subject: How To Attract Real Estate Investing Business Locally Through Search Engines [print this page] It is likely that as a real estate investor, you target your local market where you buy and sell houses. It is likely you only get your leads exclusively from this local market.
It follows that if you can rank highly in this local area, you are likely to attract a lot of leads for your real estate investing business.
In this article, we cover how to rank highly in the local search results in the search engines.
What are local searches?
All the search engines - Google, Bing and Yahoo - have three types of search results:
1)Pay per click - these are paid searches where you pay the search engine for every person that clicks through to your website. For your ads to be active, you must maintain a payment method.
It does require you to spend sufficient time to optimize your ads to make sure you get a good return on your investment.
2)Organic searches
These are the main search results that usually appear below paid ads. It is every marketer's dream to rank highly in organic search results - bringing you a lot of profits.
We have covered how to rank highly in organic searches in a separate article.
3)Local searches
Local search results usually appear between the pay per clicks and organic search results. In a lot of cases they appear together with a map of your local market.
This means that just outcompeting your local neighbors can bring you a lot of leads right where you do business, even if you do not rank highly in organic search results.
How to submit your business in the search engines
You do need to open accounts in all the three main search engines to submit your business.
When you submit your business, always make sure you submit as much information about your business as possible. They let you submit a full profile including title, description, pictures, videos, etc. And of course, remember to submit the URL to your real estate investor website!
Your URL appears prominently so people can visit your real estate investor website from local search results. I have seen a lot of ads with no URL - big mistake. In such a case potential leads are left with only a phone number if you have one and the description you have submitted.
1)Google
You do need to open an account with Google. Go to www.google.com/local/add. They will ask you to log in or sign up.
Then go through the signup steps. You must provide a real address even if it is a P. O. Box.
To activate your ad, Google will mail a postcard with a PIN to your address. Until you have entered this PIN, your ad will not be activated.
2)Yahoo
Go to www.listings.local.yahoo.com/signup. The steps are similar to Google. Yahoo will activate your ad within 30 to 45 days. They do not send you a PIN.
3)Bing
Go to www.bingbusinessportal.com. The steps are just like Google. Bing will send you a PIN by mail to activate their local searches.
How to rank highly in local searches
To rank higher than your competition, you do need to have more back links.
Back links are links from third party websites pointing to your website. They rank you more highly the more links you have.
