Building A Real Estate Website: Where To Start?

Question

Hi BP,

I am starting a website to attract leads while also educating them so I am their source of info and can find their best option. I plan on using wordpress and host gator. I don't care if the site is aesthetically pleasing so long as it is not ugly enough to make people leave the site immediately. This is for wholesaling.

I could really use some tips on these following things:

1) SEO. Where should I start by doing it my self?

2) What type of content should I use to educate leads (blogs, just some paragraphs educating on a topic after clicking a tab on my site, pictures,etc

3) What are "must haves" for a real estate wholesaling website

4) Cool gadgets, plug ins,etc.

5) Guides on how to build a site.

6) Where to get images and outside sources for content

You DON'T have to answer them all but I would really appreciate advice on this.

Omar Ruiz · Answer

1) Youtube search SEO 2017 or SEO 2018. I subscribe to Brian Dean (his videos are entertaining & informative), Neil Patel (consistently posted these 2-5 minute clips & Josh Bachnyski (Canadian who seems to know what he is talking about, must take notes when watching his videos).

2) Content, in my opinion, should focus on your target market (distressed homeowners). Focus on

• Preforeclosure
• Hoarding
• Divorce
• Liens
• Condemned House
• Abandoned House
• Damaged House (Major Repairs)
• Bankrupcy
• Probate (Inherited) House
• Relocation
• Fire/Water/Mold

3) Any business website must have a Terms of Use and Privacy Policy page. If you need a business attorney, go to UpCounsel. This site allows you to create a legal project and local attorney will bid for your business.

You are going to also need to create a Google Analytics account plus Facebook business page account so you can do online ads and retargetting.

Set up a Linked In account, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and any other Social Media account for your business.

Plus, it is not just about whether you site looks nice, it needs to preform well to rank one page 1 of google results page (depending on the selected keywords you are trying to rank for).

4)  See below

• WP Super Cache
• WP Optimize
• WP Smush
• Regenerate Thumbnails
• Wordfense Security
• Perfmatters
• Updraft Plus
• Easy Updates Manager

5) Udemy - Purchase the 2017 Complete Guide to Digital Marketing online course ($10-$15 only). They have a section that shows you how to build a site using WordPress. I wish I learned about this before investing in a webdesigner. However, I hired a design team who knows about coding, which is helpful since I do not know anything about coding.

6) Shutterstock or Unspalsh

Nick Calabro · Answer

What you're trying to accomplish with your site is perfectly doable with the some simple marketing tactics. I'll go over each of your points -- the big thing to takeaway is that you're going to get people onto your site from solid SEO and digital marketing, capture them as a lead with an optimized landing page, and proceed to keep them as a visitor to your site with valuable and extensive content.

1) SEO — Great idea keeping this as the #1 point. You'll want to read a few articles on SEO tactics to at least get the basics in order while you’re building out the site. Some great sources for this include Moz, Ahrefs, and HubSpot.

For some more technical advice on teh architecture of your site’s SEO, you’ll want to install Yoast SEO. This will enable you to do a few things regarding your SEO:

• Give you a complete audit using their wizard which:Determines if your site is personal or business — important for Google to know so they can give you a Knowledge Panel or not.Collects all your social profile links — to include in the knowledge panel and associate your business with them.And ensures your site’s overall title and other metadata are correct.Generates an XML Sitemap — Extremely important for SEO yet so commonly neglected.
• Determines if your site is personal or business — important for Google to know so they can give you a Knowledge Panel or not.
• Collects all your social profile links — to include in the knowledge panel and associate your business with them.
• And ensures your site’s overall title and other metadata are correct.
• Generates an XML Sitemap — Extremely important for SEO yet so commonly neglected.
• For each page and blog post on your site Yoast will allow you to:Modify the title, slug, and meta descriptionThe title is the main and #1 indicator of what is on this page — this should absolutely contain your keyword that you expect users to search leading them to stumble across you.The slug is simply the URL which should also contain your keyword.The Meta Description is the two-sentence text that describes what’s on the page — also containing your keyword.Yoast will rate each blog post and page’s SEO and readability. It’ll throw tips your way like adding images, telling you your headings are misleading, and such.
• Modify the title, slug, and meta descriptionThe title is the main and #1 indicator of what is on this page — this should absolutely contain your keyword that you expect users to search leading them to stumble across you.The slug is simply the URL which should also contain your keyword.The Meta Description is the two-sentence text that describes what’s on the page — also containing your keyword.
• The title is the main and #1 indicator of what is on this page — this should absolutely contain your keyword that you expect users to search leading them to stumble across you.
• The slug is simply the URL which should also contain your keyword.
• The Meta Description is the two-sentence text that describes what’s on the page — also containing your keyword.
• Yoast will rate each blog post and page’s SEO and readability. It’ll throw tips your way like adding images, telling you your headings are misleading, and such.

• Determines if your site is personal or business — important for Google to know so they can give you a Knowledge Panel or not.
• Collects all your social profile links — to include in the knowledge panel and associate your business with them.
• And ensures your site’s overall title and other metadata are correct.
• Generates an XML Sitemap — Extremely important for SEO yet so commonly neglected.

• Modify the title, slug, and meta descriptionThe title is the main and #1 indicator of what is on this page — this should absolutely contain your keyword that you expect users to search leading them to stumble across you.The slug is simply the URL which should also contain your keyword.The Meta Description is the two-sentence text that describes what’s on the page — also containing your keyword.
• The title is the main and #1 indicator of what is on this page — this should absolutely contain your keyword that you expect users to search leading them to stumble across you.
• The slug is simply the URL which should also contain your keyword.
• The Meta Description is the two-sentence text that describes what’s on the page — also containing your keyword.
• Yoast will rate each blog post and page’s SEO and readability. It’ll throw tips your way like adding images, telling you your headings are misleading, and such.

• The title is the main and #1 indicator of what is on this page — this should absolutely contain your keyword that you expect users to search leading them to stumble across you.
• The slug is simply the URL which should also contain your keyword.
• The Meta Description is the two-sentence text that describes what’s on the page — also containing your keyword.

2) Content — Write your posts to be as evergreen as you can and loaded with as much content as possible. Meanwhile, be sure to include the proper keywords so they’re easily found organically. In the span of a year: A blog that has 25 long-form SEO-driven posts all posted within a month will outperform one that has 100 poorly optimized and merely 500-word entries posted twice a week throughout the year. It’s recommended that a solid blog post include around 1500 words, images (with alt-tags), inbound & outbound links, as well scoring well on the Flesch-Kincaid readability tests.

If you want to get even more into the marketing side of your site, you can consider some type of magnet for the future. I’ts much easier to get someone’s name and number if you promise them a free download of your e-book or some exclude email content. How’re you collecting these leads and information? That brings us to your third point.

3) Must Haves — The most important thing you’ll need for a wholesaling site is a landing page. If you’re doing any kind of digital marketing or sending people to your site, you’ll need clear calls to action and to make it as easy as possible for them to become a lead. Your landing page might include an image, some big heading copy, and just a few fields for people to insert their info — boom, lead.

4) Gadgets — There are a few plugins I put on all my clients’ sites:

• Yoast SEO — as we discussed
• All-in-One WP Migration — used for taking sites locally and moving them to a live server
• Autoptimzie — caching solution to increase your site’s speed — WP isn’t always fast and unfortunately on HostGator you’ll need all the improvements you can get since it’s a shared hosting solution.
• Contact Form 7 — Most themes you go with might even include this. Will be essential for your landing and contact pages to actually fire you off an email.
• iThemes Security — Won’t go too heavy on the details but it’s great to just have running and checking your site. Will prevent brute force attacks and a lot of other things you may want to consider especially since you may get a lot of traffic that pass around sensitive data like housing info and such.
• Really Simple SSL — although I’d recommend this for any site, it’s especially important for your site since one of the main purposes are your contact forms. No one wants to start typing their sensitive information just to see the address bar populate with not secure. Enabling SSL will fix that — super easy too, you’ll have to be sure to modify the cpanel or contact host gator to help with this step.
• UpdraftPlus — Another great plugin to have running in the background and merely forgetting about it. Link this up with Google Drive or Dropbox and set a weekly backup of the database and you’ll be glad you did.

5) I’ll suggest looking at page builders like Elementor and X Theme. Since you say you’re not worrying too much on looks, it may even be best to pick some free theme WordPress suggests on a fresh install and going with that flow.

Jerryll Noorden · Answer

Do not go that route.

You need to ask yourself what the point and purpose of the site will be.

Is it for bragging rights that you build your own site? Or is it to generate leads?

A website is not some magic carpet ride that for magical and for unknown reasons, a "good" website will magically generates leads, and if it doesnt perform, it is bad.

No!

A website has many parts. The parts you can not control really, hosting speed and all the basis for SEO that will make any SEO you apply to the website amplified, and onpage SEO, and Off page SEO.

I am not telling you to go with Carrot because I use it. It is the other way around. Carrot is simply the best second to none and THAT IS WHY I use it.

I mean seriously, do a search. Type in "We Buy Houses In [city] [state]", and look at the top ranking 4 to 5 websites. I bet you my panties you will see several IC sites on the top.. always.

Coincidence? yeah OK.

So do you want to build your site or do you want to generate leads and make money.

Now realize, when I got my carrot site I completely wiped it clean. EVERY SINGLE PAGE and I put my own design and content on it. "Then why did I choose carrot then in the first place if I was going to delete the content?". Because I think my SEO is second to none. True or not, it is irrelevant. I truly believe this and I thought I could do far better conversion than anything else out there with my own content.

I basically chose carrot because of their behind the scenes awesomeness, site speed, conversion, Jake if you read this, I love you dude, my smexzie bearded man you.. bro-love of course. That dude is a sweetheart teddy bear. Trevor I hope you fire him, I will take him from you and pay him 5 times as much ! FIRE HIM !!!!

Wait where was I going with this..

Oh yeah...

So I didn't write my content winging it... and here is the funny thing. I deleted the content and rewrote the content by myself based on my own SEO testing. And after 1 WHOLE YEAR of excruciating trial and error, and I finally got my site tweaked... it had the main elements of the stock investor carrot website. So I can tell you from my own awesome research, they know what they are doing and I had to redo all the research I did on my own to realize this.

Of course I improved DRASTICALLY and surpassed it all (my personal opinion) and now well.. see for your self:

OK so now that you see this.

I will ask you again, do you want leads? Or do you want to build a website. Do you not think that Investor carrot will be FAR better at building the website than you ever will be?

Do not reinvent the wheel. IC is proven to work when you work at it and on it, so just do that!

Hope this gives you a bit of motivation and direction to take efficient action and not just any action.

Monkeybutt has spoken!

Nick Calabro · Answer

@Cody Evans ha, no worried! Just read up. I'll definitely take a look at the beta version of your site. It'll be good to be sure the most imporatent things are taken care of before driving paid traffic.

As for the order you should develop your site in -- this should be a decent blueprint to follow:

• Theme: Be sure you choose a theme you're happy with and everything. Great that you're not worried about looks too so you'll be able to get some free solutions. I suggest going with Astra and Elementor. Together, you'll get something great and free in no-time.
• Posts: Write up at least one blog post -- this way you'll have something to promote and drive traffic to. Be sure to include calls to action once people land on your page they know how to get in touch with you.
• Yoast/SEO: This isn't going to be a time consuming part. Like you said, just let it run, follow its instructions, you'll be good enough to go for now. 
• Paid Traffic: Honestly, unless there's something really specific in between all this you can think of, I think once you're at this point you'll be good to start buying up ads. If you're using FB sure to follow instructions for setting up your Pixel. This will help you monitor who's converting and such.

Feel free to DM with anything or if you think I missed something. Can't wait to see this site!

Nick Calabro · Answer

I'd advise against this only because it contradicts what you initially want to achieve. Building a website yourself is going to be more cost-effective and ultimately more efficient. If you're going to spend the money on Lead Propeller -- then you may as well use Lead Propeller.

I suggest spending a couple nights to get the most basic WP site up and running and use that to drive traffic in tandem with your FB ads. It shouldn't take that long to get something good enough for your purposes.

Lance Reese · Answer

Great info...

Maryna Bobrovskaya · Answer

First of all, you should do some research and figure out what kind of features you want to see on your website. The next step is to find a real estate development company which will build a website for you. There a few options of what kind of a company you can choose, it can be either a local software dev company, in-house development team or an offshore software development company. More information regarding each of these options and a lot more information about real estate website development in general you can learn by reading this article: https://www.cleveroad.com/blog...

Shawn Ward · Answer

@Cody Evans if you PM me, I can give you some tips and a good place to go to get a great site..rather you build yourself or want someone else to do it.

Onwards!

sjw

Cody Evans · Answer

@Nick Calabro

Sorry, mentioned the wrong person. The above post was for you. Still tweaking the website but do you mind if I send it to you to look at after?

Cody Evans · Answer

@Caleb Heimsoth

I just went ahead and put together a word press. I don't know about the SEO but I figure I'll just Yoast it. It isn't ready quite yet but should be up by tonight. On this forum I asked a topical question but what do you think I should do chronologically as far as getting this up and running efficiently?

Building A Real Estate Website: Where To Start?

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