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#1 – Video ( Facebook, YouTube and Instagram)
#2 – Reviews
#3 – Facebook Advert
#4 – Email and text marketing
#5 – Google Local Service Ads
Welcome back, folks, to The Mail-Right show. This is episode 411. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about how you get high-quality real estate digital leads in 2024. 2023 is coming to an end. It’s gone quickly, isn’t it, folks? Plus, my regular co-host, Robert Newman, has gone away on vacation for the month. Taking his place is my co-founder of the Mail-Right show, Adam Brown. Adam, would you like to introduce yourself to the listeners quickly?
Yeah. Jonathan and I have been working together for a past… Man, are we coming up on almost two years?
I’ll be free.
Oh, wow. I also have a marketing agency, so really familiar with videos, and photos, working with Jonathan, all the SEO, Google video reviews, and things like that as well as the program he’s got going. So thanks for having me on.
No problem, Adam. Adam, like I said, he really specializes in video and Facebook. He’s an idea, the website, and the SEO.
Good compliment.
Yes, I think so. Folks, in this episode, Adam’s going to be doing this show with me and probably a couple of shows in December. Then we’re going for a break over Christmas and the New Year, but we will be back, and hopefully, Robert will be back as well from his trip. As I said, in this episode, we’re going to be discussing how to get digital leads in 2024. Let’s start off the number one thing we have hammered away during the 2023 video. Video, in all the mediums that we have been talking about, will help you attract more leads and better quality leads through Facebook, advertisement, YouTube, Instagram, or, if you’re really up on the edge, TikTok. But we’re planning to discuss videos for Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. What are your thoughts about video and utilizing video to get better-quality leads, Adam?
Yeah, the video is huge. It’s pretty much the staple now online, even using static images on social media. It’s just not getting the reach that it used to, which is unfortunate for the photographers. I also do photography, but video is more my niche. It’s not a waste of time to do static images, but it is worth your time to start implementing video if you’re not already. Honestly, we should have been implementing video, not we, but everyone out there years ago, just because of how much more effective and captivating it is to reach people. Plus, it works better. It’s better for SEO. It’s just better all around. It’s so highly suggested, and it’s why we keep pounding on this with all the different workshops and stuff that we’re presenting.
Yeah, obviously, these are different platforms, folks, so different types of video work on them. The other thing is, most of you are either going to have a really great iPhone, or you’re going to have a good Android. Almost all modern phones now have a fabulous ability to take video. Actually, Adam had some technical problems, and he couldn’t utilize his new, average cameras. He’s recording this with me using his iPhone, and it looks like… And it looks fantastic because he’s got the lighting set up. What I mean by different types, in Facebook, we can… A lot of people don’t want to take videos of themselves, add and can develop and utilize a video library of pre-taken videos and slides. We can make some compelling videos without you being part of the video. But if you can take some video, which we can utilize the more, the better, but we can advise you. Facebook, if you’re going to utilize it for branding, it’s best if you can video yourself about the local market, about what properties, showing properties, walking through a new property, and promoting it. These are all excellent ideas. But when it comes to Facebook advertising and utilizing video, you don’t necessarily have to be in it.
When it comes to YouTube, that’s different because that’s more about education. Would you agree? Because I think, Adam, when it comes to YouTube, people want to know about different aspects of the area that you’re an active real estate agent in. They want to know about the schools, the parks, the immediateities in general, the market in general. It’s really very informational focus. Would you agree with that, Adam?
Yeah. And yet our household, my wife and kids, watch a lot of YouTube for entertainment purposes. We don’t have cable, for instance. We were trying to think of using it for entertainment reasons, which really if what we’re sharing on YouTube as real estate agents or whatever industry we’re in, if it’s not entertaining and it’s just spewing out all this information without having some fun, it’s just not going to be as effective either. Yes, totally agree. But also keep the fun aspect as you’re being resourceful and providing information to people.
Yes, absolutely. I see exactly where you’re coming from, Adam. You can’t be too dry and it doesn’t necessarily have to be too… Don’t end up like me, folks. But he doesn’t want to be too long either. But if you could do a monthly video about what the market is like in your area, show some of the properties, talk about the different areas, the different types of property. We’ve discussed finding the niche, if you can, that will help resonate your videos to the right target and offering a resource and talking about that resource during the video, having some lead magnet and having a landing page that they can go to to get that lead magnet, and having a link in the video, that’s important as well, folks. Now, when it comes to Instagram, what’s the situation? Because you’ve got the different type of reels and you’ve got the different types of advertisement on Instagram. What’s your thoughts about this, Adam?
Yeah. Like you said, you have the Reels, which is more of that vertical portrait way of holding your camera, your phone, for instance, and their stories, which is going to use the same format for that placement. And then you could do posts still. Facebook, for instance, when you do a post, it’s turning it into a reel. So if they’re owned by the same company, so that makes sense. And just as a little pro tip too, YouTube has the YouTube shorts. So if you’re already doing the portrait format up and down with your phone and it’s quality enough and it’s resourceful enough and it’s entertaining, if you can make it short and sweet and make it look pretty decent with your phone, which I think you can, I know you can actually, you can also post those onto YouTube as well. So you’re getting more bang for your buck with the time and effort you’re putting into creating these videos. So definitely check that out too.
Yeah, it’s really important, folks, that you just have a plan of action where you have one or two hours a week and you knock up a few of these videos and you keep at it. Because for branding purposes, the more you get in front of your target audience, the more trust and an management you will build up, which will make your other paid advertisement or your other attempts to get good quality leads a lot more easier. On to the next video, reviews. Now, I think reviews in general, getting really good reviews, get them on your website, utilize them on your Google Local Business Area page, getting them on your Zillow, the free Zillow resource that they offer you. But just generally getting reviews is one area that a lot of real estate agents fell on. I think it’s one of the key factors that really will determine how effective your digital lead generation is compared to other people, your ability to have a system and get reviews. What’s your views on this, Adam?
Yeah, I feel like you and I hammer out reviews and try to reinforce that because it’s super important. It’s really good for SEO. Google loves it. Like Jonathan said, dito to all of that and integrating it into your website as well. It’s huge. It’s necessary. Reviews are basically today’s word of mouth without talking to somebody. When we buy stuff, whether it’s a home or some electronic device, we are looking for reviews. What are people saying about it? I don’t know about you, but when I see it’s got four to five stars, that’s when I start to look a little bit more versus if it’s a little less expensive and doesn’t have four stars, I probably won’t look at that one just because of the reviews. They’re powerful and they’re really important.
Having them linked to a social media platform and then utilize them on your landing page or your paid advertisement is really going to increase the effectiveness of your paid advertisement. We specialize in Facebook and Google, local adverts platform, and having reviews and having those reviews generated by a social media platform and then utilizing them is really important. Just writing a review, getting a written review and putting it on your website helps. But a lot of people will dismiss it as well. If it’s linked to actual social media platform, gives it more credence and it will really make a difference to how effective your outreach, especially through paid advertisement, and it just makes a big difference. Now, with Mailright, I just want to plug the Mailright platform, it’s a CRM, it’s a social media platform, and we’ve got a really easy, usable CRM in build. Plus, it does text messaging and email and text strip campaigns. But we also got a really fantastic in Build review platform that you can send out a request asking for reviews in batches, and that really saves time. We’ve known people utilize it and it makes the whole process of getting these reviews and getting it more systematic, a lot easier.
I think it’s one of the gems of our Mailwright system, really. Would you agree with that, Adam?
Yeah, I think it’s such a great way and it’s user-friendly and it’s got a little bit of a… What would you call it? So if reviews come in that are under a seven or something, right? They go through a process so they’re not immediately posted onto the website, right?
We ask for a mini survey from people and you can see it. It’s like 1-10. It just asks them… Obviously, if you ask for them to write out a full review straight away, you’re going to get a lot of resistance. It just seems quickly, they click it and then they ask, Can you give a rating of 1-10 stars about your experience? You can set it at five or whatever limit. If it only gives you five or below, it will take them to the screen asking, Can we have a chat? Can you give me more feedback? If it’s five or above, depending where you set it to, it will then ask for a quick review and then it will take them to either Google or Facebook and they can leave a quick review there, then we find this system just really helps agents get a lot more reviews. We’ve got some more great points to tell you about and point out to you, but we’re going to go for our break now, folks. We’ll be back in a few moments.
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Welcome back, folks. It’s strange to do this without Adam, but I think, Roblox, I should say. But Adam’s doing a sterling job. Let’s talk about Facebook adverts. I think about almost a year ago, Facebook was facing a challenge because they were dealing with the new position that Apple had brought out, and they made it much harder for Facebook to get the information they need that enables them to make their efforts really effective. But the good news is, folks, that basically using artificial intelligence, Facebook threw an army of their developers and a load of money, basically, because they had to deal with this because it was affecting the results people were getting from Facebook. Now they’re getting better results than ever, the reports I’m getting, and Facebook has just come back. I think for a real estate agent, combining video, which we mentioned in the first part of the show, is really important. What’s your feelings about this, Adam?
Yeah, I think with Facebook in particular, it’s good to run some test ads and do different formats of the video, and also do carousels and static images. That way you can test and make sure the money is going into the placements that are the most effective, and so you’re not losing as much money, but also gaining more quality leads through being more strategic with your advertising on there.
Yeah, it’s really important, though, because with the mail write system, you’ve got two choices: you’ve got the DIY element of WordPress where you get a fantastic website which you can brand and that’s yours, and IDX integration as well, plus the suite of all the tools, the CRM, the Drip, email, the text messaging, that all comes in a DIY package at one of the best prices out there. But if you don’t, you can then do your own Facebook adverts and run your own campaigns. But we also offer a concierge service where Adam and our team can manage the campaigns for you. So you’ve got options with us. That’s the basic choice. Our platform is really powerful because most people go wrong, and I want to see if you agree with this, Adam, is they run their campaigns a bit too short and also they don’t have the consistent follow-through because with Facebook adverts, people are at different journeys on their house purchasing or selling journey, and it’s a disruption platform. So videos, they think, I want that information or I want to know about that property. Then you send them to the landing page, you get their name, email, and phone number, and then our system will email them over a month and text message them.
Then after the month, it puts them on another list, which then they will be sent a monthly type newsletter. It just keeps them in your sphere of influence because they’re all at different stages of, like I said, the buying or selling journey, aren’t they? What do you reckon, Adam?
Yeah, I think you nailed it. So obviously, test them to create different placement formats and sizes. I think people don’t spend enough money on it. I would definitely put at least $50 if you’re trying to get any significant results and you want their AI and algorithms to really try to pull what you’re trying to do. When you put five or ten bucks, it’s just not really going to be super effective. So you will get into it what you’re putting into it, which is good and bad depending on your budget and what you want to spend. The other thing is people don’t run it long enough, and so you can’t run it for two days and be done. Although I have had clients say, stop, wehave enough people. We’re good, which is always a great problem when you spend eight bucks if that’s the case. That just doesn’t happen too often. Run it for a good week, maybe even two weeks, once you know which are performing better from the tests that you’re doing. That’s a couple of quick tips. We could really spend hours talking about this.
Next week, Sean would probably do a deeper dive about Facebook. The main thing is a lot of people give too much information on their Facebook effort. You need to be in what I call with Facebook, the go delox area. You give enough information to intrigue them, so to click on the effort and go to the landing page. If you give them too little, there’s no reason for them to click the effort. But on the other end, if you give them too much information, they won’t click either because they got everything they wanted. That’s why. Now, if you do want us to run your Facebook effort, we got a great concierge service and it’s $250 a month, so it’s not outrageous, folks. Then we recommend that most areas you need a 250 budget to start off with, so that’s 500 bucks. We run one or two campaigns a month for you. You do have to sign up for six months, though, because it does take their upfront cost. We have to interview you, find out. It’s a customized service to some extent. We’ve got a library of different campaigns that work, but we do customize for each clientele.
We need you to sign up for six months, but it’s not an outrageous amount of money. We find that people get fabulous results from it. Or if you want to, you can sign up for the MailRide platform on its own, which starts at around $150 or slightly underneath. You can do all this on our platform yourself, so you’ve got great choices. Email and text marketing. I think the money is in the list, as they say. It comes from a lot of the leading individuals that started talking about digital marketing, is that building up your email list and then emailing those people and keeping your email list, your database up to date and relevant, text messaging is powerful, but we suggest that when you run a campaign, you can text people, but you do it like you send two email and you send one text message, and you do that for the first 30 days, and then you just put them on the email list afterwards. That’s what we recommend. I think email has been proven. When social media ads came out, and it’s great social media, but a lot of so-called guru was saying the email was finished.
That’s turned out to be totally untrue, hasn’t it?
Yeah, it’s still effective. It’s still necessary. If you’re saying faxes, maybe that’s true, it’s faxing. But email is fax. I thought it was a fax. Yeah, right? What is a fax, though? And so-.
I bet when you say that to your family, they just look blank at you.
I could- I know, I’m sorry. -like, I wouldn’t even know what that is.
We don’t even know in what fact what you’re talking about.
Yeah, a facsimile. And the good thing is if you aren’t good at following up the mail-write program with the email text strip campaigns, basically really helps you out with that. So it’s always good. I mean, the sooner you can follow up, the better. But it is set up in a way that there’s multiple, multiple touches through that first week. So you’re top of mind, tip of tongue, and you’re going to find out if they’re interested or can you put them in the pipeline inside the CRM? So it’s great because you could put notes on there and things like that, that of the process and conversations and things just to keep you fresh next time you go in there.
Yeah.
We can.
Like I said, we’ve got a full… You can build a full email text campaign, 30 days or plus. Plus, we’ve got a landing page builder that’s really easy, but it’s flexible and you can build great landing pages. Plus, we provide some digital lead magnet resources, or you can upload your own, plus the review platform plus the social media, Canada. Because a lot of people, one of the key things, folks, is to get a result on social media, you’ve really got to publish a lot of social media content. And most agents, it’s feast or famine, either you’ve got no time at all. The other key to social media is every month posts a lot of content. Well, you can pre-populate and we help you there. We supply to all our clients a calendar worth of one post a day to Facebook and other platforms. We provide that for you charge and you can add to it. It just puts your social media on steroids, basically. The last thing, before we wrap this up, Adam, is Google Local Service Ads. We want to point out, if you go to the MailRoy YouTube channel, we’ve got about four or five really great videos about Google Local Service Ads.
Do you want to tell the listeners quickly what they are, basically?
Yeah. There are ads on Google that hit your immediate area, and it’s created through your business account and the information you provide on your profile. So it’s super important that you fill that out correctly. Like Jonathan said, we have several videos that can explain and walk you through that, or you could just get a hold of us through the website. They’re good leads, they’re good leads. They’re not inexpensive. But again, you’re getting what you’re paying for. I think, Jonathan, I would say they’re better than Zillow leads, right?
Well, basically, Google is competing with Zillow. Basically, when you do a search for a local service in Google, folks, you will see the top three, and they will be linked to a MacPAC, as this is the SEO term they call it. And those free placements, not all the time. It depends if they’ve got anybody advertising on the platform, but in most areas, they’re paid placement. And you want to be one of those… Basically, it’s very similar to Zillow Premier in the way it works. They have a bid. If you’re the highest bid, your advert will show. They match searches when people are doing a search in Google, and they know, especially when somebody’s using a mobile device where they are located, so they match the search. These typically cost between $50 to $70 per lead. The great thing is that if you think the quality of the lead is totally rubbish, you can actually make a claim, and you can claim that money back off Google. Zillow doesn’t do that very well. We find they’re much higher quality. But the key to this is you do have to pick up the phone. If Google senses that you’re not, they will back off sending these leads to you.
And second, you’ve got to set up your Google business profile, claim it, and fill it in. We do have a service where we can assist you to do this. If you do sign up for the mail right for the year, we’ll set it up for you for free. If you don’t want to sign up, there is a charge, but we will help you set it all up for you and advise you. But it’s more expensive than Facebook advertising folks, but the quality of the lead, they’re much further on their journey, their buying or selling journey, than what a Facebook lead is. But you can be lucky with a Facebook lead, you can show up at the right moment. But in general, they’ve got a much broader intent of either purchasing or selling. With the Google Local Service Ads, they tend to be much further on their buying or selling journey. Their intent is much later on in the process. That’s why you have to pay that price to get them. It’s very similar to Zillow. But as we all know, the quality of Zillow premium efforts, unless you pay for their screening services, which is an extra cost, i.
E, they get a virtual, they get offshore VC actually to rent out the prospect. That’s all the extra cost that Zillow charges you. It gets very expensive very quickly. I think Google Local Service Ads is much better than you. You need a little bit of help. The brutal truth, folks, is almost 80% of real estate agents don’t set up their Google Local page correctly or don’t claim it at all. It’s just bonkers, basically. It’s time to wrap it up. We’re at the half-hour mark. We’ll be back next week, and we’ll probably talk about Facebook in a bit more depth or use video equipment. For the next two weeks, if Adam’s up for it, we could do two shows before the Christmas and New Year break. In one of them, we talk about Facebook advertising in a bit more detail. In the second, before we went for a break, we talked about video equipment because Adam knows everything about that. What do you reckon, Adam? Do you think it’s been a good show?
It’s been a great show, and I guess what? If all you have is an iPhone, I just recorded on my own iPhone, so you could do it.
I’m going to tell you, Adam.
It doesn’t look too bad, huh?
Well, you’ve got all the lights in, Adam.
Lighting helps, and onthe honestly, you could spend like 30 bucks and have enough lighting. Let’s talk about that, too, right? There are some more just for you to maximize your reach and make it look good for pretty inexpensive.
Hopefully, you’ve enjoyed it, give us some feedback, folks. We’d love you to go to the Mailwright, leave a comment on the Mailwright YouTube channel, and give us some feedback. We will be back next week with another, giving you some real value and insights. See you soon, folks. Bye.
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Uncover the truth about Redfin in this thought-provoking show that delves into whether it is a devil incarnate or a saintly enterprise. Gain valuable knowledge about how Redfin operates and its impact on real estate markets, then decide for yourself which side of the debate you stand on. Don’t miss out—now, to gain a deeper understanding of this contentious topic.
We discuss the similarities Betwen WeWork – Adam Neumann | Redfin CEO and Founder – Glenn Kelman business models.
#1 – Redfin has existed for 20 years. It has yet to be a profitable enterprise.
#2 – Even during 2021, the most extraordinary of boom years, the company lost $109.6 million.
#3 – Making payroll every two weeks for over 2,000 agents is a sobering reality. And while Redfin has referred out the business to “partner agents” for years and recently announced a goal to send 50% of its leads to such non-Redfin agents, a path to profitability has remained hard to discern.
#4 – Redfin CEO and Founder – Glenn Kelman
The estimated Net Worth of Glenn Kelman is at least $41.6 Million dollars as of 9 November 2023. Mr. Kelman owns over 211,111 units of Redfin Corp stock worth over $7,496,727, and over the last 5 years, he sold RDFN stock worth over $33,022,650. In addition, he makes $1,082,280 as President, Chief Executive Officer, and Director at Redfin Corp.
#5 – The future of Redfin?
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. It’s episode number 410 of The Mail-Right Podcast. Today, we’re going to talk about one of Mr. Donwood’s favorite subjects in the whole wide world, which is Redfin. If you tuned into our show last week, he’s looking all confused. But of our last 10 shows, Redfin has been brought up at least two or three of them. Oh, I didn’t know. He probably just doesn’t realize it. The title of today’s show is Redfin, Devil Incarnate or Saintly enterprise, which is a very English way of phrasing it, all that anyway. In case you did not know, I’m going to allow my co-host a moment to speak and introduce himself, and you’ll figure out pretty quickly. He’s an English bloke. Hold on. John, take it away.
Thanks, Rob. I’m the joint founder of mail-right. Com. We are a CRM lead generative platform that also provides a great website solution. Back over to you, Rob.
All right, so today we are going to dive into Redfin, which has been making the news, as it oftentimes does. One of the reasons it makes the news so frequently is that in case you did not know, Redfin does not follow traditional model. Number one, they charge their customers like a flat 1% commission rate. So they have a lower commission structure. They put their agents on salary, which sounds lovely. All of this sounds lovely. Pay, customers pay less, the agents get a salary, what could possibly go wrong? Well, truth is that the point that John has put down that was number one, which I do happen to know. I am not the Redfin expert that John is, but Redfin has yet to be profitable. It’s existed for 20 years. John, why don’t you kick off the conversation there? You’re the one who created that title, so I’m sure you have something to say about it. Let’s hear what your thoughts are about that.
Thanks, Rob. Well, it’s linked to last week’s chat we had. Folks, you definitely want to listen to last week’s show, because obviously Redfin decided to leave the NAR before the lawsuits really hit the public media in some ways. I think the Redfin founder, Glenn, has always had a very—I’m looking for the right word, Rob. I’m struggling relationship with the NAR. But before we go into the business side, because I’m just fascinated to get your view on it, how would you classify their technology, their web technology specifically? Do you think there’s anything particularly special or that differentializes their web presence than some of the leading national franchise players and even some of the brokerage or clientele that you represent?
Well, they’ve definitely had a unique spin on lead flow and lead assignment from the very beginning. Redfin had used to—this is not true anymore, used to have a much better job at landing pages and hyperlocal presence. I think that one of the challenges that Redfin has done is that from the very beginning, John, they focused on the small, long tail searches, and stayed away from competing against the major, like homes for sale in city name. That was always the top searches. Redfin understood that Trulia and Zillow had those locked up, and I don’t think they put as many of their resources in them, and they did instead, neighborhood searches, subdivision searches, things like that. And they’ve done a very good job. But what happened, though, is competition changed, and now Redfin has become more known for its commission model. They also lost the fight in producing anything unique inside the website space. In other words, their website looks and operates very similar to the way that Trulia does. It’s not that much different in terms of page design. I’m looking at when they’re landing pages right now, it’s identical to truly a landing page. The data points presented on the page are slightly different.
Redfin does a slightly better job at doing the details, and then it, of course, points you in the direction of Redfin, Real Estate Agents, which is its interpretation in the digital age of what Century 21 did back in the ’70s and the ’80s. Do I think that they did a really good job with this? No, I think they fell short. I think they fell short through no fault of their own, because whoever started the company ran the company. They just couldn’t keep up with all the technological advances on the website side. That’s my opinion.
Yeah, I think that’s very astute. I think Glenn Carman background, he had a successful start-up at the start of his career, which was bought. Then he started Redfin and he still goes on a lot of startup podcasts and talks to the startup VC community probably as much as he talks to the traditional real estate industry. I think that… Would you agree that’s what surprises me? That is, in my opinion, that Redfin and the founder have been dealing with a broken business model for a very long time, but that’s just my opinion. But I think because of what we discussed last week, I think he blames or hints that it was the monopoly, in his opinion, the monopoly practices of the NAR and the more traditional national franchise brokerages that contributed to his broken business model. How would you respond to that, Robert?
I would say that there’s probably some truth to that. I’d say that Glenn probably gave up the ghost on competing, and I think he’s given it 20 good years. From what I can see, the one thing that I’ve learned from being an investor is that you like, there’s a lot of companies that do nothing but track how much stock are the leaders of the company keeping, selling, stuff like that. Glenn has been selling his for a while, like a long time. He’s been selling and selling and selling and not rebuying. I think that tells you everything you need to know about Redfin. That’s the CEO of the company divesting himself of his stock, of which, by the way, he sold the largest percentage that he’s ever sold on November second of this year.
Yeah, that’s very insightful. Thanks for that. I didn’t realize that, Rob. What is the problem with Redfin? Obviously, discounting has been around a long time. Paying your agents directly, the research I did, he’s got over 2,000, they’ve been backing away from that model and increasingly, more of their agents are paid on the more traditional model of commission. Was that one of the leading factors? Because I think we both agree that we feel that there’s some fundamental weaknesses in the business model of Redfin. Was it that one of the key problems paying agents directly a salary rather than then a commission-based structure?
If you were going to pay agents a salary, then there’s no doubt that you have to have an aggressive bonus compensation. There’s definitely a lot of… It’s a good thought to say that you’re going to pay somebody a good wage. In a very tight… I know of one broker that does that successfully, and he is a retired military guy who lives in a military city in Florida and hires only ex-military people, and he runs his operation like a military operation. It works in that environment that I’m mentioning, it works very well. He’s a very highly rated brokerage and agency and with very high success numbers coming in from their clients. But in every other environment that I’ve ever seen people try to do this, it fails. And the reason it generally fails is pretty simple. You take an agent who you’re paying 1% to, and it doesn’t simplify the real estate process. In many cases, and I’m sorry to my audience, real estate agents are overpaid for the effort that they deliver. But the reason that there is such a high compensation, John, is that every once in a great while you have a real estate client that you have to work for weeks or months on, as if it’s your only job.
An old lady with health problems, and you all of a sudden have to move her, replace her carpet, and the list goes on and on. Basically, your life becomes moving this human out of their home. In those rare circumstances, like where you take a Redfin agent and say if they want a good review, do they have to work any less hard than a fully commissioned agent? The answer is no. They do all the same work and get paid literally a third of what somebody else would get paid. So any good agent providing a high level of service is going to look at that eventually and go, I’m making literally a third less, and in these problematic circumstances where I have these really high energy clients, I am just getting compensated so much less than what I should be compensated. I think that’s a problem. How does Redfin keep really high quality people when that becomes a reality?
Do you think it’s also linked? Because as you know, Robert, I’ve seen it in Northern Nevada, and obviously I’m sure you’ve seen it, that a lot of the regional large brokerages and also the national franchise brokerages, a lot of their model depends on having a very large group of agents. A lot of them are part-time, a lot of them might only sell three or four houses a year at the most. But the percentage that the brokerage takes from those sales is extremely high compared to the deals that they have to do with high-producing agents that part of their brokerage. I think that model in a buoyant market works, but it doesn’t work that well in a more settled market or a semi-declining market. What’s your thoughts about that?
Can you rephrase that question for me?
Well, this whole business model, which I think a lot of brokerage is not exclusively, but I’ve noticed in Northern Nevada where they have a vast group of part-time agents.
And a.
Lot of those agents only sell two, three, four houses a year.
I.
Don’t think agent handling that level of transactions can really have a feel for the market, and this is just my opinion, but it’s very beneficial to the brokerage in profitability. What do you think is going to happen to that model? Do you agree that is a model?
That lot going on? Well, there is absolutely no question whatsoever. So if Redfin has 2,000 agents, then check this out. Keller Williams has 187,000. Exp has like 30,000. So the largest brokerage by age account is Keller Williams, and I think that Keller Williams has done an incredible job at creating value in the recruitment process. They’ve also got enough training material so that most new agents drift in the direction of working with, like a Keller Williams. But that model that you described, do I think they seek it out? Hell, yeah. Why wouldn’t they? Because when you have a model that can get 100,000 of anything, and that 100,000 people, let’s say, produce like two deals a person, that’s still like 200,000 deals a year with… There’s always complications, John, just like any other industry. The highest level, highest producing agents are going to make the brokerage operate at the narrowest margin, because they’re going to negotiate for their own salaries aggressively, and you’re going to have a very hard time turning them down, or because there’s so many no commission agencies, and by the time an agent is able to sell 20 or 30 properties a year.
They’re probably doing their own marketing. They absolutely understand how to do the transaction coordination. You have to work pretty hard to provide them a service they can’t do themselves. So do companies like Keller Williams seek out these part-time agents? Absolutely. Is it a model that I see being sustained in a shaky economy? Not as much would be my answer.
It’s also linked, this is why I wanted to bring, because I think you were a little bit, I wouldn’t say puzzled, but you had some slightly puzzled why I brought this red thing in. Because I saw it very linked to our conversation last week, Robert, about obviously what happened with the lawsuit, which we only touched very little bit in the second half of last week’s show, we mostly talked about follow-up boss. But obviously, what has happened to the NAR, it might take years for that legally to go through all the processes. But you can, to some extent, see the writing on the wall with the 6% really, because I agreed with what you said last week that if you take a common sense position, that is a lot of money for what the average time needed for the average transaction. So can you see why? Because hopefully you can see where I was coming from in this discussion here a little bit.
I mean, yes and no, I’ve never really considered Redfin to be a major player. They’re two thousands of agents comparatively to… Zillow has more agents than Redfin does at this point. They are so many, they’re one of the smallest brokerages by age and count that exists, and they have a very unique model, and I think that it’s dying on the vine, so I don’t pay too much attention to them. Is it worthy of a discussion, though, in and of itself, of course. I mean, Redfin is, Zillow is, Realtor. Com is every single one of these companies, and if you want to take this as a nod to their disconnection from the NAR, and/or Glenn trying to say that NAR is anti-competitive. Well, hell, yes, they are. Yes, they are. They are anti-competitive. Nar has been egregiously trying to maintain control over an industry that would absolutely, probably at this point, better be served by a more flexible or adaptable organization being at the forefront. Nar is 10, 20 years behind everybody in everything all the time. And is that serving the real estate industry as a whole? No, it’s really not. And is Redfin indicative of that?
Sure. Is it a great indicator? Probably not. I think that Glenn Wishes it was, like the EXP is more of an indicator now, I think. Let’s go to a break, though, and discuss your response when we come back. Also, allow me a chance to try to fix my camera. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to go to a break when we come back. We’re going to talk a little bit more about Glenn, we’re going to talk about payroll, we’re going to talk about the financial situation of Redfin and some other points that John has brought up here. John, I will be right back as I try to do this one more time, okay? Do you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need mail right. 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 the Mailright show. Today’s episode is number 410.
My fearless co-host and I are talking… We’re doing a trail on… We’re doing a completion subject that came up for John when we were doing episode number 409, which I agree with John. It was a really good episode. So for those of you listening to the show right now, if you’re trying to figure out why we’re talking about RevPen and where does that connect in, we were talking about the lawsuits that NAR had lost and how that might affect real estate commission and a few other things that were all really great topics in episode number 409. So, John, we left off. You mentioned a few different things about the profitability, and you said, I think let’s pick up from number three. I don’t know that we really talked about that. So right now, Redfin is a little bit in trouble because even in the best year that they’ve ever had, they’ve lost $109 million. Part of what you… The reason for that is they’re making payroll for 2,000 agents in a slowing real estate industry, so most likely they’re going to be hemorrhaging Red Ink. I don’t even know where they’re going to come with the money.
That’s a lot of money to come up with. So what was the thing that you wanted to talk about surrounding that idea?
Well, I think first of all, I’m going to make a quite controversial statement, but it’s my opinion. I think Glenn is very media savvy and I think Silicon Valley love him. Obviously, they’re sharks, they just go by the money, but his ability just to keep having access to more and more capital. To me, he’s very similar to Adam Newman. I think he’s the Adam Newman of the real estate industry, basically. If you don’t know who Adam Newman is, listeners, he was the co-founder of WeWork. To me, Glenn obviously is different, but they are similarities. The whole business model of Redfin from top to bottom is broken as far as I’m concerned. I’ve just been amazed how this dog has just kept on going. But what interests me, and I thought why I would bring it up this show, is where do you think the industry is going in the next 2-3 years? I’m just interested in… Because I think in some ways the national chain are going to have their problems. You can never say no, but I just cannot see how Redfin can keep on going. But I think there’s going to be for smaller agile boutique, brokerages, power teams, solutions.
I just see the market being very disrupted. What’s your own views, Robert?
I agree with that. I think all the national companies are in trouble, except for the ones like RealT One and eXp that are going to virtual models. I think that we’re going to see fewer and fewer real estate offices with physical locations. I think we’re going to see more more of a branching out, more hyper local brands becoming more and more relevant inside the real estate industry. I think that the big brands have gotten a bit out of touch with what? What is needed to maintain a strong foothold in local places? There are exceptions, but it usually is office-to-office and centers around a very small handful of agents that have been with the same brokerage for a long period of time that do add a certain prestige. The Coldwell Banker office in Beverly Hills is an incredibly strong example of a very traditional brand that is falling out of step in many places, but maintains like a lock on Beverly Hills because the agents that work out of that office, like they’ve been there for 20 or 30 years. So you still go to them regardless of where what the shingle is outside the door.
But other than that, you’ve got Beverly Hills Realty, which has really been on the upswing and is competing quite handily against Tilton and Highland. Same thing with the Agency RE doing the same thing. I’ve been watching that happen more and more in different marketplaces, and I don’t think it bodes well for the big brands. I think it bodes very poorly, and if they happen to lose a major lawsuit, the people that are targeted in that lawsuit are the big brands, not the little local companies. So I perceive that it’s going to be a difficult environment for big brands over the next three years, and I think that we’re going to continue to see a proliferation of low cost, high digital services companies spring up that emulate the eXp model. That’s what I think.
Yeah. I think that’s… Yes, I agree with you there. Where I see, and I might be totally wrong about Redfin, because of the ability of Glenn to get more capital and to pivot Redfin or… He’s a great storyteller and he’s ability. But I just feel that the runway is shortening quite a lot. But the other thing is I also think this other business model, which we touched on in the first half of the show, of the national franchise chains and the large regional, there’s two in Northern Nevada you got Chase International and you got Dixon in this part of Northern Nevada. They both, in my opinion, utilize the model of having 400-500 agents. Many of them only sell two, three houses. I really see those regional brokerages and the national chain being really hit hard. Would you agree with that?
Yeah, I would agree with that. I would also say that part of what you linked to us was an article talking about the shift to traditional commission splits, and that is a reality of the cyclical nature of real estate that Redfin definitely doesn’t take into account. It is a retarded model when you look at the way that real estate works in the US, because it goes white hot for its own reasons, and then it does have periods of rapid decline. What are you supposed to do? Keep 2,000 people on staff? No, it is better to disperse that risk in a pay-for-play compensation structure. If you sell stuff, John, I will pay you. What you should be doing is making it a no-brainer for agents to want to pay you that split. Right now, the only coin of the realm for most agents is, Can you give me qualified leads? That’s going to be very difficult moving into a down market. I think that right now, just commenting on this article and really giving it a little bit of thought, wow, is that an upside-down model? It was always upside-down. They’ve never made money. But now to say, Oh, we’re going to give you a discount and we’re paying our team a salary.
No, it’s idiotic.
It truly is, isn’t it? But to finish off, what do you think are some of the skills that agent is going to need to build up and foster in the next-three, in the next 2-3, maybe four years to be successful? Because I still think with the right skills, our agent can build and be really successful, even in this environment. What are some of those skills that you think they need, Robert?
Like.
Agents? Yeah.
I think that agents are going to have to be more and more digitally savvy. So skills is going to be learning rapidly, keeping up with a rapidly shifting digital landscape. Now, just to be clear with you, John, because you and I talk about the marketing side, and I think that for the nature of this show, we’ve said that ad nauseam. What we haven’t talked a lot about is that also changing at the same time as the way real estate agents are marketing, it’s the way they actually process their deals once they have them. That is changing rapidly too. The way that commissions are dispersed, the way that transactions are coordinating, more and more that is becoming digital. So these agents that are super established have oftentimes two or three assistants to keep up with all of that for them, but let’s say you’re not in the position to hire two or three assistants. Being a fast learner, being willing to embrace digital technology in general, being forward thinking, these are all skills that I think are going to become more and more relevant to being an agent, John, and I don’t think that we cover that, a lot of that.
Are you forward thinking? Are you looking to embrace digital? I’m not telling everybody to go do this, but if I was an agent, I would be carefully and closely examining little bits of AI to see if there was something that was mundane that I could cure with autonomous learning or autonomous intelligence, which is really not what it is. But I would be looking to see if I could shorten my process up using AI, and if I could, I would use it.
I think we’ve got our topic for next week actually, ain’t we? Is it Thanksgiving? I’m losing track of Thanksgiving is all a weakness if we are having a show.
But I think next week’s show should be this. Let’s talk about what a bleeding edge new Millennium agent looks like, because we don’t address that too often. What does that look like? Who is that? What would you and I say that that agent looks like? If we could construct a perfect real estate agent in our heads, what would that person look like?
Well, it’s not going to be next week because it’s Thanksgiving Day, but the following week, the 30th, that’s all because I doubt if we’re going to do a show on Thanksgiving, but the show on the 30th before we have our break, I think that’d be a great ending show, weren’t it?
I think it would. I think that’s the last show of 2023 for us, and I think I can’t think of a better subject for us.
Right. I think it’s time for us to end this show, Rob.
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, everybody, for tuning in. We really appreciate it. If you’d like to learn more about me, you may do so at Inbound, R-I-M. That’s the word, Inbound, rabbitedwardmichael. Com. I have training courses currently up there, which I will be taking down soon enough and charging $99. I have stuff that’s equivalent to what Levi does, Krista Mayshore. I’ve got it up there for free. Just look under my recent blog post. I will teach you and train you how to do video. I will teach and train you how to do hyperlocal. I would do it all for free. Check it out at inboundirm. Com. John, how would you like people to reach out to you?
I’ll just go to the mail-right. Com. We’ve got a load of resources on the site. We are a CRM, lead-generative CRM. We provide the tools to not only manage your clientele, but help you get digital leads. I love the opportunity to have a chat with you and show you how the MailRite system can help you. So just book a free demo. I normally take most of the demos. You have the pleasure of having a chat with me. Back over to you, Rob.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, John, take us offline. I’ve got nothing else to add. We’ll see you at the next show. We’re looking forward to it. We’ll wrap up 2023 strong.
The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show
Jonathan Denwood
https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa
————————————–
Robert Newman
InboundREM
https://inboundrem.com
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Agents need to do more than blogging to get results in 2016. We discuss this during this show with our two Read more
Greg McDaniel literally began his career at his father’s knee. It would not be an exaggeration to say he has Read more
Personal agent photography is really important but usually semi-forgotten. We have a great guest "Preston Zeller" on the show who recently Read more
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Are you a realtor looking to gain an edge over your competition in 2023? Look no further. This show is packed with expert tips on leveraging local SEO to generate more business leads. From optimizing your website content with location-specific keywords to harnessing the power of customer reviews, we’ll show you step-by-step how to attract qualified clients right in your own neighborhood.
#1 – Introduction
#2 – Online Directories and Local Citations
#3 – Google Properties and Tools
#4 – Website Optimization
#5 – Create Local Focus Content
#6 – Encourage Customer Reviews
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. It’s episode number 408 of The Mailright Show. We, John and I, are here. We are going to do this awesome, amazing show. Guess what we’re going to talk about? We’re talking about, Hi, for Local again. Yes, everybody gets excited. Why does it keep coming up over and over again? Why are John and I just going to keep hammering this home? How to get more local businesses for us in 2023? We should be saying that part of the hyperlocal equation that we’re focused on is connected to Google, my business profile. We should also be saying that John and I’s experience is that 80 or 90% of the inquiries that realtors get is for listings. Listings are now going to be the coin of the realm in terms of digital marketing, which makes this because of lawsuits are happening with NAR, concerns that are happening in real estate, and the fact that Google has been more and more time, and energy, and effort into their hyperlocal ranking between sending more and more searches into those profiles, between all of those things, it creates a perfect storm where you, our customers, are starting to really realize at a core level just how important this vertical really truly is for your business.
We’re going to keep talking about it and trying to be helpful to all of you. Today’s subject, episode 408 of The Nailwright Show, is going to be how to get more leads. Now, we’ve talked about the profile. We talked about some basic ways to optimize it a few shows ago. If you didn’t see there or hear that show, please go back and check it out because it’s a good way to get you into the mindset of setting up your profile. This show is going to be talking about once your profile is set up, how might we get leads. John has also picked for us some more advanced strategies for getting ranking. I’m going to fill in my expertise here and explain how some things that connect to ranking also connect to lead conversion, which is exactly what everybody here wants. Everybody listening to this show, you want leads, you want phone calls. But before we dive into this incredibly important, relevant, super exciting topic, John is going to introduce himself. For those of you who may not know who he is, he’s going to share his wisdom, his expertise, and all the lovely things that he’s done over at his web development company for real estate agents.
John?
Thanks for that, Rob. I’m the joint founder of mail-right. Com. We’re a paid agency. We’ve got our own technology suite based on WordPress, and we utilize Facebook and Google Local Adverts to get more leads for you. I’ve also got news of a special offer. If you sign up for one of our yearly plans, you will get six years of Facebook-managed adverts for free. We normally charge $250 a month for managing your Facebook campaign, but for the first six months, you will get that for free if you sign up for one of our yearly plans. Back over to you, Robert.
Ladies and gentlemen, for those of you who may not know me, my name is Robert Newman. I have been a real estate SEO expert in the real estate and residential real estate space for 15 years. I’ve worked for major notable companies like Agent Image and Forza. I’ve worked for Independent Incubators doing very, very large-scale custom web development jobs. Now, seven years ago, I founded my own company, InboundREM. Com, which focuses on SEO as a service for real estate agents. We do both very large-scale projects and huge custom web development projects. We also do very small, very focused projects, such as just working on your hyperlocal profiles. If you’d like to learn more about me or Inbound rem, just go to inboundrem. Com, look at my About Services page, and that should take care of you. We’ve also added a whole bunch of free resources to the website recently, including 300 tips that you can give away to your buyers on your website. It’s free. Go grab it at inboundrem. Com. You’ll get a beautiful e-book and a brochure, and you can add it to your website. All right, so without any further ado, we’re going to jump into today’s subject.
For those who may be new to the show, John produces the show, and I am the guy who shows up and is an online talent, especially when it comes to SEO subjects. We divide our efforts. John is the one who does all the groundwork for the outline of the show. John, you’ve done an incredible job this time. You added a tremendous amount of notes. You gave us six different bullet points that you wanted to cover. The first one is, why is Local SEO significant? I’d like to add to this after the fact because we’ve just done a new round of research in our brand and content team over here at InboundAREM, but I’d love to hear you intro this and give your thoughts, and then I might add a couple of my own after the fact.
Yeah, I think the reason why it’s important because it links hardware with software and that’s always the strongest sector. What I mean by that, folks, is before the mobile phone, before the iPhone and before Android, Local SEO was there. It was a thing. It was a sector that there were expertise in. But with the iPhone and with the Android, Local SEO is being put on steroids because fundamentally, if you’ve got a phone on you, a mobile phone on you, and almost all adult Americans do, and you’re searching on your phone for particular local services because you’re doing it on a mobile device, Google roughly knows where you are. Because they know you’re location, they can obtain the location information. Because you’re on a mobile device, they can feed you adverts and information based on where you are. Obviously, there’s privacy, there’s all sorts of other concerns about that, but we have to live in the age that we live in. Because of that basic fact, because of the mobile device and Google’s technology, that’s why it’s so powerful. That’s my own thought on it. What’s yours, Rob?
First of all, this was my own basic math when I first got into this subject. For everybody listening to this show, I was saying a couple of shows ago that we felt like I’d seen about a three or four hundred % spike in the amount of traffic that Google was sending into Google profiles. I was using my own and about 10 or 15 of my clients’ profiles to measure that result. It wasn’t a huge case study, but it was a case study. Since then, the head of my brand and content team actually went out and spent 20, 30 hours researching the subject, doing actual proper deep analysis. Here’s some amazing facts that those of you should consider. 98% of the realtors in this country have not bothered to set up a Google business profile. 98%. Jesus. That means that when you walk into your office in the morning, guys, and you look around, understand that the vast majority of people that you’re putting your eyeballs on, they’re not even competing against you. They’re not even trying. First of all, in comparison to the amount of people that hold licenses, it’s a massive untapped audience. Number two, this is my own personal experience.
Sean, when you and I start talking about the things you can do to optimize a profile, just setting it up correctly, I would say that of the 2% of agents that bothered to set up a profile, the ones who know how to optimize it or set it up correctly are literally maybe 10% of that, if even that. Now we’re down to 0.01% of the entire country. Might even know how to set up a profile correct. Now you add in to the subjects that we’re going to talk about today. Slightly advanced, there are entire services, LocalEasy, BrightLocal, WhiteSpark. These are companies that are massive marketing companies and all they do is essentially optimize these local profiles. That’s it. That’s all they do. There’s nothing else. That’s all they do. And they’re hundreds of millions of dollars big every single year. When you start looking at… And guess what? Real estate tends to be about 10 years behind all other service industries: plumbers, contractors. There’s so much money in those industries and one group of guys is usually like… I have an old client, the twins plumbing company. Their marketing budget every month, including for localists, $30,000 to $50,000 because they’re a plumbing company, they’ve got 15, 20 trucks running around Southern California generating millions and millions of dollars of revenue.
Whoever gets these plumbing jobs, each plumbing job for them, it’s 50-100,000. Now, here’s the crazy thing, John. They’ve done the math and figured out that the local profile is worth $10,000 of their budget every month, like $10,000. The local real estate agent doesn’t realize that being ranked 1, 2, 3 in those search packs is probably going to equal out to be about $200, $300,000 in GCI. It’s just as much money to a realtor. Just the realtors don’t realize it. They don’t realize that being ranked there is going to get them calls for listings, going to be able to put listings under contract. Then the market that we’re in and are going to be in for the next 5-10 years, listings are gold. They are in almost every market. You get a listing on the contract. It is essentially a commission earned just over time. That’s it. You’re done. That’s all you need is the contract. That’s what these profiles deliver to you. Hyperlocal is absolutely one of the most underserved, most important, easiest to win marketing opportunities a real estate agent has. Full stop. How do you win it? We already went through the basics.
John is moving into an advanced strategy now that will absolutely impact your hyperlocal profile. For that very small percentage of our audience who has a profile, this is where you really need to pay attention, tune in to this part of the show. John, I’m going to let you introduce bullet point number two and talk about this for a second.
Well, it’s always been the section of local SEO that made it a bit different to city, large, metropolitan, regional, national, because you’ve got all these directory, local service directories, Yelp, Yellow Pages. When it comes to regional, national, or very highly competitive, metropolitan, like the Bay Area or New York, they’re not quite so important, but you could debate that, a metropolitan. But when it comes to most cities, most areas, it’s one of the factors that Google looks at. It’s looking to confirm that you’re a legit player, that you’re legit, that you’re doing business in the area that you’re stating when you set up your Google business local page. One of the factors they look strongly at, there are many factors, but what research I’ve done is they’re looking at these directories. Plus, if you’ve got your own website as well, but we’re going to touch that later on, but they’re looking at these directories. I think you mentioned you’ve got to utilize the same email, the same phone. They want to see the same details literally letter by letter, digit by digit on all these different directories. If they’re different, then the warning signs start to flicker at Google.
You’re not doing yourself any favors. Brack, over to you, Rob.
Online directories are extremely important. I’ve had tons and tons of experimentation with this over the years, John, including on my own profile, which ranks for real estate marketing within about 80 miles of my office, which is my home. I played around with the profile. When I first started doing it, it was very similar to most of my philosophies. It’s like, If I’m going to be a marketing company, I should prove that I know what I’m doing. I’ll prove it first with me, with myself, because I compete against luxury presence, Ylopo, and Agent Image. They’re all within 30 miles of my location. I compete against all of them for the search term real estate marketing. When I constantly come up number one, that means I’m beating all these other guys that sell SEO as a service. I just wanted to do it to see if I could do it. But here’s how I found online directories and citations and things like that to impact the profile. Number one, if you have just a few, just a handful of directories that have a different address, because when I first started, I started off at a PO box that didn’t want to use my home address.
Then I discovered through a series of experiments that somehow Google knew it was a PO address and I wasn’t getting any ranking whatsoever off that PO address. About a year into my business, I changed it over to my home address and no surprise, within 30 days, I was discovering that I was starting to rank in local searches. However, my rankings stagnated pretty quickly. I discovered as soon as I changed those PO box addresses and synonymous my personal address, my ranking shot up and have continued to shoot up ever since. Address and directories is incredibly important in terms of ranking. One of the things that most real estate agents are, here’s a few common things that relate to your address that I care about, online directories and addresses. First of all, what happens if your address is that the same as a broker’s? Like you work out of an office and you list yourself along with 100 other agents all out of the same address. Can you compete? Yes, it’s harder, but you can. Here’s where you will fucking epically fail, is if you set up your home address and then you list your business address in different places, you’ll never rank anywhere.
You choose one or the other. You choose an address, and then what you do is you use services like WhiteSpark or Inbound IDM or somebody to clean up all your addresses, find them, analyze them, and then change them over so that they’re all the same address. This one thing that we’re mentioning right now from these online directories is incredibly important. All of you who are listening to this show already know what the 10 biggest directories are. I guarantee it. It’s Zillow, Realtor. Com, Bing, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, all the big fang companies, Yelp. All those are the most reputable directories. If you’ve heard of a directory, Yellow Pages to White Pages are fairly far down the list, surprisingly enough. You already know where the top 10 directories are. You just have to make sure that you have the same information listed in all of them. I could cover this subject forever, but we’re not going to. As a matter of fact, we’re going to go to our break right now. When we come back, we’re going to dig into some other media topics that relate to hyperlocal. We’re going to talk about website optimization, creating content that is aimed at your local profile, properties and tools, encourage customer reviews.
Inside the optimization part and the local focus content, I’m going to give out a couple of tricks and hacks to make that content actually get you phone calls. So day two. Do you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need mail write. 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. We’re so glad if you decided to stick with us for the second half of The MailRight show. Today’s episode is number 408. We’re talking about local SEO, specifically how to get more local business leads for Realtor. We’re focused today’s show on what’s working in 2023. The next subject up that John has got down here for us is Google’s properties and tools. I didn’t really quite know what you meant by that. If you could dive into that, John, then that would be great.
Well, I think, because Google’s got a number of its own properties and it’s mostly the Google Business profile, making all the things we discussed in the first part of the show. There’s a fundamental bit of overlap, isn’t it? But I also think putting up images, the image search is a big thing and having the address. They’re number three overlaps number four, which is website ops as your website, because what I’ve read, and it’s self-serving, but it is what I’ve read, is a lot of agents make the mistake by not having their own website. My understanding, Rob, is part of this metrics of different factors that Google looks at, is if you’ve got your own website and it’s active and you’re doing things on the website and it matches the stuff that you’re putting on the website is about the area that you’ve claimed through the Google Business profile, it all matches. There’s as though they’re seeing a spider web view of your online presence and everything matches up. That’s how I globally see it, Rob.
Now that I understand what you mean, I have a lot to say on the subject. Sorry about that, John, I didn’t really understand. Google does provide a whole massive toolkit much deeper than most people realize. You have a Google Maps profile, which is also more commonly referred to as a local search guide. You can be a local search guide.
You.
Can also contribute reviews to other businesses. Here’s what most people don’t know, because we leverage this inbound, Miriam, a lot. You can also make custom maps using their tools and then share them. Just share them with the world at large. You set the map to public, and then you can take that link for that map that you’ve created and you can install it somewhere. One of inbound, Ariem’s favorite hacks is to use that map on a website. What we’re doing is we’re using the customer’s email address, creating a profile under them, creating a Google Maps profile for them, and jump-starting their local guide and Maps profile. When you’re saying Google tools, that’s one of the tools that nobody… As far as I know, in Boundary, I was the only company doing it. I don’t even know of anybody. I’ve never seen it anywhere else. I’m not saying that it doesn’t exist. I am absolutely saying I’ve never seen it, except for us. Then you have YouTube, which is another Google profile. You have your Google business profile, which is yet another Google profile. There’s probably an image library profile, which, to be honest, with everybody listening to the show, I don’t know.
There’s also, and this is another one that we use that nobody else uses, there’s an author profile, which is a very old Google. They defunct it, but they said that they’re not cracking it anymore. Every single person like me who’s been an SEO for a long time is under the belief that they’re going to bring it back big time because for a very brief amount of time, Google was measuring the quality of your content, connecting it to an author profile, and then giving that profile a score so that your content, if you’re a guy like me, was automatically ranking. The reason they defuncted it is they started to notice that there were literally a few hundred people across the country that were dominating across all of Search. Neil Patel, Bryant Dean, just people that had massive audiences were publishing hundreds of articles, and those guys were dominant because their articles are way more widely read than anybody else’s on certain subjects. They said that they couldn’t measure it about… Basically, he said, Well, shit, we didn’t realize there would be such dominant players and we don’t know how to make this fair for the little guys, so we’re going to mothball it while we figure it out.
They then tried it again when Google Plus was around and then once again defuncted it for much the same reason, but it’s still there. You have an author profile that measures the quality of your content. When you start saying Google properties and tools, yes, and there’s even… Nobody even remembers this anymore, but there’s BlogSpot?
Oh, yeah.
There’s nothing Google tool. In total, there’s probably or 15 or 20 different Google tools that you could theoretically set up. Google does see them and measure them all correctly. That, as I’ve said in other videos I’ve done about SEO, if you want to know what one of the secrets is to ranking, believe it or not, it’s just making sure that Google can read what you’re doing or understand what- What.
About the website? About having your own website? What do you think about that?
Well, websites, I agree with website. Search engines use a website to understand what your business does. I’m reading the notes you put in location pages to help search engines understand the areas they serve. That’s 100% correct. As long as with WordPress or whatever you’re using to set up your website, you use the same email address. Essentially, imagine it’s a profile card. Your profile is connected to your email address. I started my business under a standard Gmail email called inboundrem@gmail. Com. I’ve never moved away from using it because when you switch your emails up, let’s say you decide to customize your email, like I have a robber@inboundrem. Com email obviously now, seven years later, but it doesn’t help you to change that information off all the profiles that you set up. Since I set them up using inboundarien@gmail. Com, they’re all still set up that way. When you’re setting up your website, make sure that you set it up using… Don’t use a Yahoo email address to set up your WordPress website when you’re hoping that the WordPress website is going to be found through Google. Use your Google Gmail address. Same thing applies to your YouTube channel, your BlogSpot account, your Google Maps account, all the same email address.
When Google knows it’s you, Jonathan Dynwood, Jonathan Dynwood’s doing all these things and they can see everything, including your website, which is what the question was you asked me, that’s when websites become really powerful.
Yeah, good words. Sorry. The way I’ve dealt with this, Rob, is we’re both with my two businesses. My main domain, my main email is with Google Workspaces, but I’ve also bought a secondary domain that’s very similar to the main domains. They’re a service where I can have multiple inboxes at a very low price. Because the problem with Google workspaces is fine with just one inbox, but if you have a mobile team and you have multiple inboxes. I’m not talking about A-listes. I’m talking about actual physical inboxes. It’s $6 a pot, so it can soon build up in cost. But the way I’ve dealt with it is I use on other service for a very similar domain where I can have multiple inboxes without the $6 a charge. Is that making sense, Rob? Yep.
I know that we’re drifting out a little bit, but everybody who’s listening to this show, listen, I pride myself on being a transparency guy. When you understand what SEO is and how you do it properly, really, it just comes down to a lot of work and effort. That’s what Inboundar does. We do a lot of that work and effort. We try to do it at a low cost and high quality just because you don’t want to do it yourself. You wouldn’t really understand how this all works. However, I try to tell you how it works upfront. I’m going to tell you something that websites are incredibly good for a job. When you have a YouTube channel under your email address and when you’re doing a Google Maps profile like I’ve described, where websites become an almost unstoppable force in hyperlocal SEO is when you’re linking your local YouTube videos to a neighborhood page. The neighborhood page is talking about this specific area. Then you’ve got the YouTube video with the latitude and longitude, then you’ve got images that you’ve attached to that page with the latitude and longitude. Now it becomes an unmistakable signal to Google.
I’m here, boots on the ground, this area, you know it. I’ve got pictures, I’ve got video, I’ve got writing, and it’s all interconnected into the website. That’s where websites really start to get you power, because now you’re getting the traditional search volumes into your page. You’re getting the YouTube search volumes into your YouTube channel, you’re getting the image-like search volumes into your image library. Between all three of those platforms, you’re capturing a lot of the attention that focuses on that neighborhood. Your branding is synonymous, however people are doing searches. When it connects into a website where you can direct people to certain pages like your profile page, which has a deep bio and all your social proof, that’s when you start to create a lot of marketing momentum to prove to somebody, I am a local expert.
Can I ask, how do you deal with the public? I’ve been asked this a couple of times and I’ve never really fossilitated. This is a tricky one. How do you deal with your relationship with your broker? Because your broker is going to want you to utilize a rubber act, whatever the brokerage is, or they’re going to want you… They’re going to offer you, or they’re going to insist that you pay a monthly fee for a digital marketing pack. Aren’t they? A lot of the national franchise do that. But I think you should have your own website always and keep your own email and don’t use the brokerage. How was your advice on all that? There was no.
Clean answer to that, John. You’re right. That is a tricky question and that I’m going to be straight with you. Here’s the answer I generally give, and it’s a shitty, arrogant answer. In my 15 years of doing this, it’s been at least 5 or 10 since I’ve run across any CTO, CMO that understands SEO at the level that I do. When an agent or a broker calls me that’s working for a brand, I’m immediately telling them in no uncertain terms, you need to set up your own email address with, like Google works as an example, if you need to do an entire team, but we need to be in control of your email addresses. If your brokerage is issued one, great. You can continue to use that for all the broker-required profiles that you need to have. If you’re paying me out of your own pocket, no brokerage is used. There is almost no brokerage out there that’s saying that you can’t market yourself. They’re saying you can’t. I’m delivering the bad news that you have to spend extra money. That’s not an easy conversation because you have to spend extra money for something that you already have.
But you absolutely have to do that, is my answer, John. Like I said, you are correct. It’s a sticky subject. It’s a shitty subject. And especially when I get forced into the position of saying, Listen, I get what you’re telling me, Mr. Realtor, but I know a lot more about this than your brokerage does, and they’ve got it wrong.
Because a lot of these nationals, some of the regionals and nationals, want 100, 150, 200 a month for their digital marketing package, don’t they?
Yeah. All right, so we’re going to move on. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re now deep into bonus content. Bonus content today is going to be the content and the reviews. Both these next subjects are ones that have to do with lead conversion, getting somebody to be a peruser to somebody who’s going to be a phone caller. The big subjects it’s great bonus content. It’s almost like we timed it this way. We’re exactly at the 30-minute mark. John usually does 10 extra minutes on the Mail-right YouTube channel. I occasionally get around to requesting the files and getting it up on the inbound rem channels, but John always does it. Check out the mail-right-YouTube channels to YouTube, and you’ll see the show, the 10 extra minutes of bonus content. Without further ado, create local focus content. What John has written here is local content can help you target local keywords, provide valuable information to your local audiences, and consider blog post videos or other content relevant to this area. We’ve talked a little bit about that. A restaurant might create a blog post about, best places to eat. Every single thing that you wrote here is spot on. Why did you add any thoughts that you have and all add money?
Well, the reason why it’s spot on is I didn’t write it. I’ve just lifted it off other resources for these show notes to be truthful about it. But I did read it, and I did agree with it. It’s basically, the content needs to have a high element of local knowledge to it, value to it. I value it. If Google’s technology reads it. It matches up with all the other elements that we’ve outlined in this podcast.
When it comes to local content, ladies and gentlemen, here are your conversion tricks because I promised and promised and promised them. How do you get the conversion? How do you get calls?. I’m not going to give a thousand conversion tricks. How do you get calls without force and registration? It is a subject that comes up in 30 to 40% of my calls. All right, so here you go. Conversion happens with social proof, ladies and gentlemen. When you’re doing hyper-local information, if you’ve done a good job on your local page, done everything that John just did: local properties, restaurant, great blog post, sold properties that connect into that specific neighborhood, that is the place that you start with your social proof if you have it to offer. If you’re an experienced agent who’s done business in this area, prove it by showing the sold properties. That gets people a lot closer to wanting to call you, especially if they identify something that looks similar to a property that they’re thinking of listing or a property they’re thinking of buying. That’s number one. Number two is to make sure that you connect that to your local reviews. You can either have them on the same page under that neighborhood.
If you’re super organized, which most of my clients are, but not to this degree, a review for somebody who did a specific piece of business inside that neighborhood with you is the number one way to go. But failing that, a single place on your website where you have all your reviews collected is preferably a plugin or link to an external profile. Why? People don’t trust the information that you published on your website yourself because too many people have ruined it for all of you, where they put fake information or reviews that are 20 years old. They took an old letter, screenshot it, or retyped it out, and put it on their website. So when somebody calls you and goes, Oh, this Scott and Dorothy Kimmel review looks great. You go, Oh, yeah, that client was two decades ago. Nobody looks at that and goes, Well, that’s relevant in 2023 or market that in the early 2000s? No, it’s only relevant to the history that you have in the area. It’s good to say that you got a review from 20 years ago, for sure. But is it really going to compel somebody to call you today?
No. More recent reviews and things that you’ve done right now or what compel people to call you. That’s why external systems like Google Reviews, Zillow, and Facebook, have dates and more information on it where you can see how recent those reviews were. There’s a certain amount of trust. Not so much with Facebook, certainly with Google and, to a degree, Zillow. Zillow is in the middle, and Yelp is at the very bottom of the stack. Very few people trust Yelp so that you know.
I think many people trust Zillow and Evel to be close.
Not consumers do, John. Consumers trust Zillow. It is big enough and branded enough that they trust Zillow. I don’t know that they should, but they do. All right. So create local folks going. Now, last but not least, ladies and gentlemen, I’m just going to continue on my tears and let you add your thoughts at the end of my tears here. Here is the number one conversion factor that you are in control of. Reviews. Okay, boy, old boy, I learned this trick a long time ago, and I probably learned it from Ziggler or Tom Hopkins or somebody like that. God, it’s made me so much money throughout my career. You know what the funny thing is about reviews, John? Is that human beings are fundamentally lazy. We’re lazy. When you request a review, the worst possible thing that you can do is say, John, will you please go to my Google reviews channel and leave me a review? Then we leave it at that. When you call a client and say, Will you please do this? That’s exactly. You have maybe a one-in-100 chance that they’ll remember to do it, and they’ll go do it.
If, however, you type out a letter or email and say, Dear so and so, this is the experience that we had. This is the home we had. I just want to say how much I enjoyed serving you. All these three areas were my favorite parts of the transaction. By the way, if you could do me a small favor, reviews really helped my business grow. If you feel like I gave you outstanding service, I would really appreciate it if you give me a review and then a link to the profile that you want the review on. But you don’t stop there. You then go, I don’t want you to copy what I’m about ready to tell you, but I would really love it if you covered the fact that we did a transaction in Van Ies, that it was for a single-family home, that it was roughly in the neighborhood of $400, $500,000, and that we spent six months looking for the home, that we got in the car 50 different times, and then we finally found you a perfect home. If you can illustrate that customer journey for me, that is what would help my business the most.
Now, here, after doing this myself for 20 years in my sales career, is what amazes me. Despite the fact that you always ask people not to copy what you said, they always copy what you said. If you want to control what your profile says, you just write it for them. For the most part, even if they don’t copy it word for word, they usually summarize what you said and then throw it directly on your profile for you. That’s the number one hack I have. Now, why does that matter so much? Who, what, when, where, why, and how is always the reasons that we’re looking for when we want to make a decision. That’s it. Conversion. If you give somebody that, like I bought a home in Van Is, it was $500,000 to $600,000. This guy went out with me for six months. We took it 50 times. That tells you so much about the realtor right there. That tells you so much about the experience. By the time you’re done reading that, 99% of anybody who’s even vaguely thinking, Maybe I want to call a realtor, they’re going to go, Oh, shit, I got to call this guy.
I got to call him right now because he’s going to be patient. He’s sold the home. My price range, he’s familiar with my area. This other human loved them. They sound like a much more complicated client than I’m going to be like, Oh, yeah, this is my human. That’s how you get a conversion. You control your reviews. You respond to every single one to push it forward even more. 80% of all people who are making decisions about using you are doing so through social proof. Why in the world would you not control the messaging inside this space? It’s never made any sense to me, and it’s how I get more sales and anything else that we do.
Well, you’ve made me very joyous here, Robert, because in the Mail-Right system, we have a section, part of our platform, that is built, and it does exactly what you have just outlined. You’ve made me extremely happy, Robop.
Good. Then you should… If I were you, John, if you haven’t already done this, for me, a case study for mail write is this. Just walk your first couple of clients through using it. Make them use it, get them to use it, call them as many times as it takes for you to use it because I will make you a bet right now, John. You get somebody doing it using that bit of your platform. They’re going to make money. From then on in, you are going to be able to have front and center all your media going, This tool that John made for me is the best tool I’ve ever used in my entire career. You would be a fool not to call him today.
Okay. But it’s not easy. But Robert’s CRO reviews and… But it is just to finish off, Robert. If you’re listening to this podcast, you’re listening to Robert and myself, and if you just do a couple of the things we’ve outlined in the past three weeks, you’ll be 90% in front of 90% of your competition. It’s really that simple, really, Robert, isn’t it?
It really is. I’m going to do what I’ve done the last couple of shows, which I rarely do, but InboundREM is beta testing a service that does a lot of this for you. For those of you people, John also has a platform that does some of this for you as well, we both have systems in place that will do a lot of this work for you. You can either contact me at inboundrem. Com or email me at Robert@inboundrem.com and go to my services page to schedule a call. For this particular service, you will not necessarily get me. I’ve now got a staff taking these calls for the hyper-local service line that we’ve got out. If you make a special request, do you think you have an exceptionally difficult problem to solve, you can potentially get me on the phone. John, how would you like people to reach out to you if they also would like to talk to you about the same subject?
Yeah, just go to the mill-right. Com website and book a demo, book a chat, and you get me. We chat here is this area is the only area that we really fundamentally over that because, like I said last week, folks, we don’t really deal with SEO. We are paid advertising on Facebook and Google, setting up your business profile and the platform. It’s paid traffic is what we’re aimed at, where Robert and his team are content marketing and SEO. That’s why we can do the show together because, honestly, we dabble a little bit in it, but we don’t take long-term SEO clients. We send them to Robert because we’re in Facebook paid traffic. That’s what 70, 80% of what we do with about 20-30% Google.
Beautiful. Okay, a couple of last plugs for all of you listening to the show. The value proposition for what John does is just skyrocketed. Why? We’re going to do a full show on it next week, but I’m going to give everybody here the cliff notes. Follow-ups just sold themselves to Zillow. This is a big deal. John has a CRM, maybe not as robust as the Follow-Up boss, but he has one that is still within his and your control, not your main competitor. There is something to be said for that. In my opinion, humble as it is, the SA, software-as-a-service guys like John, and in particular, John, who’ve taken the time to build an independent tool, now that the number one independent tool has just basically exited the independent part. That means that there should be a lot of people calling John and people like him, just exploring your options. I’m not saying bail out a follow-up boss or that there’s a reason to. I am saying that a lot of people are going to want to do that regardless of what I say. And if that’s the case, this is a good time to talk to John.
Now, we’re going to dive deep into this subject next week. We’re going to talk about this sale of the follow-up boss to Zillow. We’re going to share our thoughts on it. We’re really going to dig deep into it. John and I both independently have various times to talk about FollowUp Boss. I recommend FollowUp Boss. My clients use Followup Boss. I’m deeply immersed in this follow-up boss world.
Like the product, isn’t it? It was a great product. Yeah.
I don’t know that I’d believe that it’s not a great product. No, it’s pretty good. There are now things that you have to consider that you didn’t previously have to consider. Just no doubt about it. You just have to. Anyway, everybody, thank you so much for tuning into the show. John and I really appreciate it. I think that today is one of the big payouts for those dedicated listeners, those loyal listeners. Please do us a favor. If you have teams, if you have people that you’re working with, this is a show you want to share with them. If, for some reason, you’re a team guy or team gal, then make sure, 100% for sure, that you’re working on your hyperlocal profile. Until next time, John and I would sign us off.
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The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show
Jonathan Denwood & Robert Newman
https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa
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Robert Newman
InboundREM
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#1 – MVP (minimum viable post)
#2 – Producing “Information” posts (it’s all about ideas, baby)!
#3 – Basically, semi-copy your competition post titles. (odd numbers get more clicks).
#4 – h2 and h3 titles are important
#5 – internal and external links are important.
#6 – Links to your website.
Ladies and gentlemen, to episode number 407 of The MailRight show. Today, John and I, two real estate marketing industry veterans, each with our own different skill set, are going to give our analysis of a video that John picked up talking about the best ways to.
Improve.
Your real estate website traffic. So before we get into our meaty subject today, why don’t you go ahead and… I feel like John’s going to cut that bit up. Why don’t you go ahead and share your… Sorry, tell people who you are, John.
Yes. Are you with us, Robert? It’s been a busy day, isn’t it?
Yeah, I’ve been just bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.
Thanks for that, Robert. I’m the joint founder of Mail-Right.com. We’re a platform that gives you more digital leads. It’s got a number of aspects to it. We utilize paid traffic with an emphasis on Facebook, and then we have text messaging, email messaging, a really cool social media calendar system, and a couple of other cool elements that would take up too much time. But if that sounds interesting, go over to the Mailright website and book a demo with me, I’ll show you all the features, and we can have a chat about your needs. Back over to you, Rob.
Cool beings. All right. My name is Robert Newman. I’m the founder of Inbound, IEM. I’ve got 15 years of experience in the industry. I’ve worked with notable companies like Guilopo and Luxury Presence and agent. Image contracting, doing various things for all those companies. And then I also have my own company that I founded. Mostly, though, I’m known for my skills and experiences that relate to residential, real estate website SEO or SEO in general, video, image, and traditional search of the hyperlocal. So you can always go to inboundrem. Com if you want to learn more about me or any of those things, any of those subjects. All right, so we’re going to dig deep into a topic today, which is going to be a commentary on a guide that’s saying seven ways to increase your website traffic in 2023. In some of those ways, I agree with John on driving in an advanced. Some of those ways. I don’t know that we’ve made my list. But go ahead. The first number one on our list to review and dialog about is MVP. And no, we are not talking about the most valuable player, we are talking about minimum viable votes. Post?
Why don’t you start jumping into that, John?
Yeah, I could understand the concept in some ways. What he was talking about is looking at the competition a bit but also having a structure to your posts about the different elements. The only problem with it is that I think you’ve got to have some level of awareness. What I mean by awareness is you’ve got to have a certain level of knowledge to make the assessment of what a minimum viable post compared to your competition is. What I thought might be interesting, because based on your experience, Rob, is maybe you can give a quick outline of some of the major things that you, when you look at somebody’s website and their posts, what are good practices in 2023 around how you judge what a good post is.
I’m not sure you’ve got… In MailRide, we specialize in paid traffic, but obviously, in my other business, I do a lot of SEO posts. So over to you, Rob.
Okay. First of all, minimum viable post. I feel like this gentleman who did the video, his name is Adam Infroy, for those of you who are interested, he has 156,000 subscribers, which is far more than and I do just to call him out for having a much bigger following than either one of us does, at least as far as I know. Certainly me. I’ll speak to him to myself.
Oh, yeah. It’s called a much bigger following than me.
Okay, so I’m going to say he obviously has never run across Bruce Clay. Bruce Clay a long time ago turned the term skyscraper into a vernacular that every single SEO guy uses. That’s Neil Patel, Brian Dean, anybody that talks about SEO talks about skyscraper. What that is, is another way of saying what this guy just said. You look at what’s out there, you try to do something better. That’s it. Building a skyscraper, building higher than the next building. That’s why it’s stuck. Well, these days that doesn’t necessarily work. Okay, Seth Godin called out a whole bunch of good things for those of you who don’t know who he is, look them up. Seth Codon says that today’s content, which I agree with, is more about engagement, usefulness. It doesn’t have to be just because the other guy wrote 500 words, you have to write 1,000 or something like that. Minimum viable post. When I look at a post, I need to look at it and go, what can I provide that’s not being provided? Now, the easiest, lowest hanging fruit is what John and I talk about in Cessil. Video. Why? Because it’s interactive content that you easily put on the site.
The user interacts with it. That’s number one. Number two, if you watch it on the website you found it on, you’ll oftentimes discover that you spend 1, 2, 3, 4 minutes there. Google registers that as hang time, engagement time with the site. So you’ve got that going for you. That’s a huge SEO signal. If you click on the video and go to YouTube, that’s a user engagement signal. So even if you bounce off the site, go someplace else, there’s still some value in posting a video to your site. It also changes the dynamic of the content. You can write the exact same post that somebody else wrote, almost word for word. But if you put a video on it that has a fairly educated opinion about the subject, you’ve now created what is effectively a much better piece of content because perhaps you’ve added commentary that makes somebody engage with the written word better. Now, not all things circle back to video. There are other things you can do. A table of contents. Let’s say you’ve written a 5,000-word article as an example, John. Well, a really useful thing to do that is very popular today, including by The Closed and other websites that you and I directly compete with, is a table of content.
So you just say, this is where you find this element, and you click on it and you go to the place. That’s another user engagement feel. It’s interactive. You click on the table of content to go straight to the place in the article that has what you’re interested in, it’s 5,000 words and who’s got the time. Accordion menus, something that you engage with that’s an easy click that reveals hidden content. That is probably the biggest, easiest, cheapest hack that exists. And then, of course, one of my favorites that we use Canva for is infographics. Making an infographic off a set of data that may not fit the right way into your piece of content, such as the top five most expensive things on the cost of living cost, what is most expensive in Costa Mesa? Gas, groceries, whatever it is, right? But you’re creating a little infographic with a couple of pictures. Some of them doesn’t even have to read the infographic. They just go, Oh, groceries, gas, and boat, slipage fees are the most expensive thing in Costa Mesa. Got it. All right. So when you’re talking about most viable content, the way I read into that is look at what you’re competing against and provide something different or better.
It doesn’t have to be longer.
Yeah, I think that. But I also think you’re in the layout. I’m looking at your website and your blogs and obviously a highly optimized. Obviously, you have your table content available on the left side of all your blog posts. You’ve got a video on most of your blog posts. Then on the right-hand side, because I think you’re using Elementor.
Aren’t you? Elementor, yeah.
On your right, you’ve got your recent posts, you’ve got your categories. Categ is putting certain posts intojust grouping them in certain categories. Then you’ve got recent comments. Then you’ve got your review section as well, where you’ve got people giving reviews as well about inbound marketing. Then on the page, you got it split up. You’ve got tables, written content, and images, and you go for the same layout depending on the blog post. But I think that there were the things that he was talking about, having a consistent layout that’s really optimized because obviously you and your team are experts on this. This layout, when I’m going to compete with a particular term, I can tell straight away like you that the people that own the website know what they’re basically doing because they’ve optimized it quite a bit. Would you agree with what I just outlined?
Yeah, absolutely. All right, we’ve got a lot. Like I said, this is a media topic, everybody, so we’re going to move into number two. Producing information posts. It’s all about ideas, baby. That’s what you got on here. On the actual guys thing, it says, Create a content assembly line, which I think is his way of saying content ideas, but share your thoughts with me on what you meant when you were saying it’s all about ideas, baby.
Yeah, he information and then there was another category you utilized as well. But I think in the particular, because this was an article in the general area producing content on your website that would get traffic. I looked on to real estate agent, real estate industry and there were some blog post there, but I thought they were extremely outdated, Rob. I went for a more general source. I think that was about doing some basic research because I think this is the key area when people are producing content for the website and they’re doing it themselves. This is the major step that they really fell on, because you’ve got to choose topics that can get some reasonable traffic from organic search if you’re not going to utilize paid traffic. You’ve got to do some basic SEO research and it doesn’t have to be too current. One of those, I don’t know if you would agree with this, Rob, is that… Ijust look at your competition, look at the other websites in your local area and have a look at some of the topics. There are tools that will tell you and make a judgment call about the subjects they’re talking about.
But you’ve got to do some basic research. Then I think posts around that give information, give share insight and knowledge are the best ones to start off with. What’s your views?
I would like to answer this question in a way that I don’t generally answer this question, which is I would like to see here. Let’s do this this way. All right, give me one second. Guys, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, for those of you who are not… They’re not watching our video, you’re going to want to watch this on this next little bit on a video, okay? Because I’m going to show you all something. John, the easiest way to get contents these days is actually just to let Google suggest the subjects to you, and I’ll show you what I mean. So I’m doing a broad search in Fairhope, Alabama, which is an upper middle-class shoreline area in Alabama. It’s a burgeoning area. I just did a broad search, Fairhope, Alabama. Nobody needs Ahrefs, Semrush, Ubersuggest, or any other tool to do decent keyword research. Why? Google already gives you all the primary questions that are being asked about the area. What is it known for? Cost of living, distance from beach, and famous people. Right here, we’ve got eight article suggestions in the first screen is what me and my teams actually do. I’m not telling you all to do something I don’t do myself.
Additionally, when you look at what support information is somebody writing about that helps them get ranking like the city, community, parks and trails, Fairhope Museum of History, Fairhope Docs, Marina. All right, so now already we know on those pages… I’m going to stop sharing or try to at least. Have I stopped?
Yes.
Ladies and gentlemen, when it comes to content ideas or writing content, I think a lot of people just overcomplicate it. You might need to empty it up a little bit by saying, The most asked question about cost of living in Beirut, Alabama, or, I keep my blog title subject simple, generally speaking. The head of my brand and content team does not. He adds these really long titles onto our blog done, and I don’t get in his face about it. But with me, I always stick to simple title, and I usually do look exactly what the top questions are that we’re asking about an area.
Yeah, and I think unless you’re dealing with very competitive, very competitive metopause scenarios where some of the real estate competition probably got in-house professional SEO and copywriting staff in-house or hiring or they’re hiring agency like you. Just doing some basic research that you’ve just shown and linking it to the previous point that we discussed, you’re going to be heads in front of most of the competition, aren’t you?
Correct. We’re going to go to break in a second here, but ladies and gentlemen, everybody overcomplicates blog post. People like me get paid tons of money to overcomplicate it. Even other content producers oftentimes accidentally complicate their content. The only thing you really need to know is that as a real estate agent, you are supposed to be a lifestyle and a transactional expert. That’s really what your profession dictates that you should be. So then the next question is, what questions are people asking about homes? Good God, I hope you know the answer to that. And then the other question is, are people asking about the area that you serve? I just showed you the way that we use. The other way that you can go is you can go on to Core and you can say questions about Fairhope Alabama. Two rock-solid ways to create because you just want to create answers that may not already be out there about questions that people have. It’s the easiest way to create blog content. Questions that people have about your area, Tripadvisor, Core, and Google itself are all the areas that we use to get what those questions are.
Ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to go to break. When we come back, we’re going to talk about why titles are important. We may dig into keyword research a little bit more, but I feel like we covered that subject. We’re going to talk about how to title your blog, get a little bit more specific about that. We’re going to talk about internal and external page connection, how you connect the pages on your website, and how people use those connected pages, and then how people connect to your website that are not part of your website. In other words, external people to you, how do they connect to your website? Why is that important? All right, ladies and gentlemen, we’ll be right back. We’re looking forward to hopefully educating and entertaining you for another 15-20 minutes. Do you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need mail right. 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. Today, we are talking about the best ways to improve your real estate website traffic. This makes the assumption that you have a website. It makes the assumption that hopefully you have enough control over your website to feel comfortable investing your time and energy into improving the traffic on your website. We’re going to talk very briefly about leads because mostly what I’m noticing these subjects about are actually traffic, and traffic and lead generation, two entirely different category subjects. John, the next subject that we have on here, do you feel like we cover number three, basically semi-copier competition posttitles?
Well, just the titles are important. I think they’re one of the main things that Google looks at. Look at the… Do what we outlined in part two that you showed, look at the post. Don’t copy the title word to word, just swap some of the keywords with similar words. He also suggest you get a lot of list articles because this wasn’t specifically aimed at the real estate industry. You get a lot of list articles, like nine blogging tools. He seems to suggest, I never heard this one before, that odd numbers work better. I’ve never heard that one before. It’s like a little bit of a difference. I don’t know. But the titles are linked to your SEO research. I think in SEO terms and readability terms, people clicking, it is important. What’s your thoughts?
I know where the odd numbers thing is coming from. It’s coming from ChatGPT. I just looked on one of my earlier calls today, Guy’s posted 521 articles that you all supposedly wrote in August and September, 521. There are all nine best ways to do this, nine best ways to do that. Guy destroyed the uniqueness of his blog just by posting nothing but what was obviously AI or behavioral learning-generated content. And odd numbers, when you search in ChatGPT, it says that odd number of posts gets clicked. Well, that’s according to its data pool, which would be Bing and Microsoft. They didn’t have permission to grab data off Google, so they’re missing 85% of their data. I’m not saying that their 10-12% isn’t representative. I am going to say I don’t know that I would necessarily buy into that 100%. But for the sake of argument, let’s say they’re right. Just to keep the conversation flowing. Let’s just say that odd numbers do work better. Seven, five, nine, three. H2 and H3 titles are important. John, do you care to explain to the audience what a header is? What that actually means? Because you just lost 80% of us.
Yeah, that’s right. Blog post content on the internet are laid out in a scripted language called HTMLL, and your titles, your main titles are H1, which is normally the main title on top of your page or blog, especially in WordPress and then in most website building tools. Then you have semi-titles that break up your page. H2, you should only have two H2s, but this isn’t concrete. But I think the research I’ve done from various experts that the wording in your H2s and your H3 is a key factor that Google looks at. It’s looking at a load of different factors, hundreds of different factors, but it’s spending a bit of time optimizing those and making sure it’s important, but not overdo it, not stuff it with keywords all over the place. Yeah, that’s what I’ve got to say about that. What do you think?
Well, everything you said was correct. Html, all those things. Ladies and gentlemen, you can tell the title of a page. Generally, it’s signified by the size of the text and the boldness of the text. Now, the boldness is not a universal signal. The size, however, is actually a universal signal for H1s and H2s. So when we’re talking about, and once again, for those people, I don’t know why I’m so into this particular time, but once again, I’m just going to show something. I’m going to use one of our sites. I’m just going to go to a blog. This is an H1. It’s a title, okay? Larger, in this case, bolder. You click on it, when you hit the page, it’s still going to be larger, still going to be bolder. And then this down here for us, we skip. This is probably H2s, and H3s would be slightly smaller in size. The relevance of these things is… I should have just stopped sharing. Just confirm for me that I’m not sharing anymore.
Yeah, you’re not sharing.
Okay, so the relevance of these things, ladies and gentlemen, is that Google is taking the titles and it’s actually making a vast assumption about everything else on the page, and it’s using your headers as confirmation. So it’s called semantic keyword recognition. They’re just assuming what the keyword and the content is on the site, and they’re no longer looking words for words. They have an element of their program that just casually verifies based upon language density, what it is you’re really talking about. Out. But once they’ve identified the signpost and language density, they just make the assumption this is what the article is about. And then they look at user engagement for a lot of their other signals. They also still do look to this interconnectivity that we’re going to move on to in the next subject. They look at the way the pages are connected on the site and how easy is it for somebody to get from one page to the next in order to use the rest of the site. Let’s just say you have an answer to a very popular question, but you have support content out there for that question, such as let’s say you wrote an article on beaches and then you say, I also, by the way, have a little page that tells you what the fees are to park in each beach and a map to where all those beaches are.
That would be an excellent example of how you would be linking off one article into other pages that were existing on your website that all support the main article, which Google does look at and looks at the user behaviors. People travel from one link to another and lands on those additional pages and then do they stay there? Did it seem to support the original topic? And if the answer is yes, all the pages benefit. What’s your idea about internal and external linking? I think I’ve commented to the degree that I want to on that.
Yeah, I think there’s two levels to this because obviously the Serps areas tend to look at page authority. Itry to think to some degree, Google’s moving away from that from page authority to more domain authority because of AI, because of changes in technology. They’re, to some extent, and I might be totally wrong, but I’m just going by what I’m hearing and the professionals in this sector that I follow. They say domain authority is becoming a bit more important than it always has. But the other factor is they do like to see internal links to other sectors of your website from your posts. There’s like Robert and a more aware, more professional person that’s working on the websites, they would have silos. It’s called silos in the industry. A silo is around a particular sub-topic, and they group pages that feed the main authority juice to one main page. It’s a will where you’ve got a central hub and you’ve got pages that feed authority into the main page. But you’ve got to be at Robert’s and his team level to understand all this. If you’re a DIY person, or I would say just make sure that if you’ve got about three or four pages around a particular subject, it’s great to link them.
Then something which people who are not a professional try to struggle with, it’s a good idea to link to external websites from your pages to external websites that give more value about the subject. Trying to explain that to a client that hasn’t got some knowledge in this area is really, really a struggle because they say… It’s understandable because it’s counterintuitive. You’re taking them away from your website. When it comes to the professional level, you might not like that idea because then the only contradiction is obviously keeping them on the website. You want to keep them on your website as long as possible because that’s one of the… I don’t know what your view about that. Especially if I’m linking to a more authoritative website, I do have external links. What do you think of what I’ve just said, Rob?
I think that there’s a lot of dialog about something called link building. Link building used to be 80% of SEO, and John’s right, complicated, multilayered. There’s all sorts of things where websites are hosted and what the subject of the site is and do the visitors from that site stay on your site? Ballot’s free link building is a signal that is diminishing in value over the years. It’s now not by most people considered that you can be a top five signal. I also agree with John where the place that you do still see things really mattering is there’s definitely still a part of the algorithm that is looking at link building to establish a domain’s overall authority and decide whether or not that domain can really rank for top tier keywords in a number one or two position. So I think once again, we’re talking about, are you aiming at a really competitive keyword? Because if you are, do you still have to worry about link building? Absolutely. For a lot of the lesser competition keywords, I think it’s almost 100% based on user behavior these days, John. I don’t even know that we need to talk about external link building anymore.
But what is that? Let’s just say a website has a book, the book has pages. Let’s say you’re in a library and you’ve got 10 million books to choose from and you go to a librarian and the librarian said, You say, I want to find out something about hunting deer in the state of Wyoming. So the librarian points you to a section of the library that has books on hunting. That point is the same thing as a referral link that a website would do to a broad subject that you had. Internal linking would be the specificities once the book is there and it’s opened and it’s very, very credible. Let’s just say that you go to that section of the library instead of just one librarian down at the bottom, there’s another librarian. Now you say to that librarian, Where’s this book on deer hunting? They go, Well, you should try this book, this book, and that book. That is what a website does when it refers somebody to you. It is literally saying, We think that these websites are the most authoritative on those subjects. Do they know that you really necessarily have the specificities of the answer?
No, not necessarily. But if the librarian is considered a subject matter expert, depending on the library that you’re in, and they refer you, then of course that expertise transfers because that librarian is supposed to know what they’re talking about, right? That’s the same thing as websites and linking, John. That’s the same thing that high-quality linking focuses on. Grant links for real estate agents these days or ActiveRain, which has been true for many years, but Inman, RealT news. These are all places where real estate agents and professionals go to get their real estate-related news, and they anticipate that those blogs and newspapers are experts in the field. So if you were to get a link from those experts to your website and you’re in real estate, that one vote is probably enough to establish your domain in the eyes of Google, and two or three votes of that high caliber would definitely establish your domain in the eyes of Google. Does that make sense? From my perspective, does that make sense to you?
Yeah, sure. I don’t know what you’re going to think about what I’m just going to say, but I always said I think it still applies, but I’m not active with clients in this sector like you are, is that when it depends on if you’re in a smaller city or smaller town or region, localized SEO is a little bit different, I think, to some extent than regional, national, if you’re in a big, meta-potential area. What I mean by this role is that when it’s in a less competitive area, I think you can build external links that have some of it by using directories and go into a number of resources, and you can just fill in the details. I think they still offer it, but I haven’t checked it for over a year. It’s Moss. They used to offer a tool that I think was a one-off payment. I don’t think it was that, or you paid it once a year, and you could fill in all your details, and it would make sure your details were filled in in all the local directories so the contact details were correct because that’s one of the factors that Google looks.
I think in less competitive areas, I think there are a lot of low-lying link-building strategies, which I’m sure you utilize in your team, that can make a big difference. I think these strategies get more difficult when you’re dealing with very competitive, like Beverly Hills, or you’re dealing with New York or San Francisco because you’re dealing with a whole crowd of real estate, brokerages, and individual agents that either invest a lot of time in knowledge themselves or they hire other people like yourselves that really know their SEO. What do you reckon? I’ll just outline.
I reckon that we should have a different podcast on hyperlocal SEO. It’s a completely different subject. Not that anything you said was necessarily wrong, but it’s not even the same search results. It’s a different category, so we should talk about it separately. All I will say is nothing to do.
Yeah, we’re about to do that next week.
Beautiful. We’re going to do that. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to wrap up this show-up. It’s been about 35 minutes, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of how long we tend to like to go. John, if you wanted somebody to have a longer dialog with you about SEO, what a search site is, any of the subjects we said, or what you would recommend for their website to get them additional traffic, all those things, how would you want them to reach out to you?
Well, first of all, I’d be really happy to have a chat with them, but if they were really serious about SEO, I’d send them over to Robert because we don’t have, Robert, we just don’t have the team and the bandwidth to do that. My small team focuses on Facebook. As you know, we’ve built a really good platform for paid traffic and follow-through, and we’ve got some other cool elements. Rob and his team are really good value in this because he’s built up a whole team, and he’s at a price point that a lot of people could afford and get some real benefit, whereas, In other services, they’re more aimed at… You need a very, very large budget, a very successful brokerage budget. That’s what I would do. But if you just want a general chat, I’m more than happy to give you some insights. But if you really, really want to hire an SEO team, you’ve got us going over to Robert, back over to you, Robert. Back over to you, Ross.
Thank you so much, Sean. That means the world to me. If anybody would like to do that, I’m going to say go to inboundREM.com, and go to our About or Services page. You can either find a link to a contact form or you can find a link to my calendar, depending on which one of those two pages you go to, and I will happily have a conversation with you about real estate SEO. With no further ado, why don’t you sign us off, John?
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The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show
Jonathan Denwood & Robert Newman
https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa
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Robert Newman
InboundREM
https://inboundrem.com
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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.
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.
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.
I interviewed- Rush, S-E-M? You’re talking about?
Yes, Russia’s SEM. I interviewed one of the founders of that.
Holy cow, why didn’t you get him off this show? I left Thank you for that.
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.
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.
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.
I certainly have incredibly strong opinions on every single one of these.
He’s already shown that with our pre-shown discussion points.
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.
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.
As well, I think, Rob.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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-.
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.
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.
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.
Well, I duplicate you too. I duplicate you double and three. That was funny, wasn’t it? Because it was about duplication.
All right, so we’re actually going to number this correctly for John.
I have on my copy, I’ve just done it, but not on yours.
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.
They’re everywhere. They’re in Safari. They’re everywhere. There is no lack of visibility on Google from Chromium.
That’s why I don’t use it. I use Firefolks.
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.
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.
No, I’ve got anything to say. I agree with you, Antoine.
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.
Shall I give my opinion first?
Please.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Number six.
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.
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.
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.
Now here’s the mind-blowing bit. Thirty-five point one purchases a cent is the number for the internet as.
A whole.
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..
There’s.
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.
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.
You’re going to be a bit worried if they did something.
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.
Yeah, I thought you did quite well, and I think it’s been some good value, don’t you think so?
I hope so because I hope so. If I can’t do good value on this subject, fire me.
I think we have managed to give value without going off on a big end in a really big tech dive.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show
Jonathan Denwood & Robert Newman
https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa
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Robert Newman
InboundREM
https://inboundrem.com
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