ran into when I started doing my own website and kind of understanding how this game works is how do you pick who to work with? Because again, as a, as a layperson with only a limited amount of marketing dollars to spend, the challenge is what kind of solution am I buying? Like in terms of what kind of company am I working with? What are they really selling me? Because it happens that maybe I don't really know, right? Like we all know, you go on Google, type some search terms, and obviously the more specific you are, the more likely you are to get a specific answer, the more niche you are as a result, the more likely you are to show up in those answers. But how should I go about interviewing a specialist to work with? What are the questions to ask? What do I need to understand to make that decision in a smart way? I would ask them really what their strategy is, how they're ranking websites, because you want to figure out what are they doing, how are they ranking you? Are they focusing on just your website, or are they also going to optimize your videos? Because videos show up on Google, Optimize all your images, because images show up on Google. For your local business, you want to get up on the maps because the maps also rank really high on Google. So not just optimizing your website, but trying to take up as much free real estate as possible on that first page of Google. Also, you could ask them, show me a portfolio of who you've worked with. But the biggest thing is how are they ranking you? And ranking websites entails? Well, it's different for every business, but some of the basic kind of similarities are content, meaning text on your pages. Google reads the code and they're looking for keywords in the coding for you to put all over the coding in the website. But Google doesn't really care what you put on the website because they don't believe anything anybody puts on any website without you. Building trust up. And the way to build trust is by getting what are called backlinks, getting other websites to talk about you. The more websites that talk about you, the more trustworthy Google sees you as. And then they look at those keywords on your website. But it doesn't work the other way around. If you're not building backlinks, Google's not going to rank a website. So you got to figure out, how are these companies building backlinks? What type of backlinks are they building? How do they, what strategies are they utilizing? Because unfortunately, in the past, it was just a numbers game. If I have a hundred backlinks and you have 200 backlinks, you would rank higher than me. But nowadays Google's changed where it's not the number of backlinks, but the number of quality backlinks. And what is a quality backlink to Google? Quality backlink to Google is a backlink that comes from a site that's related to what you're doing. So if you're doing real estate investing, you should find other websites about real estate, homes, investing, financing. It doesn't have to be real estate investors linking out to you, just anything summer related and authoritativeness. How popular is this website or how big is this website? The bigger the website, the more SEO value that's going to be passed on. So in a backlink from my website, which is good, but it's not the same tiers like Forbes or New York Times or Wall Street Journal or entrepreneurs. So the bigger the website, the more SEO value and the more relevant, the better off it's going to be when you're building those backlinks. And that's really what I'd focus on is figuring out how are they building backlinks, what type of backlinks are they building? Because they build the wrong backlinks. Instead of ranking higher, you're actually going to drop down in rankings, which we don't want that to happen. Mm. Have you really been listening to the episode or has your monkey mind been taking you off in one direction or another? Our mental habits can be our biggest assets or our biggest liabilities as we pursue certain goals. For me, the biggest performance gains have always come from training my mind. In my book Mindful Landlord, I talk about how you can train your mind and how you can apply some of these strategies to your journey in the real estate field. The book is available on Amazon and also on its website, mindfullandlord.com Now I'll stop evangelizing for the power of mental training and let you get back to the show. And I think also you know, again, as I was like learning a little bit about how this works, I think there's in terms of like, understanding the algorithms, like, there's a lot of like, technical stuff in there. So like, I think in terms of, you know, let's say posting multiple identical content or like various things that you can sort of be penalized for the, the, you know, backlinks. If I'm a real estate company and all of a sudden my backlinks is like a sunglasses company or like some other kind of sketchy things. Those are, those are things that you can quite easily get penalized for. So, you know, if you were giving people, let's say, I think you already mentioned like a few guidelines. So one is get as niche as possible, the other one is work on your backlinks. Is there something else that's that like Another strategy that people should be using when they want to be on top of their SEO. Or am I forgetting something? Well, I mean there's over 200 ranking signals, so there's a lot that goes into Google. But it's like a puzzle. There's a lot of pieces of that puzzle. Some pieces are a lot bigger, like the content on your website, meaning text. So having text on every single page on your website is so very important. Not just having a bunch of images or having a couple settings, but really breaking it down on every single page and then building that trust up through those backlinks are two more important things. But there's so many other little things. Like you could add schema code which enhances your listing or your website to make it pop out. So if you go to schema.org they'll tell you how to write that code. It was created by Google, Bing and yahoo about like 10 plus years ago. And that's just a way to make your listing pop out. So when you're searching on Google, sometimes you might see stars or you might see things besides just websites appearing. That's all from schema. If you add that to your website, Google looks at how long or how fast your website loads. The faster, the better user experience. They look at how long people stay on your website. So people just go to your website and then hit that back button that tells Google maybe you're not the most relevant and that maybe you shouldn't be ranked at the top or whatever position you're in, they'll drop you down. But there's so many variables and I was just really focused on providing good quality content and a good user experience to people. That's really the most important thing, is not just spamming or throwing keywords in your website content just to throw them in there, but really trying to focus on the user and providing value that's going to be the most beneficial nowadays. That's really what Google's looking for, is offering value. Yeah, all about good, good quality content. What what have I not asked you? Like what what am I, what am I neglecting in terms of somebody trying to understand the value of SEO and the importance of what you do with the value. It's really just coming down to how many people search for those keywords. If people search for your keywords, then you're missing out on potential leads. But if no one's searching for those keywords, then you gotta drive that awareness. And if no one's searching for your keywords, a great way Alternative is social media. It's a great way where people aren't really searching on social. They're. I mean, some people do, but most people are browsing and they get recommended feed or Explorer feeds or topics that relate to what they're doing. So if no one's searching for your services, then SEO is not gonna be the best for you. But if there are people searching for it, someone else is taking that traffic away from you that you could be potentially getting into your, into your website and into your sales funnel to get them to convert into a client or paying client. So biggest thing is just trying to figure out what keywords to utilize. That's always the first step for SEO, is figuring out what keywords to use and then incorporating them into the coding on your website and the text and the backlinks. So everything is relevant in the lines and make sense to Google. So understanding the lay of the land with digital marketing and seeing how that kind of fits into the bigger picture and understanding how you capture your leads in terms of how people find your business or service. So I think those are all some really good tips. Anything else that I'm missing? Anything else you want to add? I mean, there's so much more with SEO. Just depends on what route you want to go. I would just say be patient. It takes time. Don't get discouraged if you're not seeing immediate results. With SEO, it does take months, if not years, depending on how competitive those keywords are. So if you find something more niche and less competitive, you'll be able to rank a lot faster. But if you're just targeting those really broad, generic keywords, especially like bigger cities, it could take a long, long time because there's all these websites that have been around that have established trust with Google. And if you're just a startup, a new small business, Google's not really going to trust you and they're not going to want to rank you until, until you build that trust up by getting those backlinks, essentially. Okay, well, look, thank you so much for taking the time to educate my audience a little bit on the value of SEO. Do you want to maybe say something specific about how people get in touch with you, how they can learn more about what you do if they want to take this to the next level and understand specifically how your company operates? So anyone that wants to learn more, actually you create a special gift for them if they go to my website@seoptimizers.com that's S E-O-O-P-T-I-M-I Z-E-R-S.com forward slash gift. And they can find that there, along with my contact information and a bunch of classes I've done over the years I've thrown up for free. So they can see step by step, how to do a lot of stuff that we talked about. And also if they want to book some time on my calendar, I'm happy to check out the website from an SEO point of view and let them know what's working, what's not working, or if there's potential to rank higher. And they can book some time for free on my calendar there as well. So we'll make sure to drop those links in the show notes for our audience. And Brandon, you know, thank you for taking the time to chat with me today. It's. This is a topic that we don't maybe focus on a lot in the industry because we're so busy focusing on actual, you know, investment strategies or ways to service clients or to deliver better service. But definitely, if you're looking at working on your business, not working in your business, understanding the digital marketing environment, specifically as it relates to websites and SEOs, so important. And so don't hesitate to reach out to Brandon, share the episode, go follow him on social media and learn about SEO.