SEO Secrets For Real Estate Agents From The Guy Who Outsmarted Google

Do you ever get those calls from people who say something like you kind of go with a company, we can get you ranked on the first page of Google and we’re, do you keep hearing things about SEO and how you should be doing something about it for your business, but you don’t really even know where to start? Well, today is kind of like a one-on-one workshop or class on what real estate agents should know about the beginning of SEO ranking for their business. And most of the tips today are 100% free. My guest today is a world renowned, truly SEO expert. He has done over 400 scientific tests on what works and what doesn’t work. As far as SEO and Google ranking, he has developed and fine tuned a method to test whether variables are ranking factors in Google’s algorithm. And he actually has a patent for this process that he figured out validating the techniques that he has come up with. And really he is like the go-to expert for SEO professionals. So he has such a wealth of knowledge and I was like, okay, you gotta make it basic for us because, Hey, we don’t have a ton of time. We don’t have full-time capacity to work on the SEO for our business, but what do we need to know as real estate agents? So he’s going to teach you some very basic things. And also why you can just go ahead and say no to those people, calling you who, if you pay them, they can get you ranking on the first page of Google. Welcome to this episode of Confessions of a Top Producing Real Estate Agent. I’m your host, Jennifer Myers, listen in, as I share exactly what I did to go from not being able to sell a house for years to becoming one of the top 1% of agents in the U S even opening my own brokerage full of agents helped me serve all the clients that were coming my way. I taught those agents the same strategies I use and date two became top producing agents. Now through this podcast and AgentGradSchool.com, I’m sharing those same modern marketing and business strategies with you. Most of which I learned from looking outside the real estate industry, no fluff, no theory, no outdated sales techniques or paying for leads. Just the exact steps to get you the real estate business you’ve always wanted. And the life outside your business, you’ve always wanted to let’s make it happen and dive into today’s episode. All right, Kyle, great to have you here today. Thank you for stepping out of it feels like your scientific SEO labs have a conversation with me today. As you know, our audience is full of real estate agents who keep hearing they should do something with SEO, but they don’t know exactly what to do. So where do real estate agents even start when it comes to hearing like they should do something about SEO? Like what should they be doing? Well, probably the first thing is maybe an understanding of what SEO can do and what you might want to do with it. So SEO is organic traffic and organic typically means something that you didn’t pay for. Meaning that somebody searched for something in Google and a page of yours appeared, and they clicked on it. That’s organic traffic. And so you didn’t expressly gain anything to Google, whereas a, an ad, the results you see at the very top are ads. People pay for placement. It’s an auction. And if it’s a term that you really like, and you were just starting today, that is a very viable way to, to get in the game is simply to pay for placement within Google. So we get a ton of calls as real estate agents. We get on some lists and I get at least a call a week, or maybe a call a day about if you pay us, we can get you highest on Google ranking kind of thing. So what I’m hearing you say is that SEO is not really about, or it can be about paying, but it can also be about not paying and still ranking high. Is that right? The theory is that there is no payment involved. You have a web page, Google likes the webpage. It’s going to put you within the search results on page one, page two, page three, wherever it might be. And that is not paid. It’s a mathematical equation. It’s an algorithm that Google has. It looks that your page, it looks at other pages and it crunches the numbers. And it decides from a math perspective, which page it likes the most. And that’s the page that it puts up. That’s actually, it gets into a pretty common misconception. A lot of people think that Google can read and that Google is making value judgments. Google looked at your page and said, oh, I am richer for the experience of reading this content. And I will now put it on page one. I think a lot of people actually realize that once they try to put some content out there, I’ve heard this from a lot of people that they’re like, my piece of content is clearly better. You know, I’ve got 15 years in the industry. I actually, this is my specialty, the people on page one, they don’t even do what I do. They don’t even do the thing. And then somehow they’re on page one and they feel like Google has read their content and is making some sort of value judgment as to which piece of content to show. And that isn’t the case at all. Google isn’t reading Google. Isn’t saying like, oh, this person has 15 years experience. And this person only has three years experience. They’re not doing that at all. They’re not even looking at the pretty pictures. You know, I like my page design so much better. Google. Isn’t looking at that at all. What Google is looking at is that they’re very specific places on a page and a Google looks at this would be the title of your page, the title tag, if you’ve ever been in the back of WordPress, sometimes this is called a meta title. It’s looking at the H one. This is the title that humans see when they come to your page, it’s looking at your URL. And it’s looking at paragraph text P tags, the meat of your site. Those are the four most important places that Google is looking at. And what Google is really looking for are the terms inside of there, which terms you have used and how many times you have used them. So if there’s a particular phrase, you know that if somebody were to search for it and you really want a page to show up, if you put that phrase in those four places, you’ve probably done 60% of SEO right then and there. Wow. And you don’t have to pay a penny for Right now. People really try to overthink it. They try to get very clever with it. What if I did a fancy title here for Google and I did a fancy title over here for humans. Don’t do it. Don’t overthink it. Put your keyword in those four places. The one note of caution is let’s say you have a page that is established. It’s actually doing pretty well. And you realize that you don’t have your keyword in that URL. Don’t change your URL. If you change a URL, you’re giving Google a brand new page and you’ll have to start over from scratch. So only do this on say a page that isn’t performing well or completely brand new page, but otherwise, if it exists and has existed for some time and is bringing you some traffic don’t change your URLs. But otherwise the URL is something that you don’t want to get your target keyword into. Wow. Okay. So like literally, how do we know what keywords to put in? How do we know how to develop a page? That’s going to rank well in the ways that you’re talking about how do we do that? The first thing you want to look at is understand that one keyword is one page and by keyword, I mean, main keyword, the main concept of the page. It’s good to think about a page as a Roman numeral outline in sixth grade, Ms. Cherry told me that I needed to write outlines and she was right. And I can tell you, I’d never done it, but it’s, it’s the same. It’s the same thing. You know, you know, if you don’t write an outline and you try to write an essay and it’s a terrible essay, it’s the same thing with a web page. If you don’t sit down and write an outline, you’re going to have a pretty terrible webpage, but that one page needs one concept. And that’s your Roman numeral one.  That’s again, the title you’re going to put in for humans. And the surgeon is to see that first part. And you’ve got your ABC and D. Those are the different sections on your page and an SEO speak. Those will be your H twos, your secondary headings, slightly smaller font, but it breaks up the page. But that one page is at one main concept. So an example that I like to give to people that are new to SEO is that let’s say you’re writing a page about how to make tacos. And so you’ve got your, how to make tacos as your title. You’re going to have two sections on there, probably soft shell tacos and hard shell tacos. And those are the intro to your H twos, your A’s and your B’s an outline. As soon as you start talking about burritos, that’s a whole other page. Even though this is in the concept of Mexican food, they would need to be two separate pages. And so the idea is that I’ve got my tacos, pager, how to make my tacos, and that’s my title. And I’ve got my sections on the different types of tacos I can make. And then as soon as you get into another type of food, that would have to be its own separate page. So only about what your main concept is, and then each main concept needs its own page. And so that’s why, and correct me if I’m wrong, because this is a little over my head, but like, is that why blogging is so important to SEO rankings? Because you can have a concept per page. That’s why each of those pages can rank on their own for individual terms or individual phrases each for its own main concept. And what’s really nice too, is the longer, the phrase is that you’re going for the more words that are within that keyword phrase, generally speaking, the easier it is to win, which is often why blocks can be very effective because you can go after a longer phrase terms that maybe your competitors, you know, huge, huge, and huge aren’t going after, you know, Remax or Zillow or whoever you might be going up against might not be taking the time for those longer tail phrases because they just don’t care. But it’s an opportunity for you to get some wins by simply answering questions that people might be asking and then putting them within your blog. Yeah. So what I’m hearing you saying is the most effective website would have a blog where there is a concept on her blog page, right? And then I’ve heard that one other thing that helps us. And so I’m curious, your thought is, you know, so many real estate agents have websites that are just kind of static. I call them like vanity plate websites where it’s just like, Hey, here’s how I am. It’s like me. It never changes. And so what I’m hearing you say is like, that’s why those pages don’t rank very well. One is because of the blog, but is there anything to the algorithm with it continuing to update every week or every, you know, every month, like the newness of it? Does that help too? Sure. Well, the first part I’m talking about is, like, often people use their website as a business card, right? That it’s, this is who I am, and that’s totally fine. The, your homepage, the first page that people see you should be your business card. It should say little about who you are, where you work, you know, your core values, that kind of stuff, the stuff that a business would present, and you want to do the same thing for Google. You know, you want to have that page. That’s dedicated to saying who you are as a company or who you are as a person. And that’s totally, totally fine. The other pages on the site are the ones that you would then go after for very specific terms and the concepts, and those can be pages or posts and to Google, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing a page or you’re writing a post that doesn’t matter if they all ranked the same. But the idea is that you then need those internal pages that are going after your specific terms When it comes to Google changing all the time. But that’s a question that I get quite a bit. How do you stay on top of things? The one thing that’s really nice about Google is that the majority of it doesn’t change. If you think about a bell curve distribution, when Google is making changes, they’re often making changes to that fringe 10 to 15% on either side of the bell curve, because that’s where people are trying to game it or trying to take advantage of things. But that middle, like 70, 80%, the core of it changes so rarely. And the changes are usually not all that significant because it works. The only people that complain about Google results are SEO’s. Everyone else who uses Google is quite happy with it. And that’s why I have like a 95% market share. And so there’s no monetary reason for them to change something that works so well. So if you could nail some of these basic concepts, they’re evergreen and Google will change this, or change that, or tweak this, or tweak that most of the time, you’re not going to get wrapped up in it. Because if you say kind of within that 70, 80% that isn’t gonna change it, which is usually within Google’s guidelines as well, you’re gonna do quite well. And if you’re ever concerned about, is this riding up against the edge, it might be. But if you’re just doing content, if you’re just creating pages on your site, that’s always within Google’s guidelines and you’re never going to get in any kind of trouble. And usually don’t have to worry too much about any changes in Google. Awesome. So if I’m a real estate agent and tune back to like, literally, how do I increase my SEO ranking? Like what would I do literally? Well, so you’re probably gonna have some pages on your site, and this is a confusing concept that is never going to rank, but you probably need to create them. They would be pages that would be going head to head with Zillow or with Remax or with century 21 on The big guys. Yeah. The big ones you might be going head to head with them on a certain page and that’s okay because you need to get those concepts on your site. And it only makes sense for people coming to your site. They probably want that information anyway, but so you’re gonna have some main pages like that. They’re going to go after some very tough terms. I remember those tough terms are the main concept, but Leadpages don’t rank for just one term healthy pages, rank for hundreds or thousands of keywords, and many of which don’t even exist on the page, but you must optimize for that top level difficult thing to win all of those other ones. So you can then create pages that while they are targeting in they’re optimized for that top level page, really the existence, why they are there is to win all of those other terms. And some of those terms that the larger firms won’t care about. So remember we mentioned in our room and rely on you’ve bet your ABCD. And those are the different sections on your page. You can write different sections on your page. And really the goal is those sections, the keywords in those headings are actually what you’re going after, because you can win them because they’re longer tails, they’re terms that the big guys really don’t care too much about. And you can go after that. So you’ve got that page after that really difficult term that you may never win, but the sections on the page can be quite successful and start to bring you targeted traffic that you need the type of drive that can convert. Okay. So we have a page in WordPress, you can choose which type of header. So you were saying you would choose H two for those are these headlines, Which one would be the title at the top. And that contains that. And then each of the other sections would be HTS. Yeah. H twos. And then how do I know what to pick for that? So if I’m in Timbuktu, would it say something like how to buy your first home in Timbuktu in the age section? For sure that’d be, that would definitely be an option for how to buy a home. And 10 by two might be actually a pretty tough term. And that actually might be the title on your page, but then what’s nice is Google gives you some pretty good options without using any fancy tools on what you can use. So search how to buy a house in Timbuktu, scroll to the bottom of Google. And you’re going to see a related keyword section. If you, if you properly optimize for that top level term, you can win those secondary terms and the ones that are really important to you like, oh, I really like that. Use those as your HTS in those different sections, The Google, the thing that you want to rank high for, you’re probably not going to win. You might use that for your title. Look down at the bottom, the related search terms, use those as your age twos. Exactly right. Oh my gosh. Okay. You have a good chance of winning those. The other thing is, you know, the questionnaire that comes up, it’s called people also ask. So what is that? So sometimes when you do you ask a Question And then there’s a section, people also ask, those are perfect for HTS. The idea is that somebody has asked that question and not just one person. Oh, a lot of people have asked that question. That’s how it’s shown up in Google. So now you can create a section on your page that answers that question. It also gives you an opportunity to take that spot in Google, where you might not be on page one, but you could take a people also ask section and actually gain clicks from that without even ranking very well at the start. Wow. That is really cool. So then what I’m hearing you say is make your H2O questions and then , That’s an excellent way to do it. I would take a few of those related searches and I’d take a couple of people also ask. The other thing I would do is I’d start clicking around on all of those related searches. And sometimes have you ever seen at the top of Google, there’s an answer. There’s like a paragraph to give an answer. There’s like a list or A table, And that’s called a featured snippet. I’d go around and find a couple of those that are relevant and put those on my page as well. And that gives me an opportunity to take up that spot on Google as well. So I’ve got my target term that I may never win, but I’m going to put in two or three related keywords that I can win. I’m going to put in maybe two questions that I can win. And I’m going to put in a couple of featured snippets, which I can win. And that gives that page the best opportunity to rank. Even though you might be going up against all the big players in the space, you still have a page that can rank for hundreds of thousands of keywords and be very, very successful. And the more pages that you have like that, the more you’re going to rank entirely when I’m, So those pages have, as they start to pick up their own keywords, they start to get their own impressions, their own clicks. But what happens is a lot of people, especially when they’re starting out, might take that hard keyword, you know, the list of like 20 hard ones and put it into a tracker and they’re like, I’m doing terribly. Now, these aren’t ranking at all. That’s okay. That’s not, That’s not the Point. The point is that you’re actually gonna rank for all those other terms. And you’re gonna have very, very successful pages. Okay? So this all, what you’ve mentioned could be done completely for free. So you want people to call and say, do you want to rank first on Google? Our agents can say, no, thanks. I’m gonna try something else. First, Anybody that guarantees that, by the way, just as a, as a note, if anybody says like, I can definitely get you on page one, don’t use that agency, but a good chance. It’s a lot less than reputable ones. I just buy the first spot in ads and they assume you don’t know that that’s a purchased position. I’ve got you on page one. Well, you could have done it yourself. You know, you didn’t have to pay them to do that. Anybody’s like guaranteeing page one spots. The hardest thing is even if a term looks easy and you could probably get to page one, we don’t control Google, not yet, you know? And also other people cheat, you know, there are people out there cheating and you don’t control that either. And then also there’s sometimes where there’s some SERPs results pages that you’re not gonna get on there because there might be only one or two available spots for a site like yours and it’s just not going to happen. So anyone that guarantees that type of result, I’d be very wary of. I probably wouldn’t go with them, But are there any tools that can make it, cause what you’re describing on how to do it feels a little time consuming, a little confusing. You might, I would probably sit down and like, not know where to even start with everything you’re saying, is there any tools that can help us do this better quicker? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that is the, that is the name of the game. Of course I have a tool that I, I do think it goes quite well. It’s with the on page SEO, that’s meant to help you. What type of terms that Google actually wants to see. Now we mentioned at the beginning, putting your target keyword in those four places and then finding your HTS, that’s going to do a lot of work for you and you honestly need no tool at all. If you want to go kind of one step farther where now, okay, we want to find how we can get those edges, how we can really try to take advantage of that’s where something like my tool, page optimizer pro would come in because we’re doing the math. So it’s not just putting the keyword one time in certain places, it’s putting that keyword. It’s variations, other contextual terms, a certain amount of time in very specific places on the page. And that’s where if you want to take it up to a real math level and really try to get an edge, that’s where we would come in. We can also help you with those different sections. Like, because we pull in the related keywords, we pull in the people who also ask questions. So you can be like, okay, if you haven’t built a page yet you can get the recommendations and you can also see those places that might make up those different sections on your page. And so how much does a tool like that cost for those? Because I do get questions all the time. Like what about SEO? SEO? And I’m like, I don’t know. What about it? Like, like how much does something like that cost $20 a month? That’s it? Yeah. That gives you 12 runs. That’s our lowest plan. Unlimited runs are $39. Okay. And what does that mean? Like how does a real estate agent use this tool? Because that sounds super cheap. I thought you were going to say like a thousand dollars a month or something. If you want the agency, we’ve got a 1500 and we can do all the work for you. But if you want to jump in and do it that $39 a month plan, we’ll do it. So each where that main concept is one page. The idea is that within the tool, you’d organize your projects by all the pages that you are trying to create, or they just that you have, you want to tweak. And then there are recommendations. Come in. I would also mention that we do a free workshop twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays right now it’s actually completely live. Cause we made some updates to the tool, but usually, the first section is recorded. You got to give us some basic concepts on SEO and then also using the tool. But then on each of them, I come in live and I stay on and I answer any and all questions. And that can be about using the tool or actually just SEO in general. So if somebody is a pop user, actually don’t even need to be a hot pop user. But if you’re like, Hey, where should I start? Or I’ve got some questions about this or that. I answer those every week for free, as long as people have the questions and I’m still using the tool and they liked the concepts, they also get access to me as well, just from our free workshops. And so I’ll link to that in the show notes for this episode, we’ll use the male grow, I’ll get it. Okay. And that way people can interact with you that way. So how did you come to know all this stuff? Because a couple of things that I read, like you have some really cool mottos, like Google doesn’t read and only does math. Like how did you figure this whole thing out? How did you become, you have a patent when it comes to SEO. So like, which is really hard to get, I would assume. So. How did I also have a Google rule? I showed people how you can figure out some stuff within the algorithm and Google really didn’t appreciate it. And they wrote a rule specifically for me that you can’t do that anymore. Okay. So yeah, that’s pretty funny. So obviously what you do seems to work. How did you get to be so knowledgeable about this stuff? I’m so curious When I decided to get into SEO, you know, and you sit down to learn something like in you go to Google and you search right now, is this a ranking factor? Or should I do this thing? And what I’ve found is you get, always get like three yeses, three nos and three maybes. And I was like, that’s worthless. That’s not gonna, that’s not going to move me forward. And then also you get like technique. And then everyone’s like, oh, this works like gangbusters, but it’s like 50 steps. And I’m like, man, I don’t have time to Do Things like which of these is actually moving the needle. So I started refining concepts on how to test Google’s algorithm. And I realized that I was thinking like, oh, you know, the top guys and gals in industry. I think the reason that they aren’t sharing anything or like where they’re coming from is that they’re just running their own test sites. And so I started putting up test sites to give them a go. So like, if somebody is completely brand new to SEO and they’re like, how can I actually learn the best way is to throw up a site and actually do something. I wouldn’t do it on my first site. Like if I’m in real estate, I wouldn’t do my first site in real estate. But let’s say you like juggling, like knitting, you like reading certain types of books, but a little site about that. And then that kind of gets you into the keyword research aspect, looking at your competitors aspect, what kind of pages should I put up? And then it gives you a place to tinker and to try things out and learning by doing is certainly the way to go. But then I got a little more scientific with it in my own test sites where I was like, you know what, if we start eliminating variables and see if we can’t get down to like, is this actually a ranking factor? Like, does Google look at the specific thing and do this specific thing? And then, we kind of refined methods on how to be able to do that so that we can say with confidence, like, yes, this is a factor. And we all say like, yes, this factor is stronger than that one. Or this is a negative factor, that sort of thing. And so just running tests, every test, I think I’ve published more than 400 tests on Google’s algorithm at this point. And then the method, it has a US patent as well. So you have a patented method for ranking high on SEL For determining if something is, or is not a ranking factor in Google. Like, is this a real thing? Should we be doing it is kind of the method of what we’re going after. Wow. So you are the SEO expert, thank you for sharing your knowledge with us today. Anything you want to add? Because I, like I said, I think for the average real estate agent, the whole concept of SEO is a little overwhelming, but we keep hearing the word. So anything else you want to leave all of us with? Because we, I, it still feels like this big nebulous thing that it’s like, how do I tackle this giant? Sure. Yeah. I mean, keep it as simple as you can, you know, it is really easy to get overwhelmed. Think about those terms that you want. Probably everybody else wants, start with those. And then can I do the things we talked about just in the last 20, 30 minutes about putting the keyword in those four most important places, finding my different sections, answering those questions, that sort of thing. And then that’s going to go a very long way for you, for sure. And then you want to get a little more into it. You can check out my stuff and get into it, but it’s not necessary. But if you want to take another level up, more than welcome to come over and check out my stuff. Okay. Which is Kyle roof.com. And then in the show notes for this episode, we will link to your weekly webinar, which sounds really packed with information. Thank you, Kyle, for cracking the code on SEO and then sharing it with us and everybody else. So thank you for doing what you do. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Yeah. Awesome. Thanks. If you want to learn more about Kyle and how he can help you with your SEO, you can go to Kyle roof.com. If you want direct links to any of the resources that we mentioned in this episode, you can go to www.agentgradschool.com/seo. Thanks for listening and see you next week. Thank you for listening to this episode of Confessions of a Top Producing Real Estate Agent. We purposely keep those podcasts sponsor and commercial free. So we can focus solely on providing real estate agents with the content that will help them grow their real estate business. And how about like, they love outside but business too, but we need your help to get this podcast in the hands of other real estate agents. So please, if you liked this episode, leave a review on iTunes or wherever you’re listening, and also tell your agent friends to listen in to thank you so much for supporting the show for being a listener and supporting other agents along your way to success. That’s what this is all about. See you next time. On another episode of Confessions of a Top Producing Real Estate Agent. And until then, Tom, hang with me over at www.agentgradschool.com. I’ll see you there.