Why SEO is Like Being Buried Alive: A Cautionary Tale For Real Estate Investors

Here’s why SEO is like being buried alive.

This is a cautionary tale.

We recently took a client on with NO website. Nothing.

We got them set up with a Carrot site and launched them…

Into one of the most competitive markets in the country. Tons of other investors. Tons of people doing SEO.

Our SEO team took them from literally nothing at all…

To the first page of Google for *all* of their markets for hundreds of keywords.

In many cases, they got all the way to the top 4.

It took about 40 days.

40 days to go from no website to ranking on the first page for hundreds of specific, motivated seller keywords.

This is unheard of.

I literally screenshot these results for our testimonials page.

And you know what?

The clients were furious.

They threatened to post negative things about us online. Try to ruin our reputation.

Why?

They hadn’t gotten any leads yet.

Let me explain something to you – perhaps in a morbid way.

SEO is a bit like being buried alive.

Imagine:

You suddenly wake up. It’s hard to breathe. It’s dark, hot.

All around you – pure darkness.

Your eyes struggle to adjust – nothing. No light at all.

You reach out a hand, instinctively, and –

BANG. Right into the lid…

Of a coffin.

You panic, of course.

But eventually, you get your wits about you. It’s do or die. And you refuse to die here.

You start clawing, scraping, bashing your fists against the lid.

It feels impossible – impenetrable.

But over time, you notice a small crack forming. Your very first ray of hope.

You start to hit harder. Your knuckles are raw, bloody. But you grit through the pain, until, finally…

Your hand breaks through.

Desperately, you pull the shards of wood away.

And clods of cold, wet earth drop in.

Now, you start to dig.

Every fistful of earth you pull down is one inch closer to the surface.

Your fingernails are ripped away. Dirt gets into your hair, your eyes, your mouth. The dark, earthy taste of soil is trapped in the back of your throat, choking you.

But you keep digging.
You keep going.

Inch.
By inch.
Fistful of earth.
By fistful of earth.

Until, finally….

You break free.

You pass the final level of soil, and emerge…

Under water.

And so you do what any survivor would do:

You start swimming.

SEO is like this in multiple ways.

For one, it’s difficult.

For two, it’s frustrating.

And three: you must pass every stage before you’re in the clear.

In our parable above, the levels are:

Break out of coffin –> Dig through the earth –> Swim to surface.

(By the way, you must’ve done something PRETTY bad to be in this situation, right?)

In SEO, our stages are:

Get to the first page –> Rank in the top 3 –> Get people to click –> Get people to convert.

If you don’t do any one of these steps, you will get zero leads.

Not on the first page? No leads.
Not in the top 3? No leads.
No one clicked? No Leads.
No one converted (filled out your form)? No leads.

But here’s the thing:

Just getting through some of the steps – even if it didn’t produce leads – isn’t a waste.

Just like it would be ridiculous to say “oh man – I just broke out of the coffin, and now I have to dig? What a waste of time!”

If you want to survive, you need to break out of the coffin.
If you want leads from SEO, you need to get to the first page.
Breaking out of the coffin doesn’t mean you’re DONE – it doesn’t mean you stop digging.

It means you keep digging…
If you want to survive, anyway.

These clients I worked with – the ones who got super fast results, but were still angry?

They wanted to skip the steps.
They wanted it all done right away.

“Sure, you broke us out of the coffin, and pulled us up through the earth, but we don’t want to swim!”

But SEO doesn’t work that way.

Reality doesn’t work that way.

And these people are going to walk away from a gold mine…

Because they don’t want to spend any time digging.

Or even to wait for the diggers they hired to do the work they hired them for.

🤦‍♂️

Self sabotage.

No survival instinct.

Buried in a coffin, under water, 100 feet in the ground.

If you want leads in this game, do the work or get out of the way of the people who will.