Episode #50 – How To Detect B.S. In The SEO Industry

You're listening to the REI Marketing Nerds podcast, the leading resource for real estate investors who want to dominate their market online. Dan Barrett is the founder of AdWords Nerds, a high tech digital agency focusing exclusively on helping real estate investors like you get more leads and deals online, outsmart your competition and live a freer, more awesome life. And now, your host, Dan Barrett. 

Alright everybody, welcome to this week's REI Marketing Nerds Podcasts, as always, this is Daniel Barrett here from AdWordsNerds.com. Hope you are having an awesome week, I hope you are happy and healthy and getting lots of motivated seller leads, and today I wanted to sit in a little bit. [0:01:01.0]

We've had a lot of interviews on this show, and I wanted to take some personal time, which is me and you and talk about what has been on my mind lately, which is SEO, that is Search Engine Optimization. Now, I am going to do a much longer guide to SEO for real estate investors on this show. In fact, my next episode, as you're listening to this, next week's episode is going to be all about SEO for real estate investors, we are going to get deep into the process what we have seen work. But before we get into the tactics and strategies and all that stuff I want to address some very real misinformation, misunderstandings, some things that are happening right now in the world of real estate investors that really irritate me, and quite frankly they make me sort of upset, and I see very good, decent, hardworking investors being taken advantage of by people in the SEO space. [0:02:11.4]

This is something I want to directly address, I'm going to spend this episode talking about this, and I'm not going to like go after anyone specifically. I am going to talk about the specific issues that keep cropping up, because people use these misunderstandings to basically like pull the wool over people's eyes, make it seem like things are better than they are make it seem like they are better than they actually are at what they do, and they take people's money and I find it irritating, so we're to spend this episode digging into it, and then the next episode we're going to be digging into exactly, literally what works for SEO for real estate investors. The very intense difficulty there is with SEO of figuring out what is causation and what is correlation. [0:03:04.3]

I'm going to tell a story, and this is the story that kind of got me to do this episode, because I've done episodes on SEO before, you can go back on iTunes or whatever, find my old episodes, listen to them, they're still good. This one really kind of got to me, because this was someone that was a client of ours and they did really, really well. So we took them from nothing essentially, no rankings at all, to being right for thousands of keywords in their target market getting impressions, getting leads, but the problem like with most people that come into SEO, the problem is that he really wanted results very, very quickly. It's one of these kind of old chestnuts in the SEO industry that like change happens very slowly, in it in fact I think recently Google has been making changes to the search results pages more slowly even than they used to. So we're seeing a real slowdown of these changes, but they do happen and they are considerable. [0:04:05.3]

So what ended up happening is client came on, had really great results but wasn't seeing a whole lot of leads and then left. Then he about couple months later started working with someone else and immediately started getting leads, and was like, "Oh my God, this new person is amazing." So one of the things I think I'm very proud of as a business owner and as professional, is I am not proud in the sense of I don't think I have the best anything. I'm probably not the best computer science person, I'm certainly not a great programmer, I'm not a great business person, I am someone that spends a lot of time and a lot of focus to be good at what I do, but I don't have all the answers. I always want to learn from my competition. If there's anybody out there that does good work for their investor clients, I always want to know what they're doing, because then I can take that and apply it to what we do for our clients. [0:05:07.7]

We didn't invent SEO, none of this is an invention, it's something that we just put a lot of time and effort into. Quite frankly, there was some kind of trash talked about the work that we did, and I took this super, super personally. I was like, "Look, if we did not do a good job for this client, I want to know, I want to know how we can change, I want to know how we can adapt." So we went out and we actually did a deep dive study, we reached out to the client, they were nice enough to give us access to all their analytics and all their back end data, and what we found was that the changes happened, the leads started coming in, the improvement happened before this new person had done anything. So what it ended up happening was the work that we had done that didn't seem to get results fast enough suddenly started to kick in a couple months later, and then this new person took credit for that, even though they hadn't actually done anything. [0:06:11.6]

And this is actually really, really common. It's common in the sense that people do things that think that help them with SEO and people do things that think that hurt them with SEO, but in actuality the reality here is much more murky. Now, one of the things is that if you think about this, this is kind of like the same way that superstitions emerge. Nobody actually knows exactly what Google's looking for in the sense that Google doesn't publish what they want for your real estate investor website. You can't go somewhere and write exactly what they're checking and how much it matters, it doesn't exist. So all of us are guessing, we perform an action and we look at the result. Now this is exactly, if you think about how superstitions emerge, I wear my "lucky socks" one day and then I go out and hit a home run and I'm like, "Whoa, must have been the socks." [0:07:07.1]

So now I wear the socks every day, and if I go out and I hit a home run a bunch of times I think of that like, I look at that and I say, "Okay, that's because I was wearing the socks." But if I don't hit a home run, I don't think the socks don't work, I make up another reason why the socks didn't work at that moment. So no matter what kind of happens we end up reinforcing our belief about what's working. You can actually see this in a laboratory setting, there is a very famous psychological experiment done with pigeons where some pigeons got fed very consistently, some pigeons got fed inconsistently, and some pigeons got fed totally randomly, like all over the place. And what they noticed was that the pigeons they got fed all over the place in completely random way, they developed superstitions. Like little dances they would literally do in order to try to get some food, because they did it a couple times and they got fed, again, totally random, and they think in their little pigeon brains, "Oh, I did this dance therefore I got this food." so then they do it all the time, and it doesn't matter that that dance doesn't work 100% of the time, the dance stuck around because it gave... [0:08:22.6]

You know, you never know what's going on in the pigeons head, but you can imagine it gives this pigeon a sense of control. Very few people are actually willing to go out in the SEO industry and say, "Hey, I don't actually know." Everybody wants to say they are the master of SEO, they know exactly what works. So let's take a step back a second and actually think about if Google doesn't tell us exactly what works for optimizing real estate investor sites, how can we know, how do we put together a plan. [0:08:55.9]

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We here at AdWords Nerds have gotten flak from some people for the way that we talk about SEO. We say things like we cannot guarantee you a certain ranking, other people do, they say, "We're going to get to number one, no matter what." We say it's going to take a lot of time, other people say, "It doesn't need to take a lot of time, you can do it real fast." We say, "Look, we include link building and on page analysis and all these different parts of our sequence, but we don't necessarily do every part for every client." and people get in our face for that and they say, "You're hedging your bets, you're being too careful." [0:10:09.1]

Now this comes back to the way that we know things. How do we as AdWords Nerds know that our strategy is the best, and by the way, I do think our strategy is the most effective for real estate investors long term, I really, truly believe that. Why do I believe that? Well the reason I believe it is because we've had more SEO clients in the investing space probably then anyone. Now that may or may not be true, I actually don't know. There are some other companies out there that do good work, but we've done this dozens and dozens and dozens of times in big markets, small markets, competitive markets, hot markets, cold markets, you name it. And the reason that we are careful in the our language is because everything that you can do in one market that absolutely crushes it does not mean it works in another market. [0:11:12.4]

Your favorite strategy that you did on your own website in your own market does not necessarily translate to every other investor. And if you're going to go out and market to investors and tell investors that you have "the answer", you better be able to reproduce everywhere. And spoiler alert, because we've done this, and this is, by the way, I'm talking to myself now, this is an older, wiser Dan Barrett, it doesn't work in every market. Nothing does. Nothing does in SEO, in AdWords, in Facebook Ads, nothing. So how do you build a strategy for real estate investors that works? You do this in two ways. [0:12:02.0]

One, you look at websites that are crushing it all over the United States and you correlate, you say, "What do they have, what do we think made the difference for them?" and then secondly you test it over and over and over again on lots of different investors. That means sometimes you have big successes, and sometimes, quite frankly, you don't. Now, I happen to know that even when things don't go according to plan our clients do a lot better than they used to, because the tactics and the techniques that we use are all legitimate, they're not risky, they don't run the risk of Google turning around and deciding that we are being artificial and all of a sudden tank our clients. Yeah, some clients do super well and other clients have a much harder time. That's the reality. [0:13:02.2]

If that sounds like not a great sales pitch, that's because it's reality. And guess what, reality is not a great sales pitch. You know what is a great sales pitch, pardon my French, BS. BS will always sell, because you can promise someone the moon. Reality is that the world is complicated and that real estate investing is competitive. Now, do I still believe SEO has the highest ROI of any kind of market you're ever going to do online or offline? Yes, I do as. SEO's intensely powerful, it has the potential to completely change your business. But if anybody tells you that they can do that overnight or they can do that with some cookie cutter process that they discovered or invented or whatever, that is BS. Now I told you that next week we're going to get into what actually works for real estate investors. [0:14:02.2]

I said that we test this on dozens and dozens and dozens of clients. What did we actually learn. Well we actually put it together in an in-depth guide, and we boiled it down to things that work in every market, things that are evergreen, things that are truly moving the needle, not just activity that we superstitiously think does something, but things that you can do that truly make a difference. We put that together in an in-depth guide, we are going to get ready to share that with you, it'll be ready next week, I'm going to talk about it on this show and I'm going to share the link with you then. Until then I'm going to tell you what I've told every investor I've ever spoken with over the last, I don't even know, decade that I've been working with real estate investors doing this work, if somebody comes to you and tries to tell you that they can guarantee you a top spot on the first page of Google overnight in your market yatta, yatta, yatta, and they know more than everybody else, it's nonsense and I'm sick and tired of people trying to make a name in this industry by ripping people off. [0:15:18.6]

If you've got a data set of one, meaning you did it for yourself and you got great results, that doesn't mean you actually have anything. You've got a cool anecdote, not an actual strategy that works for the majority of investors. Now the good news for investors is that very few of your competition actually put in the work to invest in this channel. So even though it's harder than the BS would have you believe ,it's actually easier than a lot of people think, because very few people put in the consistent effort and work. [0:15:59.7]

And if you look around at the investors that have really done well, that really get a lot of leads from SEO, that they're really crushing it in the real estate investing space, you know what they all have in common? Consistent investment in the channel. Whether it's their time, whether they're paying somebody, whatever it is, everybody realized the value that's there for SEO, and if you realize the value for SEO for your real estate investment business, you can do it too. You absolutely can do it, it is not complicated, it does not have to be the world's hardest thing. So next week, next episode I want you to tune in, I'm going to go in-depth on our complete guide for SEO for real estate investors and I'm going to give it away entirely free at the end of that episode. But in the meantime, if you dig this show I want you to come and join our Facebook group, you can get there at AdWordsNerds.com/group, that's AdWordsNerds.com/group that will take you to the REI Marketing Nerds Facebook group, we would love to have you. We are in there every single day posting high quality content, no BS content for real estate investors, because that's what we do, and what we've been doing, and it's what we're going to keep doing. Alright guys, I hope it wasn't too grumpy this week, my hackles up a little bit. But as always, I'm pulling for you and I hope they have an awesome rest of the week. Talk to you soon. Cheers.

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