SEO for Landlords & Property Management Companies

Speaker 1:

What's up, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of Loop It In, the DoorLoop podcast where we pick the brains of experts in property management, real estate, and investing. Tech? We cover it. Marketing? That, too. So, whether you want actionable tips, or the insider scoop from top performers in their industries, this is one show you won't want to miss. Be sure to subscribe so you won't miss out on any future episode.

Steven:

What's up, everybody? Welcome to our first official podcast. So excited to have my boss and CMO and co-founder of DoorLoop, David Bitton. Welcome, David.

David:

Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Steven:

Absolutely. I'm so excited that you're here. Most of our listeners probably don't know who you are and want to know a little more about you, so what can you tell us about yourself?

David:

Yes, so I was originally born and raised in New York, Port Washington, to be exact, and I moved to Miami in 2002, so over 20 years ago now. I've always been entrepreneurial, had a few companies in the past, two of which got acquired, and now, I am the co-founder and CMO of DoorLoop, responsible for all things marketing, especially our website, and the topic of this podcast, SEO.

Steven:

Yes. I just learned what SEO was when I started working here, so it's this whole super interesting subfield, if you will, of marketing. For those like me who are new to marketing, what does it stand for and what does it do?

David:

SEO stands for search engine optimization and it's basically means optimizing your website for the search engines like Google, or Bing, if anyone still uses that, and basically doing SEO on your website helps you get found on Google. When someone searches for, let's just say, "property manager in Miami," you want to be number one on Google, so if you do a few tactics that we're going to share today, hopefully you'll be top three in Google. That's the whole goal.

Steven:

That's amazing. What did you study in college, by the way?

David:

Yeah, so it's funny, in college, I originally was a computer information systems major, and then I went to business management, and then I took my first marketing class, I think it was like marketing 101 or 301, whatever they called it, and I fell in love with marketing, so I started taking more marketing classes. Then I ended up trying to double major. It was a little bit too late, but pretty much all my classes after that were just fully focused on marketing. Yeah, that was college.

Steven:

What made you want to become an expert in SEO?

David:

Towards the end of college, I got my first real-world experience in marketing with my own business. It was actually a music blog that I founded in 2009 called From DJs for DJs. It was a website. I used to be a DJ back in the day, that's for a different story.

Steven:

Oh my goodness.

David:

I know, I know. We ended up getting over 60,000 unique visitors a month to our site, so I mastered WordPress. For sure, have over 10,000 hours in WordPress now, and that's where I learned all about SEO content marketing. Then after college, I worked for a startup company and fell in love with marketing, and then quickly became the marketing director. After that, as they say, the rest is history.

Steven:

That's amazing. In your opinion, what makes a good marketing director?

David:

Wow. I think always be hungry to learn more. I'm obsessed with reading, audiobooks, watching YouTube videos, wherever it is. Doesn't matter what medium it is, learn as much as you can, absorb as much as you can. I remember thinking, "I know so much, how come it's not all clicking?" Then I had the right opportunity and then it all started clicking. I started applying it to my own business and that's where everything just kind of came together.

Steven:

That's amazing. Where does someone even learn about SEO? 'Cause I mean, I made it to all the way to being a manager of 500-plus units, I had never even heard of the term, so where does someone even begin to learn about SEO things?

David:

For you, I would tell you whatever platform you're on right now, meaning if you're obsessed with Facebook, or Instagram, or TikTok, or LinkedIn, whatever it is, there are tons of content on those platforms. You don't want to try to learn something new on a different platform because you probably won't stick with it, so if you're on TikTok, for example, all day today, there's gurus that are teaching SEO and marketing there.

For me, I just consume books. Two of my favorite books, for example, are Do It! Marketing and there's another one called The Copywriter's Handbook. I think all marketers should learn how to do copywriting, but I also watch a ton of webinars, listen to a ton of podcasts like you're listening to now, and watching a ton of YouTube videos. Also, there was a big blog that I liked, ahrefs.com, they have a great blog, and just follow people online, you'll learn a lot. My biggest advice is when you learn something, execute on it, and take action on it.

Steven:

Absolutely. That's so true. Touching on what you said about YouTube, I think it's just so interesting how many resources are for free on YouTube, things that 20 years ago people paid big bucks for just to learn in a more traditional setting, but that's awesome. I love you use that to your advantage.

David:

Yeah, I'll tell you, today we live in the information, I don't know what the exact word is, information economy, digital economy, whatever they want to call it, the information age. We have access to anything at our fingertips in seconds, so learn, learn. People are giving away such good free advice online. You don't need to buy courses, you don't need to spend any money. There is just tons of free content online that you could learn from.

Steven:

Absolutely. I always joke that my degree comes from Google.

David:

Yeah, definitely. Definitely.

Steven:

David, say you're like a new landlord or property manager, do you recommend learning something like SEO, or just hiring that out because it just takes too much time to learn? Or what do you think?

David:

Great question. I would say it depends how busy you are, and I think you're going to laugh because you used to be a property manager, so if I told you, "Oh, Steven, do some SEO for us," like you have nothing else better to do with your time, I remember asking you actually on the interview, I think I asked you like, "Oh, so did you only work 40 hours a week?" He laughed at me, he said, "As a property manager there's no hours." I think you told me stories that you would wake up at 2:00 AM on a weekend, there was a fire alarm going off, and a leak.

Steven:

Absolutely.

David:

It depends how busy you are. Number one, if you're too busy, definitely outsource it. Also, if you're a small landlord, just doing it yourself under five units, this is like a side gig, or even a full-time thing and you have some time and you want to just learn, definitely do it yourself, but if you really have just zero time, or you have a much bigger portfolio and you need professional help, then start looking for a marketing agency.

Steven:

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I think it's worth it, at least learning about if you do manage a larger building, or you've been in the game for a while, but especially if you're just getting into property management, definitely learn SEO. I came up in property management in a generation where half the people knew what SEO stuff was, half didn't, I was in that half, but going into the future, you're going to need to know more and more about SEO, so personally, I recommend it.

David:

I'll add to that. It's good just even getting the basic understanding even if you're going to outsource it because you want to have a grasp and understand what the agency or whoever you're hiring is doing, so it's great to know a little bit about SEO, a little bit about Google Ads, a little bit about websites, content marketing, blog posts, just so you understand what they're doing, and also, you won't be taken advantage of.

Steven:

Yeah, absolutely, that part. What's the first thing you would start off with as a complete beginner?

David:

If you are a new landlord, or property manager, or even existing one, the number one thing for doing SEO obviously is to have a website. You can't do SEO without a website, so number one, you need a website. From my experience at DoorLoop, many property managers and landlords don't even have a website, and if they do, they're not very good. What people typically tend to do is go to Wix or Squarespace or any of those and create a template and build it for free and then on the bottom footer, it's like, "Powered for free by Wix," so not so professional, not so good. You're not a web designer, so I do not recommend doing it yourself if you can avoid doing that.

Also, I have an issue using Wix in those platforms. I haven't used it in a while, so it may have improved, but generally, they're very slow. One of the biggest ranking factors in Google to rank your site high is speed, so if you're going to build a website, make sure that it has super-fast load times. There's actually, it's, I don't want to get too technical here, but Google calls it "Core Web Vitals." That's how they measure your performance and speed, interaction time plays a big factor. There's actually a stat online if I can recall, it's that a website that loads in one second has a three-times-higher conversion rate than a website that loads in five seconds.

Steven:

Dang.

David:

I want you to think about that. Anytime you're loading a website and it takes a long time to load, are you more likely to leave? The answer is yes, probably three times more likely to leave. At least I know that I am. If I were to start off, I would start off with a great website, really fast. DoorLoop uses Webflow, so you can use Webflow, or WordPress, whatever it is, but build a great, fast website

Steven:

That is super interesting. I didn't even know that if your website loads faster, it gets pushed up in the algorithm in Google. That's pretty cool. Wow.

David:

Yep, yep. Google's all about delivering a good user experience, so you can't gamify the system. They're smarter than us. It's all about the user experience. What they want is to give you, the visitor, the best experience. You're looking for a property management software, they're going to show some results. If you come to our website and it takes long to load, and then you go back to Google search results and you click on something else, they know you left our site and they know how long it took for you to come and leave our site. If it was like four seconds, "Wow, this site must not be good. It's a really bad experience," they're going to rank us lower. But if they come and click on our website and they stay for 10 minutes and they never go back to Google, they are satisfied with that result Google showed, Google ranked that site higher, and that's usually how it works.

Steven:

Hmm. Right. Wow, that's really interesting. Okay, so you build this amazingly fast website, and then what?

David:

Okay, so having a great, fast website isn't everything, obviously. The next step I would tell you is to do keyword research. What that means is you want to go into Google and start typing in words you think people would search for to find you.

Steven:

That's kind of like the basics of SEO.

David:

Yes, but the basics are the most important to master, so go into Google and start typing in some keywords. For example, if you're a landlord, it can be "apartment for rent in Miami, Florida," because let's say you have an apartment for rent, you want to think like your customer, like your tenant looking for apartments, so search for whatever they're going to be searching for. If you're a property management company, it can be "property manager in Miami, Florida," or "hire a property manager in Miami, Florida," or "hire a property management company in Miami, Florida," or "the best property management companies in Miami, Florida." You get the idea. Usually, it's that keyword, who you are, what they're looking for, and location, in Miami, Florida. Now, you want to pay attention to the search results that Google recommends when typing. They're the auto-complete results. As you start typing property manager in Miami, Google will start auto-filling suggestions, so you want to pay attention to those auto-fills because those are usually also great ideas.

Steven:

That's awesome. Wow. Okay, so you compile your list of keywords, and you know what people are searching for the most part, so what do you do with them? Where do you put them?

David:

Yeah, great question. One last thing on the last point also, if you want to go more advanced, you can search for Google and type in "Google Keyword Planner." You will create a free account with Google Ads. You don't need to put your credit card in, or you might, but you can just pause it. Don't pay for anything. This is a very advanced search that Google gives you, which actually shows you how many people are searching for those keywords you just typed in, and it also ranks them based on competition and bid amount if you're going to start bidding and paying for Google Ads. Usually, the more competitive, the harder it is to rank, so my advice to everyone is create a Google sheet, a spreadsheet, and just write out all the keywords, all the different terms that people might be searching for. You might have a hundred of them and dump that whole list into Google Keyword Planner and then sort it by the number of searches that gets a month. Steven, does that make sense?

Steven:

Absolutely. That's pretty cool.

David:

Okay, perfect. Your question was, you have your keywords now, what do you do with them?

Steven:

Right. Right, that part.

David:

The number one thing is to focus on your number one keyword. You need to choose one. You have a hundred on the list. You need to really dial it down and focus and narrow on one keyword and try to make it as detailed and niche-specific as possible. The keyword shouldn't just be "apartments for rent." It's way too broad. You're never going to compete, so it should be something, for example, "small, affordable two-bedroom apartments with a pool for rent in Miami." That might be too hyper-focused, but you get the idea. Pick one. Then once you've picked that "main primary keyword," we call it, make that the biggest text header on the homepage of your site, that's called an H1, so put it on your website title, your SEO title, your website description, the website footer. Use that word throughout your website.

Steven:

Got it. Say they're already ranking now on small, affordable apartments with a pool in for rent in Miami. How do they eventually rank in just apartments in Miami? How do they come up on that first?

David:

Great question. If it's a really hard keyword, it'll be extremely hard to do it yourself, extremely hard, so I wouldn't even bother, unless you're really going to hire an agency and start pouring thousands of dollars a month into this keyword, and we're not going to talk about that here. It's just way, way too advanced for this call.

But let's say you have 10 keywords you want to rank for, not just "apartments for rent," maybe the word "condo," maybe the word "townhome," whatever it is, maybe "a home," whatever it is. Two things you can do. You can build out new pages on your site specifically made for those keywords. A great example, and I don't mean to keep mentioning DoorLoop, or pitch DoorLoop, but if you go to DoorLoop.com, you will see on the top, we have a dropdown menu for portfolios, and you can click on residential, commercial, student housing. All of those are different pages on our site. You would do the same thing, "homes for rent in Miami," "apartments for rent in Miami," et cetera. You would do the exact same thing and make pages on your site. So far so good?

Steven:

Got it. Absolutely. That's actually pretty cool and really very strategic. I love that.

David:

There's one more thing that we can get into about blogging. You want to get into that?

Steven:

Let's do it, yeah. Absolutely. It's what we're here for.

David:

Okay. Okay, awesome. So, that's one strategy, and we definitely employ that strategy, for sure, and it works great. Now, the reason it also works great is because you're delivering a really targeted page to that visitor, so if they're looking for a townhome specifically, they will find a page dedicated just to townhomes, so you're delivering that perfect result, and hopefully they won't bounce back and exit the page to Google. That's number one.

Number two, blog. Super important. Probably the number one thing you could do to rank higher is to create high-quality blog content. Let's say you have 30 keywords that you want to target, and you're not going to make 30 pages in your site, but you could make 30 blog posts on your site. We have over a thousand blog posts right now for all different keywords that we're trying to rank for. Examples for you could be "apartments for rent in Miami, Florida," that could be one blog post, or "rent prices in Miami, Florida," another idea. There's so many ideas and so many ways you could take it, but every idea, every keyword is a different blog post.

Steven:

Wow. That's interesting. A lot of people wouldn't have thought of creating a blog post as a page for SEO. That's pretty cool. What do you recommend for helping with SEO with blogs?

David:

Yeah, great question. My number one advice that to tell my parents and everyone else that I try to help is-

Steven:

Your parents?

David:

... Yeah, 'cause they've tried doing blogs, and it failed miserably, so the problem with the problem with writing blog posts that people don't know what they're doing, they don't know how to write, they don't know anything about SEO titles, optimization, keywords, tags, stuff like that, so they just write whatever they feel like writing with no research, and then they do two or three of them, it takes them a few hours, and then they come back to me, and they're like, "It did nothing. I got no new business," so I was like, "Yeah, number one, you don't know what you're doing. Number two, you're not going to double your revenue overnight from three blog posts."

Steven:

Aw, man.

David:

It takes months. Yeah, unfortunately. A few things. Number one, be consistent. Post as many blog posts as you can as consistently as you can, and if you're on a roll one night, just crank out 10 blog posts, if you can.

Number two, do your research, meaning go to Google, type in that keyword, like "apartments for rent in Miami," and then see the top three, top five results in Google. Google loves those blog posts or pages already. They're already ranking them high. See what they're doing and then you always have to do it better than them. Otherwise, it's going to be very hard for your brand-new site with one blog post to ever rank higher.

Last piece of advice, if this is all starting to get a little bit too crazy for you and you just don't have time to do it, there is a website that I recommend called ranking-articles.com, it's actually ranking-articles.com, and they are expert writers. They can write blog posts for you, and they have an add-on that I highly recommend you check off. It's called Surfer SEO. It's a software that you could even use yourself if you want to do it yourself, but they can do it for you. When you use Surfer SEO, basically what happens is you're typing in the keyword that you want to rank for, and they will tell you what to write, what keywords to use, how many times to use it, how many images should be in it. They pretty much give you your whole content brief and outline, so they really dumb down the whole process of giving you an SEO-optimized blog post, so you can do it yourself with them, or you could outsource it to ranking-articles.com.

Steven:

Wow. That's great. What's your experience with working with them? Are they easy to work with?

David:

Yeah, I've tested about 30 different websites, companies, and blog posts, content writers, and I love them. We use them for a few things. Now, we have our whole content team in-house, we don't need to use them that much, but they're great. If you're just starting off and you want to just do some quick outsourcing and get a bunch of blog posts, definitely do it.

Steven:

Got it.

David:

Do your homework, though. It's not just so easy. They're going to ask you for, "Which competitors are your biggest ones? Which articles do you want to match?" Give them some inspiration. The more you put into it, the better results you're going to get from it.

Steven:

Gotcha. Do you think it's worth the time to do it yourself, or when do you think it would be worth to outsource it?

David:

That comes back to that same question of how busy are you. If you enjoy doing it and you're really good at it and it's a super-technical post that you don't think you can outsource and people really won't understand it, whatever it is, then you could definitely do it yourself. But there's also something called opportunity cost, that imagine if it takes you four hours to write a blog post, and right now, you're making $30 an hour, or $50 an hour, or a hundred thousand a year, and your hourly rate is $50 an hour, is it worth spending $200 worth of your time to do the blog post, or can you just outsource it for $50? The way I like to do things is outsource and delegate as much as possible. That will at least get me 90% of the way there, and it might only cost $50, and then instead of me spending four hours on it, I spend 20 minutes just touching it up.

Steven:

Got it. That makes a whole lot of sense when you put it that way. I mean, it basically becomes a part-time job, so it has to be worth it for you. I love this, but okay, it's like seems extremely technical. Can someone like me or another property manager do this?

David:

When you say "do this," I'm assuming you're talking about creating your own blog post. Creating your own blog post is hard. It's not super easy. You could definitely do it. There's definitely a big learning curve. If you are going to do it yourself, once again, go to surferseo.com and try to learn from them as much as you can. Use their software and you will get hopefully results. But if you don't want to, once again, go to Ranking Articles, or last option, hire someone, or a marketing agency, so either Ranking Articles or Upwork. I'm a huge fan of Upwork for everything: blog posts, content writers, graphic designers, web designers. You don't need to hire someone in-house. You can hire a freelancer on these websites, or you can hire a marketing agency. If you're really serious, just hire a marketing agency because they have a full team of web designers, developers, copywriters, SEO experts, and they can help you with anything.

Just to add to that, for marketing agencies, if you're not sure which one to hire, just go to Google. Search for a marketing agency. It doesn't have to be local. If you prefer someone local, then just do "marketing agency/web design agency/SEO agency in Miami, Florida," wherever you are, and you will find some results. My test is if they're ranked in the top three of Google, they know how to do it well for themselves, so they'll probably do a good enough job for you also.

Steven:

That's great. I know you do a lot of press releases for DoorLoop. Does that help at all with SEO?

David:

Yes. Great question. It's funny you mentioned because we're doing one right now as we speak getting released next week, yes.

Steven:

Yes.

David:

Every quarter or so, we try to do an external press release about new features, new announcements, new updates, and it also helps with SEO, so I definitely recommend the same thing for you. But once again, now we're going to another step of advancement, so first, I would start off baby steps. Website first, fast website, good design, pages on your website, blog posts on your website.

Then the next thing would probably be press releases. You want to try to come up with noteworthy news or stories that hopefully someone will pick up, the media will pick up, but even if they don't, Google sees it, and they start seeing a lot of links back to your site, so that's great. There's actually a website that could do all this for you, because I think if we had to get into the nitty-gritty of press releases, we'll be here for two more hours, so there's a website, brandfeatured.com, that's a great site. They can write your press release and distribute it to you all over the internet and Google will see all these other links now pointing back to your site. Then we start getting into backlinks, basically.

Steven:

Okay, so you just mentioned backlinks. What are those and what does it do? How does it help?

David:

Yeah, sorry for not explaining that. You're totally right. A backlink is basically anytime another website online adds a link back to your site. That's considered a backlink. The thing is, Google tracks this. They are seeing how many other websites are linking back to you, and they're seeing, "Okay, you must be a really popular website because the more backlinks you get, the more people are talking about you, so it must be a good website. You must have good resources." Google will actually start slowly ranking you higher and testing your site to see if people like it.

Now, I want to give a big disclaimer and warning, it is not a game of quantity, it's more a game of quality, so it's better to have five great backlinks from legitimate big sites than 5,000 backlinks from really bad, spammy sites. There's a lot of "black hat," they call it, services out there, or agencies that will deliver this and tell you, "We got you a thousand backlinks that month." Run for the hills. You will hurt your site more than help it, okay?

Steven:

Oh, goodness. Oh, Lord.

David:

Yeah, yep. I've seen it happen a lot. Then people have to do something called "disavowing those links" and telling Google, "Those aren't my links. Stop." You want to be as white hat, they call it as possible. If CNBC covers you, that's great. That's a big backlink. That's pretty much it.

Steven:

Got it. What's a strategy that's really useful for you?

David:

For backlinks?

Steven:

Yeah.

David:

Yeah, great. There's two things you can do. Number one, you could be a guest contributor on other sites and say, "Hey, I'm a landlord," or a property manager, "I want to write an article for you." If they publish that article on their blog or their website, they will put a link back to your sites. That's the strategy number one, okay?

Strategy number two, there's a website called helpareporter.com, also referred to as HARO, H-A-R-O. There are journalists out there looking for people like you to give them as many quotes they can use for their stories, meaning if there's a journalist for NBC doing a story on New York City protecting tenants by blocking all evictions for non-payments like they did in COVID, they probably want a landlord from New York City, which might be you, to give a quote of how it's damaging your livelihood and preventing you from paying your mortgage. They might want both sides of the story, the tenant side, and the landlord side, or the property manager's side.

Steven:

Interesting.

David:

If you respond to this journalist, you might get picked up, they might include you in this story and put a link to your website. It's a numbers game, though, and it takes time, so don't get frustrated. If you submit 10 pitches or responses, only one might get picked up, so you could do it yourself. You could also outsource this and delegate it to someone else as well.

Steven:

That's really cool. That's actually super interesting. I didn't know that you could just hire someone to get a quote. I always wondered how they got these quotes from people. That's amazing.

David:

Yeah, they go on these sites and they find people, and that's how they do it.

Steven:

Yeah, that's amazing. All right, so we've covered websites, speed, blog posts, press releases, and backlinks. Is there anything else into how to rank high on Google?

David:

I mean, there's a lot, and we could talk about this forever, but I think this is a really, really, really good starting point for most people that would probably take them months to really master, anyways. But once you get those visitors to your site, that's only part one of the equation. You now better have a great website that actually converts them into paying customers, owners, tenants, et cetera.

Steven:

Hmm. Let's dig into that. People are now coming to your website. How do you actually convert them into paying customers?

David:

Great question, yes. First off, your website is your only brand and impression online, so it better be good. Think of it as your virtual storefront. Most of you don't have offices or storefronts, so it's your virtual storefront, and if it's not good, it's a reflection of you and your business. Imagine a storefront and the sign is crooked because the website isn't mobile-friendly. That's what it looks like. Please, once again, try not to design your website yourself from scratch. Either use a template or get a professional designer on Upwork or 99 Designs, or hire a marketing agency, and they can do it for you.

Steven:

But David, I designed my own MySpace page. I can do a website, right? Or no?

David:

There are some nice templates, I'll start with that. You can go to Wix, even though I don't like Wix. They have a lot of templates, and they have a lot of real estate templates, so you might find one that actually looks quite good.

Steven:

Hmm. Okay, okay, so you have this beautiful, scrumptious website, and then that's it, people will come, and they'll buy your product, correct?

David:

Not necessarily. If it was only that easy.

Steven:

Aw. Whomp, whomp, whomp.

David:

Yeah, so a great website is great for a few reasons. Number one, design, number two, something called "conversion rate optimization," or "landing page optimization." What that means is there should always be one clear call-to-action button, or we call it "CTA" in the industry that you want people to click on. If you're a landlord and you have tenants coming to your site, what's the number one thing you want them to do? Schedule a showing, or review a property for rent, or if you're a property manager and you're trying to get more owners, that might be schedule a call.

Steven:

Got it.

David:

You have that one clear goal. Focus on that one clear goal throughout your site and put buttons for that one clear goal everywhere, so on the top of the website, bottom of the website, the "footer," we call it, put a button that says "Schedule a call," "Schedule a showing." Just always push towards that one goal and action item.

Steven:

Gotcha. Okay, so I've submitted a contact form, or I've used a calendar scheduler. Would any of those be okay, those kinds?

David:

Yeah. I mean, definitely have a contact form on your website, and I highly recommend and love using calendar schedulers, like Calendly, Acuity, there's so many out there. I like it because it looks very professional and people can book calls directly on your calendar. If you're a property manager and you want to schedule calls with owners, or you want to schedule a call with tenants, have a calendar, and they can just schedule a call right from the website, which is great. How many websites do you see do that? Virtually none in this industry.

Steven:

So true.

David:

So, if you do that, it's going to set you apart, yeah. But another disclaimer, if they book an appointment, or schedule a call, or contact you, you better respond. Please respond as soon as possible. Do not miss the appointment. Do not be late for the call. The faster you respond, the higher the chance you will have of getting that customer.

Steven:

Very, very true. Yeah, you need to strike when the iron's high 'cause I mean, if you wait too long, they're already on to the next property or what have you.

David:

Exactly. I mean, think about it. You have, let's say, tenants looking for an apartment, they're googling it and going to 10 different websites, and they're submitting forms everywhere, so if you get back to them in three minutes or less and you're the first one, the chance of you getting their business is astronomically higher.

Steven:

Totally. It's so true. I tried to tell this to my leasing agents when I was a property manager. It's great advice. What else should people be doing on their websites to drive business?

David:

One thing that I always love telling people, I always love asking them, "How many visitors do you get a month to your website?" Most of the time the answer is, "I have no idea." So, then I make them go to their analytics, or Google Analytics if it's installed, and they say, "Oh, wow. 300 people came to my site last month. Wow." I was like, "Great. How many people filled out a contact form?" "Only three." I was like, "Wow, so only 1%."

Then the number two question is, "Why didn't they contact you? What else are they looking for? What didn't they find?" What I love doing is installing a live chat where they could send you messages. It's less formal than a contact form. I find that it's a lot more informal, so people are more willing to do it, and if you're not available to respond, you can leave your email.

Now, if you're listening to this, you might be thinking, "How am I going to respond all day? I'm not going to be on my computer all day." There are a lot of live chat apps that can pop the message up on your computer and they could also pop up on your phone, so you should always be able to respond, and once again, the faster you respond, the better, 'cause with live chat, they're usually sending a message and expecting a response in 30 seconds or less, so respond as quickly as you can.

Steven:

Any recommendations for live chat companies or add-ons or something like that?

David:

Yes. In the past, I have used Zendesk. Right now, DoorLoop uses Intercom. They're a little bit pricey, but they might have a good plan for smaller sites. Drift, LiveChat, so many. There are so many. If you're using a CMS, a content management system like Wix, or Squarespace, or one of those, even though I don't approve of those, then a lot of them will have built-in live chats onto their website, so they do make it very user-friendly for that. I just don't like them 'cause the website is slow, but they do have them built in, so you could also try those.

Steven:

That's amazing. How do you feel about those chats that they just respond for you, like automatic chats to schedule appointments and stuff?

David:

Yeah, those are a new thing that the industry is all calling chatbots and they're charging a fortune for them, some companies are. I like them. If you're not available to respond, I like them. What you're referring to is when someone says like, "Hey, I have a question," the chatbot will say, "Great, what's your name?" "David." It makes you actually think you're talking to someone. "Great. How can I help you?" "I'm looking to rent an apartment." "Great. No one's available right now to answer you. Please leave your phone number and email," and hopefully you get a phone number and email. It's not going to be as good as if you chat live with the person because a lot of people don't want to give their phone an email. They don't like salespeople. They don't want you calling them or bothering them, so they don't love that, so live chat probably is the best option if you can get someone to do it. If you have people working in your back office, have it on their computer all day long, and hopefully they can respond as quickly as possible.

Steven:

Cool. Anything else you want to add before we wrap up, David?

David:

That's probably it as far as SEO and websites. I mean, I could talk to you for hours about this, but this is really good beginner advice. One thing I guess I could tell you, I mean, here comes a pitch. Are you ready?

Steven:

Yeah.

David:

If you are a DoorLoop member, we actually just launched our new website feature, so instead of you doing all this yourself and figuring it out, obviously we know what we're doing, so we have built 10 beautifully designed SEO-friendly, mobile-friendly, responsive templates that load fast, have basic SEO built in, everything you will ever need as a new landlord or property manager. You could show off your properties, tenant portal login button, contact form, and everything is fully integrated into DoorLoop, so if you add a property into DoorLoop and it's vacant, it will automatically publish to your website. Or if someone contacts you on your website, it will automatically send all that data to DoorLoop. It's also a hundred percent customizable, and if you want to learn more, just go to doorloop.com/websites.

Steven:

That's so cool, David. Especially as a small property, being new to the marketing game and all that, just even having basic SEO applied to your search metrics is incredibly helpful, so I know a lot of people will find that super helpful. Thank you so much for being here, David. Thanks for taking the time out of your day. I really appreciate it, sharing your knowledge with our beautiful Looper community. If anyone has any questions here, how can they contact you?

David:

Yes, feel free to email me directly. My email is david@doorloop, or you could just send us a message on the contact form of DoorLoop or the live chat in DoorLoop where we respond in under five minutes. That's it. Hopefully, this helped you. Anything else, please let us know.

Steven:

Amazing. Thank you so much, David, and thank you for everyone to tuning into our very first podcast. I'm so excited to be here, so excited to do so many more for you. Feel free to email me as well at storo@doorloop.com if you have any questions, ideas, or suggestions for any future episode. That's it for us, guys. Take care.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening all the way to the end. Don't forget to give us a good rating on whatever platform you're tuning in from and we'll be back soon with another new episode. We hope to see you there, and until next time, this has been Loop It In.

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