It’s no big secret that ranking in Google can make your business more profitable and more predictable.
If your website ranks on page 1 (or better yet, at the top of page 1) for a phrase like “sell my house fast in [market_city]”, you’re going to drive more high-quality traffic and generate more high-quality leads than your low-ranking competitors.
And once you’re ranking, you don’t have to do anything to keep those leads coming.
Want some proof?
A while back, I wrote an article titled, “How To Write Your Real Estate Investing Business Plan: The Ultimate Guide“, because I knew that “real estate investing business plan” gets 250 searches per month in Google.
Now we’re ranking on page 1 for that phrase!
The coolest part, though, is that in the last year, that one ranking has brought 2,848 new people to our website!
A chunk of those have turned into leads — some of them have even turned into customers.
You can do the same thing with your REI business.
And since you only need to rank for local keyword phrases, it’s not all that hard to get on the first page (it ultimately depends on how competitive your market is).
Here are three simple steps to improve your website’s local SEO rankings!
Phone Won’t Stop Ringing? We Can Help!
1. Easy Keyword Optimization
Sprinkling the exact keywords that you’re trying to rank for in the title, URL, meta description, and throughout the content of your page is like 50% of a good SEO strategy.
That’s because if Google doesn’t know what your page is about based on the content, then it’s definitely not going to rank you.
So this is ground zero.
The easiest way to find keywords worth ranking for is to browse suggested searches in Google (if they’re suggesting something, that means other people are searching for it). Just type “sell my house” into Google and look at the suggested searches.
You can then localize that search phrase by adding “in [market_city]” to the end.
Then put your target keyword phrase in the Title, URL, and meta description of your page… and sprinkle it throughout the content as well.
Oh — and only try to rank each page for one keyword phrase.
2. Quick Third-Party Listings
How does Google decide whether your website is trustworthy or not?
After all, the internet is host to a lot of crappy websites.
Well, there are a lot of different factors.
But the most important factor by far is how many other websites trust your website. When other sites link to your site, for instance, Google gives you a little SEO boost.
The bad news is, it can be really difficult to get these backlinks.
The good news is, you don’t actually need that many backlinks when you’re competing locally. Even one or two links can make a big difference.

The lowest hanging fruit here is to go list your business on as many third-party websites as possible… places like Yelp, Google, Bing, and Facebook. In fact, here’s a list of 48 websites where you can list your business for free — that’ll give you some good SEO juice.
3. Simple Content Creation
Sometimes, the sites with the most rankings are simply the sites that put out the most content.
After all, the more content you put out, the more opportunities you have to rank in Google.
Problem is, creating content usually takes a long time.
But here’s a little hack that I discovered when learning about Carrot’s feature, VideoPost — this tool transcribes your video content into a long-form piece of content that you can then publish on your website.
You don’t need to be a Carrot member, though, to gain that ability. Sites like Rev will transcribe your videos for $1.25 per minute.
So rather than spending hours writing a blog post, you can just talk for 10 minutes and publish two pieces of content!