#406- Mail-Right Show: Common SEO Myths For Real Estate Websites Busted

Subscribe: RSS

Common SEO Myths For Real Estate Websites Busted

Learn the truth behind common SEO myths for real estate websites in this eye-opening show.

Discover why keyword stuffing won’t boost your rankings and why backlinks from irrelevant sites are harmful. Our experts debunk these misconceptions and provide practical strategies to improve your website’s visibility on search engines.

#1 – The first myth we need to debunk is that SEO is dead.

#2 – The second myth is that Google only ranks “fresh” content.

#3 – The third myth is that duplicate content will get you penalized.

#4 – The fifth myth is that social shares help you rank higher in Google.

#5 – The sixth myth is that Pay-per-pay-per-click advertising won’t help you rank higher in search.

#6 – And the final myth we’re busting is that SEO is always about ranking #1.

Episode Full Show Notes

[00:00:10.970] – Robert Newman

Back, ladies and gentlemen. Today is proof positive on show number 406 that John loves me. Do not let his sour disposition fool you. He loves me. And how do I know that he loves me? Today’s show is Common SEO Miss for real estate websites, Busted. He used his reference, a video that was produced by one of my favorite tools in the entire world, Ahrefs. They have an incredibly competent SEO team. They always speak of SEO in a very high level. I love them. I love the content they produce. I highly recommend that you check it out if you’re trying to learn SEO. But just before I just go nuts with how excited I am about this show, John, why don’t you go ahead and introduce everybody and maybe, by the way, explain how we arrived? What is a fairly rare dive for us? We haven’t done this a ton, so maybe you explain where you’re at and why you decided that you wanted to aim this particular show in this direction.

[00:01:18.930] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, thanks, Rob. Like I said, I’m the joint founder of Mel-right. Com. Well, I’ve been doing a big dive lately because I’ve suffered a slight penalty on one of my own websites. It’s been a day of SEO because in the morning, I interviewed one of the founders of Rush, SEO.

[00:01:45.020] – Robert Newman

I interviewed- Rush, S-E-M? You’re talking about?

[00:01:49.420] – Jonathan Denwood

Yes, Russia’s SEM. I interviewed one of the founders of that.

[00:01:56.180] – Robert Newman

Holy cow, why didn’t you get him off this show? I left Thank you for that.

[00:02:01.260] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, yeah, but the thing is, Rob, it would have gone really, very technical, very quick. I think we would have lost almost 90, 90% of the audience very quickly because this can get… We have agreed that we’re going to try and keep this to a level that you can follow folks, but hopefully, you’re going to get some excellent value because, obviously, you are much more of an expert in this particular area than I am. That’s why I chose it, Rob.

[00:02:39.490] – Robert Newman

Beautiful. For this particular show, I’m going to do the unthinkable, and I’m going to trot out my pedigree, which I don’t generally do because we’re not usually talking about my core competency. But I’ve been doing… I transferred careers out of running some of the country’s largest call centers to focus on digital. Within six months of focusing on digital, I realized that what I wanted to focus on specifically was Google’s version of search engine optimization. There are many search engines out there, eight or nine. We just don’t talk about them. The one that I wanted to focus on was Google because it was fascinating because the subject is deep because they’re doing… They’ve got more rocket scientist-type people working there than any other company on the planet. Still, to this day, you hear a lot about a lot of other tech companies, but Google hires some of the smartest people that are alive to work for them. That fascinated me from a very intellectual perspective, and that was 15 years ago. I’ve continued to dive down that rabbit hole. I’ve done it for e-commerce. I’ve done it for many different verticals outside of real estate. But I focus on real estate because it’s so wildly underserved.

[00:03:51.090] – Robert Newman

Residential real estate has almost no really highly credible voices in the SEO space. Over the last 15 years, I’ve gotten the opportunity, for which I’m very grateful, to talk to some of the biggest agents in the world about real estate SEO. I’ve done that. I’ve served some of them, and I’ve consulted with some of them. We’ve had a couple of them on the show over the years. John has met some of them through me. We just had Gary Gold on the show, who I’d given a consultation to 10 years prior to him appearing on this show. I love this subject, and I feel like I’m one of a very small handful of people who spend time in a very rarefied space that dedicates their entire career to real estate SEO. Having said all that, if you want to check more out about me, about my story, about my credibility in this space, I have case studies, references, and clients mentioned all on inboundrem. Com. Feel free to go to that website and check it out. With no further ado, I’m going just to jump right in. I’m going to give John the chance to answer this himself.

[00:04:57.980] – Robert Newman

I certainly have incredibly strong opinions on every single one of these.

[00:05:01.880] – Jonathan Denwood

He’s already shown that with our pre-shown discussion points.

[00:05:06.060] – Robert Newman

Right, which is very rare. John doesn’t get this from me. I just go with the flow usually. But the first myth that we need to debunk is that SEO is dead. Please provide me your perspective after watching that aero-studio on how you feel about it, John.

[00:05:24.400] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, we don’t know where AI is going. The basic situation, folks, is that there’s a lot of hype talked about AI because there’s two distinct types. There’s AI that’s based around language recognition software, and then there’s what is called general AI, which mimics intelligence, basically. The one that has been publicized through OpenAI is very impressive technology, but it’s not general intelligence. Because what I feel that fundamental misunderstanding, a lot of flannel was said from a lot of so-called experts, a lot of them on YouTube, and I definitely don’t think for the foreseeable future. The foreseeable future in a 2-5 year period, I definitely don’t think SEO is dead. I think some of the things that were said, Robert, that is slightly different. There’s more to this, is what was said when voice came on. A lot of people said that normal search would be eliminated by voice, which was about five, six years ago. That really didn’t pan out. I think this is a little bit different, but it’s got some of the aspects of the really over the top statements and flannel, which is driven a lot by YouTube, to be frank about it.

[00:07:22.590] – Jonathan Denwood

As well, I think, Rob.

[00:07:25.000] – Robert Newman

First of all, the title is SEO Dead, it’s ClickUp. Every listening to the show. Unless all world economies and our internet infrastructure collapses, SEO is never going to die. Let’s put it that way. Why? Because look at the acronym. Search Engine Optimization. That’s what SEO means, Search Engine Optimization. What might encroach on Search engine optimization would be platform optimization such as Facebook or Amazon, creating a tool that’s so good, Alexa, that can give you an answer to every question that you have so that you yourself might do fewer searches. Fewer searches does not mean it’s dead. It just means that does search, as we understand it, trends differently over time. And the answers, of course, does. It always trends differently. A true SEO expert is going to trend with the trends. That’s it. I don’t have my weight behind what answer that we give on our websites. For instance, if we’re going to go towards audio search, I will start producing audio files on my client site. Are we going to go to an almost entirely visual medium? That’s YouTube and the optimizing on YouTube. Optimizing on YouTube, search has not only not died, it’s gotten more robust, and we’re going to cover that a little bit later.

[00:08:50.290] – Robert Newman

It’s gotten bigger and broader and more comprehensive and more intelligent. There’s more searches, more information being found on the internet, not less. All of it being run by search engines with Google still dominant no matter what anybody tells you, they’ve got Google, they’ve got the image library, they’ve got traditional search, they’re on all the tools. Chromium runs on Apple products. I think Google and Apple have a better partnership than almost any other two technology companies out there. No matter what you hear, SEO is far from dead. As a matter of fact, it’s probably the exact opposite. People usually end there is SEO dead videos like Neil Patel, with actually SEO is growing and has been forever and probably will continue to be because more and more people get used to querying the internet for answers to questions. That is usually done with a search engine. All right, the second myth is Google only ranks fresh content. Why don’t you jump into that?

[00:09:50.340] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, no, basically, that’s not right. I would say that Google wants to show people the most relevant content that matches up their search. That can be newish content or that could be quite old content. You know, your the real judgment, is it the most relevant? Does it answer the question, the search query, the best? That’s what Google cares about so I would say no.

[00:10:32.600] – Robert Newman

Since John nailed this one 100%, I’m just going to elaborate. I’m going to illuminate that answer a little bit more. It’s 100% correct. Everything you said, 100% correct. Google does not look at the age of a piece of content and rank based upon the age. There is a piece of the algorithm, either called Caffine or Hummingbird, and I don’t remember which, but it absolutely gives a small bonus or to new content, pushes up that content in certain places inside the algorithm. But what Google does once that content is pushed and has M balls on it, is they measure the user engagement, the user behavior to the content, and make a decision about whether or not they want to keep it up on somewhere at the top of the search engines where likely people are going to click on it. That’s almost entirely based on user engagement. Do people click on your metadata? Do they click on the header that you put on the piece of content? Then do people keep coming back to that answer over and over again? If the answer to all these things is yes, then Google has no reason to derank it and they will check new content frequently against the old content.

[00:11:42.780] – Robert Newman

The simple truth of the matter is there’s not that many people really making huge strides to produce something noticeably better than other people. For that, you have to research and really do your homework, see what was best previously, then take all of that and yet add to it in a meaningful way in order to potentially out-rank and keep out-ranking a previous answer. Really great content marketers understand that it’s a skyscraper building game. You start with 1,500 words that did really well and you end up with 5,000 that have to be 10 times better than what you started with because on certain really competitive subjects such as mortgage rates, refying homes, financial investments, stuff like that. What is my home worth? People are keeping… Everybody’s targeting that small handful of keywords. The people at the very top have really highly authoritative domains and all this support content that’s aimed at a central piece that’s really big. You can get really deep in producing a much better answer on your site. Shockingly deep. You can have 20 support pages in one really great piece of content and that one piece, of course, continues to rank because it has 20 support pages and a primary content piece all aimed to answer your question really well.

[00:13:10.790] – Robert Newman

There you go. Third myth is that, and this is the one that we really debated about before the camera got turned on. The third myth is that duplicate content will get you penalized.

[00:13:24.050] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, it’s just some people say no, but my opinion was similar to yours. If you have very similar content or practically duplicated content, I always thought that it could affect you because it affects the user experience. If they click you, if you have your internal pages linked and you should, obviously the experience, they go from one page to the other and it’s very similar information. It’s not going to be very useful to the end user, so they’re probably going to bounce. But you’re the expert, so over to you.

[00:14:08.650] – Robert Newman

In the real estate space in particular, template websites are extremely popular. Some of those sites have been H and Image websites, especially ones over 5-7 years old, iHomefinder, Plaster at one time. That list is very deep. What they do is when they produce a site, they have some static pages like how to buy a home, how to sell a home, that they’ve already produced because you, the agent, have been insisting that you’re basically too lazy to produce something unique to your sales process. They help you. It’s their intent to be helpful. They put the same answer on the website 5,000 times all over the country. At some point, the search engines look at that because they will eventually understand there’s 5,000 copies of the same page. They give you the credit that you deserve, which is you’re a plagarist and that you don’t deserve any credit whatsoever. They also look at the rest of the website to say, What is the user behavior? Generally speaking, templated websites with no customization on it end up getting almost no user engagement whatsoever. They certainly don’t compete well against people who’ve customized the site, designed an experience specifically for their audience, or added extra support pages and I can go on and on.

[00:15:31.160] – Robert Newman

So does duplicate content, and here’s my favorite part, all of that is logical. But depending on the provider that we’re talking about, sometimes there is the option to make these duplicate pages not looked at. You can say don’t read this page on this website. That is a command that you can give Google. But guess what? You generally have to do that manually and you have to do that on all the pages that you believe that you’ve duplicated on the site. Very few providers bothered to do that. Even though Ahrefs said duplicate content doesn’t really get you, that’s what the video said. John said he agreed with me. I watched the video on Ahrefs, and the simple fact is that while in mini verticals, there are lots and lots of people that practice a decent enough SEO game that they just say, Don’t read those pages. Then do you get penalized? No, Google is not reading the page. They don’t even see it. They don’t even see it. No, you don’t get penalized. But do like carrot sites and certain types of… I’ve listed off some, there’s probably-.

[00:16:38.070] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, it’s endemic, isn’t it? It’s at a certain price, affordability, the… Bayes is endemic, but it is endemic. But it’s endemic for some, I’m going to be a little bit kind for I’m going to say, for understandable reasons. But I do know that there were some providers that I felt they’re advertising, I’m not going to name them because I do not want to get into agro, but there’s some providers that are well-known that say they provide content and they don’t explain that it’s duplicate content that will not have any value at best or have the consequences, which you’ve just outlined.

[00:17:26.530] – Robert Newman

Correct. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, we’re going to go to break and when we come back, we’re going to discuss how social impacts Google pay-per-click advertising and what does ranking really mean. There’s a lot of mis-round ranking, which I totally agree with, and they really need to be debunked and we’re going to debunk them for you. We’re going to come back. Stay tuned. Stay gripped right onto the edge of your seat. I know just all of you SEO technophiles out there are eating this up with a spoon. I can’t wait to get back into it in one second. Do you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need Mailright. It is a powerful but easy to use online marketing system that uses Facebook to generate real estate leads at a fraction of the cost you’d pay from our competition. We stand behind our work with a no-question-asked 30-day money-back guarantee. So don’t delay, get started today. Go to mail-right. Com. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to episode number 304. Sorry, I was going to take away 100 episodes worth of credit. 406 is the episode number. You’re going to want to remember that if you want to try to search for this show on our YouTube, on the Mailright YouTube channel or potentially even the Inbound rem YouTube channel, that we haven’t done a very good job of translating this stuff into video.

[00:18:53.650] – Robert Newman

But we’re going to kick this off with a fascinating thing, which is, once again, I feel like this falls into the gray, but the fifth myth that we have on our list is that we missed number four, by the way.

[00:19:07.250] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, I duplicate you too. I duplicate you double and three. That was funny, wasn’t it? Because it was about duplication.

[00:19:15.210] – Robert Newman

All right, so we’re actually going to number this correctly for John.

[00:19:18.040] – Jonathan Denwood

I have on my copy, I’ve just done it, but not on yours.

[00:19:22.380] – Robert Newman

It’s myth number four. The fourth myth that social shares help you rank higher in Google. Now, I’m going to go first on this one because it’s complicated. There has been a long-held belief by most SEOs that social interaction does matter for SEO. But here’s the fascinating thing. Most social is dominated by Facebook. Facebook meta companies. Not Facebook, meta companies. That’s Instagram, WhatsApp. Facebook owns them all. Guess what? Facebook does not allow. They don’t allow Google to read their website at all. At all. That is zilch. When you’re saying social share specifically, the answer is, well, probably not. But it’s widely believed, including by myself, because Google patented a logarhythm that is new and unique about four years ago. The logarhythm that they patented is one that tracks, jumps in and out of Chrome, and it’s an algorithm that measures engagement based upon assumptions, branding assumptions. That’s what they said in the actual brand, branding assumptions made by the search engine. Now, most SEOs, myself included, feel that that is a very fancy way of saying, if we see you enter and exit because Chromium runs most of the web, that is the browser that Google created.

[00:21:04.230] – Robert Newman

They’re everywhere. They’re in Safari. They’re everywhere. There is no lack of visibility on Google from Chromium.

[00:21:11.220] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s why I don’t use it. I use Firefolks.

[00:21:15.020] – Robert Newman

There you go. You’ve got… By the way, Chromium runs Opera, it runs Safari, it runs everything except for Firefolks and a couple of others, Dogpile, a few others. But here’s the thing, Bing. Here’s the thing. That logarithm allows me or somebody to track. Are we entering and exiting LinkedIn a lot? Once we exit LinkedIn, do we go to a website where we can see what the client is doing. They wanted to measure it and they created a whole algorithm just to measure that behavior. My belief would be what would make sense logically is we want to track if somebody comes off a social platform and then engages with your content on your website in a more meaningful way. In other words, did somebody really connect with your brand, get excited, and then come to your website to start to really consume all of your personal content? There is the belief that if somebody is doing that and doing that well, there’s a small bonus like in ranking. That there’s some positive total impact or else why did they bother the technology? The belief is, I say between 5 and 8% when I’m on the phone with clients, nobody knows exactly.

[00:22:29.760] – Robert Newman

I sure as hell don’t. But I think that there’s a reason that they did all that work. I think it connects into social. Is it have to do with shares specifically? No. It’s a tricky language thing here, John. In my opinion, this myth title, I think it’s tricky. So your turn.

[00:22:46.630] – Jonathan Denwood

No, I’ve got anything to say. I agree with you, Antoine.

[00:22:50.990] – Robert Newman

Okay, so there we go. Number five, this fifth myth is that pay-per-click advertising won’t help your search. Now, I didn’t pay that much attention when I got this deep into the video I did watch. By the way, John, I was excited to get into an SEO-related video. Never going to get any pushback from me on that. I hadn’t watched this particular one, so I was connected to it. But I know the answer to this question through much case study and testing on my part. That’s why I tuned out is because I’ve already done extensive case studying on exactly this question. I know I feel like I have a fact-based statistical answer to the question.

[00:23:31.600] – Jonathan Denwood

Shall I give my opinion first?

[00:23:33.410] – Robert Newman

Please.

[00:23:33.870] – Jonathan Denwood

I think it’s very linked to what you said about the social media. I think the actual act of driving traffic through paid discovery, through Google or through Facebook or through YouTube. Obviously, with Google, they’re twoproperties there are two properties there, Search and YouTube. Obviously, they’re owned by Google. Basically, it’s a bit like social media in my own mind. You drive traffic to your website, but it depends what the people do when they get to your website. Is there anything on that website that would keep them on that website? Is the IDX search functionality appealing? Is there evergreen content? Is there video content? All the stuff that we have gone on for the past couple of years, Rob. Because I obviously we specialize in Facebook advertising with a bit of Google as well, but I still have a holistic attitude to it. You can drive people to a landing page and then utilize mail rights, texting, and email functionality. But is it going to help with the way Google looks at your website? Well, it just depends. If you’re doing any of the things that we have endlessly talked about, that’s my opinion.

[00:25:19.040] – Robert Newman

Good opinion. There is a historic answer to this particular problem, and a legal one for Google. Anywhere and any resource that you ever hear speak that is a Google resource, either one gets cagey on this answer or B, emphatically denies that paid search impacts organic rankings. As Google has moved in the direction of user behavior, in order for paid search not to impact organic rankings, they would have had to make an exception for paid traffic, which they did not do. They did not do it. Google doesn’t care where the source of the traffic comes from. So if you get really high intent searches, high intent being for real estate people watching or listening to the show, that’s like Beverly Hills real estate or Homes for sale in Beverly Hills or Homes for sale in 9210, whatever that famous that is, 92010. When you’re looking at that specifically and you hit a great landing page and that person searches for 50 homes on your website. Does Google distinguish between that traffic and somebody who found a blog post about the most famous mansions in 92010? Then you read the blog post and then you also happen to go and maybe search for five homes because your intent for searching for homes wasn’t as high as the guy who is or the gal who is doing the search, homes for sale in 921010.

[00:26:55.910] – Robert Newman

Now, that means in layman’s terms, just putting that all simply for the people listening to the show. It really depends on how you target your traffic. But some of the time, page search is going to spike your organic rankings a lot. Hear me on this. A lot. It just depends on how carefully… I’m saying the same thing that John said. I’m just saying it with a little bit more detail. It really depends on how carefully you pay attention to turning on that paid advertising campaign and what pages you direct those ads to and how deeply they coordinate with what the person was searching for and how good of a job that you’ve done creating the page. Let me tell you this, everybody listening to the show, a template site won’t cut it. Hear me. It just won’t. You are going to have to, if you want ranking through paid, okay? You’re going to really have to have created a unique user experience. Now, what will work for all of you listening and oftentimes gets repeated ad nauseam by some of my competitors, is if you’ve created a really filtered search, real estate search site, like you’ve broken searches down into neighborhoods and you advertise on the search engines for paid search or Facebook, and you direct people directly to a listing that you advertised on Facebook or specific property searches that you’ve advertised on Google search.

[00:28:16.350] – Robert Newman

Most companies are focused on the big and the broad like Realtor. Com and Redfin. But if you focus on specific little pockets and give everybody the filtered searches on your website, you do have a good shot at maybe ranking based on user behavior because people will crack out on searching for properties in your site, which is user behavior, just because there’s two different types of user behavior. There’s search user behavior and there’s content user behavior and there’s a combination of the two. This is what I’m saying when I say you craft your page carefully based on your app. If you do all of that, then paid can be a huge hack into organic ranking. It absolutely can. I’ve case studied this ad nauseam. I’ve done this many times to try to show myself, can you rank faster doing paid versus not paid on organic? And the answer is yes, you can.

[00:29:10.220] – Jonathan Denwood

Yep. I’m going to slightly disagree with you here, but not a lot, but a little bit. This Google for a number of years has said that there’s a firewall between organic and paid, between the paid advertisement team and what they classify as the creators of their technology when it comes to organic. There’s a lot of people, really honest people in Google that really believe that. Unfortunately, it’s come out and it came out last week. Google’s been taken to court by the Justice Department and some extremely damaging documentation was released by the Justice Department. This, this is my take on it, Rob. This propaganda that’s been spewed by Google. I think through them being taken to court, I think it’s going to be extremely damaging to Google because Google is not your friends, folks. It’s a company that wants to make tons of money, does make tons of money, and wants to still make tons of money. They are not your friend. You’ve got to use them the best you can. But it is disturbing what has come out with these relevantations from the Justice Department because they are quite damaging.

[00:30:57.600] – Robert Newman

Does it surprise me. There used to be this old adage with Google saying, do no evil, be good. That changed a long time ago. That started changing two CEOs ago. Eric Schmidt started driving the direction of the company. Google has been being very unfriendly to its customers and very not even handed with their results for a long time now. That’s been a trend that they’ve been moving in the direction of for ages. They changed. The most recent thing where they screwed their users is they keep making a less and less transparent version of Google Analytics. Why? Because guys like me and people who make a living off little subsections of Google, they were giving us too much data and they’re giving it to us for free. They keep asking themselves the question, Why do we have to give these guys anything for free? It’s our data, we collect it. They’re not wrong necessarily. It’s not friendly, though, and it’s not in my best interest. It’s not in the end user’s best interest. It’s in Google’s best interest. There’s only one person that wins. So I agree with you. They’ve been heading in that direction for a while.

[00:32:09.120] – Robert Newman

They’re getting their pants sued right off them in the UK. That’s happened many times. They’ve already lost a number of lawsuits having to do with monopolies and infringement, privacy infringements, things like that. They’re going to continue to lose cases and probably continue not to care because at this point, they have the biggest repository of data on the planet about people, about our behavior. How valuable is that? Think about it. They started that revolution and Facebook tried to put its hand in the cookie jar and got it smack so loudly and so hard you would have thought that Google would learn from the experience, but no. All right, number six. Number six.

[00:32:51.290] – Jonathan Denwood

Number six.

[00:32:52.980] – Robert Newman

Is ranking always about number one. Once again, I’m going to take this up. I don’t know what ARF said. I’ve never made it this far. Don’t care. That’s why I didn’t make it.

[00:33:05.440] – Jonathan Denwood

Can I say? Well, I think first. Sure. Obviously, to get to number one is preferable, but on the other hand, with a lot of the terms that Rob deals with, very dependent, and he will answer, he might totally disagree with me, some of the terms, depending on which area, if it’s a highly competitive or it’s an area and they’ve got similar, probably in-house. I do agree with Rob. He’s probably one of the few people in the real estate industry that you can hire at a rate that’s semi-affordable. A lot of the other experts, they’re extremely expensive for their work in-house with a particular brokerage. It just depends on the term. It’s profitable, but might not be achievable. But getting to the top three or four still will make a difference. Probably getting to number one isn’t over the way.

[00:34:14.450] – Robert Newman

Okay, so here’s my response to this question. I’m going to say no. I’m going to solidly go the other direction. And why do I say no? All of you real estate folks out here really need to hear this. It’s a scientific answer. It’s not probably going to be easily digestible, but you really need to hear it. Thirty-five point one % of all search results are something called featured snippets. That is where you really don’t get a top hit to an answer. You get maybe a single site that is number one, but right underneath that site or right above that site, you get people also ask semicolon, and then you get a number of what to look appear to be drop-down menus, and you get that above all search results. Then you get an ad infinitum, Google has taken away pages. They now have what’s called an infinity scroll on all results, so that number one or number five doesn’t make that much of a difference. This has changed behavior a massive amount. People don’t necessarily look to click on number one, they look for the place and the page that’s going to answer their specific question.

[00:35:19.550] – Robert Newman

Now here’s the mind-blowing bit. Thirty-five point one purchases a cent is the number for the internet as.

[00:35:26.740] – Jonathan Denwood

A whole.

[00:35:28.510] – Robert Newman

My estimate for real estate-focused searches and featured snippets is more like 70-80%. Most searches that you do about lifestyle, neighborhoods, cities, I can go on and on. They’re all going to be featured snippets. Some, like I’m just going to do real estate for sale in Beverly Hills as a search right now. Right here..

[00:35:57.680] – Jonathan Denwood

There’s.

[00:35:58.870] – Robert Newman

A featured snippet, four results down. It isn’t one or two, but obviously, with that search, it’s Zillowrealtor. Com, truly a Redfin, the big companies get the position, and the smaller companies, Sotheby’s and Coldwell Bank, are below the snippet. Now this snippet is in the middle of the page. Guess what, ladies and gentlemen, this is my favorite freaking thing to tell people when I’m doing SEO. How you get into featured snippets requires specialized adoption on your website. You have to do certain things to get featured snippets. It’s an SEO mechanic. It is why I make a living. It’s no longer driven by the size of your brand to get into those featured snippets. I never had a shot of getting my clients into real estate for sale in Beverly Hills. But since blog posts are now part of the response to the people also asked, there is a site called Lotus Properties, which I’ve never heard of, which is number one, and it would essentially, in the old Google algorithm, be number five on the page. It is a featured snippet discovery. Google figured out a way to get deeper knowledge outside of big brands onto major number-one hits on the page.

[00:37:17.460] – Robert Newman

When you’re having dialogs with yourself and other people, can you theoretically talk about number one? Sure. Should you be focused on it? Talk to your SEO company about it. Talk to your marketers about it? No. The depth of your knowledge and your accreditation for listening to the show is going to be this little piece of information, featured snippets, or what drives most of my clients strong. Like most of my clients, John. I’m on the first page for Fairhope, Alabama. I’m on the first page for about half the cities that we target. Am I on the first page for the actual term Fairhope Alabama? No. Why? Because Wikipedia has that every single time. Every single time.

[00:38:01.460] – Jonathan Denwood

You’re going to be a bit worried if they did something.

[00:38:04.860] – Robert Newman

I’m in the future snippet, talking about how expensive it is to live in the city, talking about what the property tax is in the city. That’s where I’m at. But my clients get hundreds upon hundreds of visits from those results. We still achieve the end goal by being in the featured snippets. Imagine if you’re in the middle of zillowtruleorrealtor. Com, Redfin, and then you’re Lotus Proper, and you’ve got, What’s the best part of Beverly Hills to live in? That’s the thing that they got. Now you get that search that little people also ask under the same topic, and boom, baby. Is that a lot of credibility? Hell, yeah, it is. Are you number one? No, you’re not. You’re number five in the featured snippets. All right, I think I’ve gotten off my high horse enough. We’re going to wrap up this show-up. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for tuning in. We’ve given you a full 30 minutes, plus 10 extra of Robert going on a tangent about ranking number one.

[00:39:01.790] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I thought you did quite well, and I think it’s been some good value, don’t you think so?

[00:39:08.360] – Robert Newman

I hope so because I hope so. If I can’t do good value on this subject, fire me.

[00:39:14.570] – Jonathan Denwood

I think we have managed to give value without going off on a big end in a really big tech dive.

[00:39:21.870] – Robert Newman

How do you hope so? We want nothing more than for everybody to be able to follow the show and get something from it that they learn and understand it. Speaking of learning and understanding stuff, John, ladies, and gentlemen, John has a platform that could be comparable to Real Geaks and other bold leads and other systems like him. He’s done a very, very good job of creating an affordable platform, using all of his knowledge previously about WordPress development and then his new knowledge about Facebook. He’s partnered with a guy who’s a Facebook marketing expert. He does a podcast with another guy who’s one of the best real estate SEO guys in the country. That would be me. Between all of those things, he’s come up with a really great little marketing offer. Obviously, as somebody who’s trying to promote it, he’s going to give you a lot of his time if you decide to set an appointment with him. He’s going to talk to you and try to consult with you and help you out. One more thing, John. Sorry, Jim. Sorry, Rob. I’m trying to give you a huge testimonial, so let me finish. One other thing I can say from personal experience is that John’s core desire will be to help you.

[00:40:28.900] – Robert Newman

That’s not very true of many people that you can call. If any of this sounds like it fits you, please give John a call now. Go ahead.

[00:40:38.930] – Jonathan Denwood

I’m just going to say, Rob, thanks for that. I think where we are is we provide a really great platform that can help you get leads. But I think what Rob offers is… I have to put, all the things we’ve talked about, Rob, is that if you don’t have the content on the website, if you don’t have that evergreen. We try and get people to a stage where they could come to you and hire you, you don’t hire your team. But our aim is to provide a solid platform that can get somebody to the level where they could consider hiring you and your team.

[00:41:23.800] – Robert Newman

Thank you very much. I really appreciate that. Ladies and gentlemen, if you’d like to learn more about what I and my team do, you can go to inboundREM.com and look under About or Services or look at our case studies, which are linked off the homepage, or watch my video on the homepage, which I filmed when I was establishing the company. I also have some old videos up there under a handle called Newman’s Buzz. If any of you want to see how long I’ve really been doing this, and I’ve never advertised it anywhere because I forgot I had them, but they’re 10, 11, 12-year-old videos talking about real estate, my direction that I thought it was going. It’s a fascinating watch because I just rewatched them myself. Some of it I got wrong. Some of it, it felt like I had a crystal ball. Anyway, everybody, thank you so much for tuning into the show. John, is there anything you’d like to add before we sign off?

[00:42:16.780] – Jonathan Denwood

No, just give us some feedback. We would love some feedback on how you found this show. Would you like some more of this more techno-focused content, or did we leave you? I thought we kept you at a reasonable level, but we love your feedback.

[00:42:30.480] – Robert Newman

Yep, absolutely agree with John. Send it to… Go to the mail-right. Com website and leave a comment on his site. Or you can go to inboundREM.com and do the same for me. You can also email me at Robert@inboundrem.com. All right, that’s it. Sign us off, John.

————————————–

The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show

Jonathan Denwood & Robert Newman

https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa

————————————–

Robert Newman

InboundREM

https://inboundrem.com

————————————–