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Podcast

Episode #58 – SEO For REI Month: How To Spot SEO SCAMS

When you want to improve your SEO, there are tons of freelancers, agencies and “gurus” who supposedly know all about how to get to the first page and finally get more traffic.

The problem: Most of them don’t know anything about ranking real estate investor sites.

They’re essentially scammers trying to make money with promises they can’t deliver on.

If you don’t want to burn money on scammers and end up on page 5 anyway, listen to this episode. You’ll find out not only how to spot SEO scammers but also how to find the providers who’ll actually get you more leads online with better search rankings. Ready for leads on autopilot? Listen now!

Show highlights include:

  • How doing your own SEO can tank your search rankings—even if you see your rankings rise! ([5:33])
  • How having a hundred links to your website can get your site “blacklisted”. ([13:43])
  • If you hear this promise from an SEO provider, run the other way. ([20:43])
  • Why even a #1 ranking can be utterly useless if you ignore these facts. ([24:03])

To get the latest updates directly from Dan and discuss business with other real estate investors, join the REI marketing nerds Facebook group here: https://adwordsnerds.com/group

Need help with your online marketing? Jump on a FREE strategy session with our team. We’ll dive deep into your market and help you build a custom strategy for finding motivated seller leads online. Schedule for free here: https://adwordsnerds.com/strategy

Sign up for the September giveaway to win $8800 worth of value for your REI business: https://adwordsnerds.com/contest/

Read Full Transcript

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 Ad Words 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.

Dan: All right, hello, everybody and welcome to this week's REI Marketing Nerds, but it is not only REI Marketing Nerds, it is also SEO and IPA because, of course, this is the final week of SEO September, SEO for REI month, all month Patti Dalessio, the head of the SEO division at AdWords Nerds, and I have been on this podcast telling you all about everything you need to know to up your search engine optimization and use that to get more motivated seller needs and deals, so this week, the final week, at least for now. [0:01:17.2]

The final week of SEO September, the final week of SEO and IPA. I am joined again by the brains behind the operation officially, the only reason that anybody ever watches this show, and you can't spell Dalessio without SEO…

Patti: [laughter]

Dan: Patti Dalessio, head of the SEO division at Ad Words Nerds… How are you, my wonderful friend?

Patti: I am fantastic, my wonderful friend!

Dan: I know! And this week, we are ending with a bang. We're going to end with the most perhaps controversial episode of the month, and we are going to be talking about straight up scams. We're going to be talking about SEO scams… You can tell me if this is wrong, Patti…

Patti: Yes…

Dan: SEO… You know I got started in SEO, you've been doing SEO for a long time now. We both SEO, don't get me wrong…[0:02:06.4]

Patti: Yup.

Dan: SEO seems, to me, to be the most scam prone area of online marketing, possibly affiliate marketing…

Patti: Um hmm…

Dan: … and SEO marketing are kind of there. Do you think that's true? And then why is that? Because we're going to dig into SEO scams. I'm kind of curious like why there are so many SEO scams and why so many people get kind of raked over the coals by SEO. What is the deal with this?

Patti: So I'm of two minds – just real quick –

Dan: That explains a lot, by the way.

Patti: I know, right? [laughter]

Dan: [laughter]

Patti: I know, because for real, I think in one way, I find my professional SEO community, my community of experts that I travel in, the conferences that I go to, the people I know, the people that I look to when I have a question, those that I follow on Twitter… I find them to be very generous, very honest, very upright. I really have this love for this community, okay? [0:03:10.5]

And they're smart, and they know the heck out of this stuff, and they're passionate, and they're all over it… So the people that I know personally, I have a lot of respect for, and I think that there are some great experts in the field. Also, there might be a relatively low bar of entry to SEO, and I say that in that you could, because the algorithm is a bit of a black box because we don't know exactly what the rules are because there is a lot of mystery and BS about what it is and how to succeed and what to do to make it happen. I think it's just for negative players to come and take advantage of that, be like, hey… Like used car salesman just bad. So, I don't know, does that make sense? I think that there are a lot of amazing experts and then also I clean up after a lot of bad SEO work all day long. [0:04:00.1]

Dan: Yeah, I think that's a combination of that for sure. It's very hard to point to something and prove that they're wrong. Someone says like, oh, I can blah, blah, blah, blah, blah… It's very hard to prove a lot of times that that is wrong without actually doing it and suffering the consequences, and then I think also there is a lot of just outdated information. There is information that was right, and this is an industry that's constantly evolving in a way that I think very few industries in the history of the world have ever had to put up with. Right?

Patti: Yeah.

Dan: I mean, it's… Car manufacturers have a schedule on which they have to like update and SEO is who knows when and who even knows what happened and it's very tumultuous in that way. So yeah, I think a lot of it is just… There are some people that mean well, and there are a lot of people that honestly don't mean well, and there are a lot of people in real estate investing specifically that will pedal kind of like insights or tips or tricks or stuff that's like, you and I, having done this so many times, we know they're wrong, right? [0:05:11.1]

We know it's wrong. One other thing I would say too that I see really specifically in REI, and this is kind of like I wouldn't call this a scam – I don't think it's a scam – I think scam… We use that word very purposely for very negative connotation, right? This is like going out and trying to take people's money…

Patti: Um hmm…

Dan: What ends up happening in REI a lot is not quite that. It is someone who works on their website or does something and then they see some success, and then they extrapolate it from that. They're like, well, I figured it out. I did the thing, and then I got X, and, therefore, doing the thing gets you X, and then they go out and they tell everybody that…

Patti: Yup.

Dan: And for one, when you start to apply this to… We've worked with hundreds of investors now, you start to see that just cause something worked for someone doesn't mean it works for everyone, by any means, but then the other part of that is that a lot of times, that investor that says well I did X, and I got Y, they have almost no understanding of what they actually did or whether it's causal or… I worked with someone once who he had launched in this market, done his own SEO and crushed it. [0:06:22.8]
Then he had launched into a new market and done the same thing and was getting nothing, and so actually hired me to consult with him and kind of help him figure out the SEO plan, and he was like, I don't understand because I did this before, and it was pretty recently.

Patti: Yeah.

Dan: And I was like, yeah, but the first market that you crushed it in, you had one competitor…

Patti: Yeah.

Dan: And they launched into one of the most competitive markets in the country…

Patti: Right.

Dan: So, you know what I mean? I was like, you kind of could have just farted into a box and ranked #2 in this other market. It would have been fine. So, it's just, there's so much that goes into that, and so it's not that someone is trying to scam you, but there is a lot of misunderstanding, so we are going to dig into it. [0:07:08.2]
We're going to dig into the scams. If you listen to this episode, you're never going to be scammed by another SEO ever again. You're going to be like, Dan Barrett and Patti Dalessio told me that was BS, okay?

Patti: Yeah.

Dan: Let's get started with kind of one of the most common ones. This is, for me, it's a huge red flag whenever I hear anybody say this, and it's if you pay me a certain amount of money… So you as the investor pay me, the SEO person, a certain amount of money, I will get for you X number of links a week. Now in our last episode, we talked about links, why they're so important. We talked about how critical they are. Can you break down for me why this is a red flag? Because on the surface, it sounds awesome. I give you $500, and you're going to get me 10 links a week or whatever. Why is this a red flag for us?

Patti: Well, anyone who says that, it just smells like poor quality links. Because imagine their job. We've already discussed how links are hard, links are hard to get. It's not easy. It's about the relationship you have, it's about content worth sharing, linking to… [0:08:09.5]

Dan: Easily the most time consuming, labor intensive part of SEO, bar none. I mean, it is not even close, the amount of time that needs to go into link building versus everything else.

Patti: 100%. So anybody who says… If you're out there… And you are not supposed to buy links, so it's that… I would assume that someone there is buying links. No, paying somebody to do a link-building strategy for you is not buying links. That is…

Dan: Buying labor to get you the links?

Patti: Exactly, exactly. So, but buying links, it smells to me like someone has a racket, and especially if they're promising that to their book of business, whatever that might look like, so the SEO has other people that they are guaranteeing 10 links a month to. It's ridiculously hard to roll that out at the quality that would make sense to actually be a good ranking factor for you. So that is a red flag. [0:09:01.1]

Dan: Exactly. I think if you are paying a link-building service, and there are legitimate link-building services out there, we build links for clients, so it certainly exists, but we charge a lot of money for it because it is extremely time consuming. I mean even Jeremiah, who does this full time, he kind of maxes out at like 5 people at a time because it's so much labor, and it is sort of like if somebody is producing a lot of these very consistently, almost always that means that they've taken out the relationship part of that because if you're trying to build relationships with people, sometimes people have links for you; sometimes people won't, right? Sometimes you'll be able to get an article up here; sometimes you won't. If you're saying, oh, I can get you 10 links a week every week, what they do is, they have a backstop way of providing that because that's what you paid them for. Almost always that's going to end up being buying them or building their own kind of artificial network of links, which we talked about before as a private blog number, which is specifically against Google's SEO rules and can easily get you taken out of the search results pages. [0:10:13.2]

One really amazing… This is a coaching student of ours came in and wanted me to review the work of their SEO person, and our SEO person, very reasonably priced, said I'm going to build you a bunch of links so I went back through the links, and what I noticed, and I couldn’t figure it out for the longest time, and it took me a while to actually figure it out, but what they were doing was, they would link to my client, my coaching student, their SEO client, they would link to her from their other client's websites, so…

Patti: Yeah.

Dan: … real estate investors, on their home pages, would have links to this real estate investor client of theirs, and then she had all these links on her website to other real estate investors. They were literally just secretly sneaking in links to your real estate investing website to a different investor. I like blew… I lost it! I was so upset by it! And it's like, look, there are ways you can do this that make a lot of sense, like, if you're got a separate website that's a separate business, you want to link to yourself, look, it's fine. [0:11:17.4]

But these people, no; these SEO people, no. What they're doing is shady. They know it, which is why when you ask them how do you go about building a link, they almost never say what they actually are doing. It is very obscure. Can explain… You mentioned PBNs before, private blog networks. I think it is important enough to go into it because it's a very common practice right now. What is a PBN, why is it bad?

Patti: Yeah, it's bad because it was only built, it's only purpose is to link out in a spammy way. That's all it does. So it has no content. It's not worth really crawling…

Dan: What is a private blog network? If I see… When you look at it, what do you see?

Patti: Yeah! So you'll see weird, thin content…[0:12:05.6]

Dan: If you're listening to podcast, Patti's facial expression is she tries to explain this relatively abstract concept, she's doing this stuff with her hands…It's pretty amazing!

Patti: First of all, I would say that everyone should really Google PBNs and just see what Google has to say about them honestly. I don't normally say just go to Google, but once you see it, you know what it looks like, and then you'll see them all over the place. Now the other thing that is interesting about this PBNs, is that there are a lot of free tools where you can assess websites and the links coming into them, so you can see if your competitors have this junk, if you have this junk. This is kind of one of the aspects of this that is pretty public. It's pretty easy to just say, tell me everyone that is pointing to this website, and it will kind of spit it out. You will see what these PBNs look like in this industry and for real estate investors. You'll noticed. You're like, oh, what is this weird website? Sometimes it will have a lot of ads on it; again, a bunch of junk. It doesn't really look or feel like a real website. [0:13:04.1]

It looks really junky. Oh, and by the way, it's not just your site that's linking from it, you'll see [laughter] they're really maximizing. Also the domain name will be really bizarre, like it won't look right. They're really cheesy, really inexpensive, are only built just to link back, and to perform this scam. It's a true scam. There is no real value to it at all, and it's only meant to fool the search engines. Now let me say this. Google has gotten very, very good at sorting out what these PBNs are and are not passing that value. So you could be paying for these links, think that you're getting them, be like, I have 100, I have 100 links. Well, if they're all these PBNs, it's actually not going to be helping you. And then as Google shuts them down, and by the way, the people that bought them, they're going to be shutting these sites down too because they stop working, they can't farm them out, they may expire. There's a bunch of… They're a hundred reasons why it's a bad move to make. [0:14:01.3]

Dan: And to be clear, there are reasons people use these things, and we're not saying no one ever gets any value out them. You might get a bump in Google from using one. There's a reason that if you look out, you see people using them. What we want to be clear about is: One, there's no guarantee that you will get anything out of it; and, two, there is a very real risk to it, and that risk is that your website just gets banished entirely from Google. It gets taken out of most search results, and that is a massive amount of damage to do. For a short-term benefit, you are taking home the risk of a very long-term damage. This is the same reason that I don't do methamphetamines, okay? [laughter]

Patti: [laughter]

Dan: Sure, it feels great! In the short term, okay? I can probably get a lot done, right? But in the long term, the damage is very real and is not worth the risk. We all make these decisions every day. We all… As an investor, you spend all day turning down deals and flips and stuff that don't make any sense because the numbers don't make any sense. [0:15:10.2]

Patti: And I would say this too. I think fundamentally, good SEOs are going to want to build equity for you in a domain. The domain is www.thatthinginthemiddleisyourdomain.com. We want…

Dan: Wait, that's a really good one! www.thatthinginthemiddleisyourdomain.com. [laughter]
Patti: [laughter]

Dan: I'm going to go check it out right now! [laughter]

Patti: [laughter] No, but that should grow. That should have value. You need to see that as the equity, as the owned platform, but it is, and it should increase over time. The longer… Just having it for a long time is also a little bit of a signal. It's been established, and it's valuable, and we don't want to get that black listed and have Google say, uck, you're doing a bunch of garbage, we can see right through you, and literally stop showing you at all. You will disappear from Google. Google will send you a message and say you're done. You're suspended. Your site is suspended. [0:16:07.1]

Now, what does that mean? That means any value, any time that you've spent SEOing and building up that domain has gone away, and also you need to either rename your business or get a new domain and kind of like start all over. It's a little bit embarrassing. I have absolutely 100% seen it happen. It's real, and it's risky. So, scam number one.
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Dan: Let's talk about scam number two, which is more of a red flag than a scam, but I think this is something we need to talk about, which is really low cost SEO alternatives. There is a lot to unpack here, and to be clear, I'm not saying that everybody needs to charge a billion dollars for SEOs – it's clearly not what I'm saying, but I think we've all been… Everyone listening to this podcast, assuming if you have any kind of business at all, maybe even if you don't, probably been solicited by email for someone that wants to improve your website via SEO. I like the emails I get. They're like, hey, I was just checking out your website, and I noticed you're not in Google. I'm like, yeah, how did you find my website, you idiot? [laughter]

Patti: [laughter]

Dan: [laughter] Anyway, why is this an issue? Because on the surface of it, low cost is good. I mean, competition is good for everybody. I believe that, and it doesn't have to cost a million dollars. Why is this a red flag for us?
Patti: I believe that good SEO is worth paying for, first thing. It being ranking in Google will certainly drive impressions and leads and conversions and deals but also you want that expertise. [0:18:05.7]

You want someone who is taking the time as we do – as I do – to stay on top of the algorithm and read about SEO best practices, read about changes, and understand the workings of what's a ranking factor, what's not, what can we do to improve – that whole landscape. I spend so much time a week making sure that tapped into how this all works, that I can't imagine any just, just… It's worth paying for. If it's at a super low cost, you get what you pay for, and these are probably not experts. These are not people taking SEOs seriously.

Dan: Well, I think even on top of that, because I think that's true, but we all have to start somewhere, and I certainly underpriced my services early on, so that can certainly happen. For me, the big thing about this, is that if someone is pitching a labor-intensive service, which SEO is, as a low-cost alternative, they're doing either of two things: One, they're purely using some kind of software to do the work, which is a recipe for disaster for a variety of reasons; and then, two, if they're not doing that, they are outsourcing that work, so there are white label SEO companies that will say we'll do all the SEO work, we'll do everything very for your client. [0:19:22.3]

You just sell our service to other people, and that service costs $300. You sell it for $500. You get a $200 profit, and so a lot of times, if you get these low-cost alternatives, you're basically trusting your business to a complete stranger. Beyond that, that stranger is then trusting your business to someone else, so it would be like if you just stuck your head out the front door and were like, hey, does anyone want to babysit my kid? And you pick the first person…

Patti: [laughter]

Dan: [laughter]… you pick to babysit your kid, and you went to go see John Wick 3 or whatever you're going to do, and you get back, and there's another person in there, and it turns out the person you pulled off the street was like, hey, I've got to go, so they just pulled a different person off the street, and now you've got like two strangers removed, watching your kid… Yeah, it's giving me ..., right? It's a bad idea! [laughter] [0:20:10.9]

Patti: [laughter] It is!

Dan: Let's keep moving!

Patti: There is really a point. I mean, some of this stuff can be put offshore, so they're not even around. You're given them the keys to your business, possibly even access to payment… I don't know… I don't know, it could be crazy.

Dan: It gets very tricky. For me, it's just like, again, we're trusting someone with a resource that we're hopefully going to have for the next couple decades. I mean, your website is not going anywhere. Google is not going anywhere. You need this stuff to be working long into the future.

Let's talk about… This is one of my favorite ones. Patti, this is SEO Steve here, and you're my new client, and, hey, have I got a deal for you. I'm going to rank you, get this… I guarantee I will rank you #1 for four keywords…

Patti: What???

Dan: Pretty good deal… What do you say to that? [0:21:01.9]

Patti: Take all my money!

Dan: Give me all your money!

Patti: Yeah.

Dan: This is a hold up! The whole SEO thing was just to get me in the house!

Patti: [laughter]

Dan: No! So what is the problem? This is a very common pitch.

Patti: Um hmm.

Dan: I will rank you for 4 keywords or 5 keywords or 10 keywords or 20 keywords or however… What is the trick here? Because on the surface, that sounds awesome. I'm a big believer that competency begins with guaranteeing your work, so I'm a fan of guarantees, but what is the problem of this one specifically? Cause there is some slight of hands kind of happening…

Patti: Yeah.
Dan: So can you explain that to people? I'm going to guarantee I will rank you, let's say, for 5 keywords. What's the issue with that?

Patti: Typically those people are then going to choose those keywords themselves, so you would imagine the low hanging fruit in this case could be your company name… [laughter]… your name… you know what I mean? They probably are not high value, highly-searched, high user intents, probably meaning they're not keywords that are going to convert for you, but, yeah, when you have that guarantee, you're going to throw everything to the wall and count whatever you can actually manage to do. [0:22:11.2]

Now, we mentioned in the last strategy talk about the 35 keywords that we care about. None of them are branded keywords, so none of them are the company name, right? Like what was it, Greg SEO or whatever or Gregorio…

Dan: Gregorio Homebuyers…

Patti: Homebuyers… Yeah, so I mean, if you're not ranking for the name of your business in the city that you live, then you need to work a little harder there, but typically those are really easy to kind of rank for, but yeah…

Dan: Put it this way: If no one cares, it's easy to rank for something. So if I want to rank your website tomorrow for celebrity jibbit hoppity hip 2019, best SEO, Dan Barrett, flippity flops, I can do that basically by just making a page that says that because it's the only page in the world that's going to say that…

Patti: Right.

Dan: And so, boom, you're #1 on Google. The trick to this is we can guarantee that we're going to rank you for a certain keyword by picking keywords with almost no competition. Well why do they have no competition? Because…[0:23:08.2]

Patti: No one is searching them!

Dan: No one is searching them! You're not going to get any leads.

Patti: Right!

Dan: So it's like, yeah, if you want to rank for just nonsense vanity keywords all day, that's great. Now, I think the flip side to that is to understand that, yes, if you go after the keywords that really do produce the bulk of leads and deals, there is going to be competition, and that's going to be more difficult than ranking for something that doesn't matter, but that's the tradeoff, right? The value is there, so the competition is there. Google is a marketplace. It operates very much like a market, and we expect Adam Smith's invisible hands to make valuable stuff complicated to get, and that is the case, right?

Patti: Yeah.

Dan: So just be on the lookout for that. If someone says like, oh, I guarantee I'll rank you for 5, my question would always be like, rank me
where? And what keywords? And start from there… And start from there and see what happens. [0:24:03.1]

Patti: Where is actually a really good point, just to point out how we're different.

Dan: You're very different. You got a little melancholy there. You're like, I know. [laughter]

Patti: [laughter] I know.

Dan: I trod this earth alone!

Patti: [laughter]

Dan: So alone! [laughter]

Patti: Okay, so the way that we track, and I don't think this is giving away too much, but no, this is why we're here. We're here to give this away.

Dan: Yeah, give away stuff. I don't care. It's fun.

Patti: We're targeting say 5 geo-locations. We have a set of… or keywords that we track. So if I live in Cincinnati, Sell House Fast Cincinnati might be a term that we care about. We also care about just the word Sell House Fast…

Dan: Right.

Patti: But I'm in Cincinnati, so I want to know how I rank in Cincinnati for that term. I want to know how I rank in Cincinnati for that term, plus its geo modifier or the word Cincinnati, but I also want to know about in all of the U.S., if I don't live in Cincinnati proper, if I live in Florida, but I'm trying to sell my house in Cincinnati, I want to know how I rank in the U.S. for that term, Sell My House Fast Cincinnati. We track all of that. I take those keywords and do my magic to them and track for all of those things. [0:25:17.9]

Dan: Because there's not just 1 page for Sell My House Fast Cincinnati. You're going to see something different in you're in Cincinnati if you type that in. You're going to see something different if you're in New York and you type that in. You're going to see something different if you type in Sell My House Fast and you're in Cincinnati, but you don't type Cincinnati, and everybody is seeing something different. You have to understand how your rank changes. You need to know those scenarios.

Patti: Yeah, absolutely, and you want to rank for some combination of all of those. You know what I mean? You want to be able to be not in a city and be able to… Because there's a lot of situations where that is beneficial, but, yeah, and like I said, in none of our keywords are we including branded terms or really easy terms. They're actually actionable stuff, and that's what you should be looking at. Like if someone puts that in, what are they looking for? You know what I mean? It's the service. [0:26:03.9]

Dan: How many people are actually typing this into Google? Yeah. And I'll tell you, real estate investing in general is one of the reasons it's so different as an industry when you do SEO is that a lot of the best search terms, like Sell My House Fast, not many people actually type that in. Compare it to healthcare or fashion or retail or whatever. You're talking about very small numbers, especially when you zoom in on a specific zip code or whatever. So, our REI is unique in that way and because of that, the more you understand about how you're actually doing or what you're trying to do and the reason that you are going after these things, the better off you're going to be.

Let's talk about the last… We have one more scam to talk about, and that's ambiguous pricing, which is kind of a broad thing, and we've talked about pricing kind of when we talk about low pricing, but there is also like this whole, kind of crop of ways that you can price on SEO that are very confusing. [0:27:03.1]

We don't tend to do a lot of different packages when we do SEO, mostly because it's like, look, you need this stuff. We're not going to sell you the… It's like, I'm not going to sell you the car without the engine just so I can have a cheaper version of the car. It's got to have the engine in it, right? So what do you mean or what do you think of when you think of ambiguous pricing in the SEO space?

Patti: You can Chinese menu all of these little bits with different people, different third parties, right? You could pay somebody for link building and somebody for, I don't know, tracking or content or some of these things. I find it's helpful to have, well like we've talked, a strategy, local content, links. I think someone doing all of these things together and wanting to be able to show the benefit of the work that's been done, really, really takes that home. I mean, anyone who's just concentrating on one little aspect of this is doing to be as helpful. So if someone is… If they're ambiguous as far as, oh, I... You really want to know, okay, what are you going to do for that, what exactly am I going to see, what kind of reporting are you going to produce, how are you going to show either return on investment or benefits over time or progress made over time. [0:28:21.5]

Yeah, you know… It's… I don't know. I guess I've seen a bunch of weird little packages, right, so… [laughter] You've got, what is it? Bronze, silver, gold? And you'll kind of see checkmarks, and that's like really popular, and that's all made to just kind of get you to level up and package up, really. Even that alone can feel a little bit kind of scammy, do you think, Dan?
Dan: I mean, I think that that could be a legitimate difference of opinion. We've talked about this before. It's like Lou… Maybe people have heard this podcast, may have talked to Lou. Lou is the one who talks to any investor that wants to work with us in any capacity and is amazing. He was a real estate investor. He knows his stuff, front to back, and Lou is a fan of packages because he's like, look, if someone can't afford the full package, we can still do some good and give them something that they can afford, and if it's not everything, then that's cool. [0:29:14.3]

It's like, that's what they can afford, and I get that, but I also know that like at this point, we've done this so many times, we know what the road map is for real estate investor to rank. We know what they're going to need in order to rank in their target markets, what they're going to need on their site, what they're going to need for their local, what they're going to need for links, and so I'm like, this is what you need, and if you can't afford it, that's okay. Come back to me when you can afford it, and I don't think there's a right or wrong there. I think it's just of a difference in philosophy… Who knows? I may change my opinion next year or next month. It happens all the time. We have actually been in talks like developing an SEO plan that would be a year long, and we would only have like 4 clients, and it would be a lot of money, but it would be super intense…[0:30:06.5]

Patti: Um hmm.

Dan: … and you know, it's like maybe that's a good fit for somebody; maybe it isn't. I don't know. I think there's a lot of room to differ in terms of what SEO should cost. If you're an investor and you're listening to this, you're wondering what is this going to cost me, where should I get started? There are a lot of different options, I would just like to talk to someone. Reach out to us, go to www.AdWordsNerds.com /strategy, talk to us about it, talk to other real estate investors, get some idea what other people are doing. There are a lot of alternatives, but I would keep an eye out for the scams that we mentioned because regardless of the pricing, these scams exist. They are straight up not good for clients, not good for the industry, not good for you, not good for anybody, and I think if you keep an eye out for that, you're going to be much more aware of the red flags than pretty much anybody else.

Patti: Yup, and actually what I would say to that is, what I meant about the pricing plan, is when it looks like specific pricing, but it's actually ambiguous, so we'll rank you for 5 keywords or 10 keywords or 25 keywords, you know what I mean? It's kind of like even that alone is weird, that they'd be… I don't know. So I agree. [0:31:13.4]

Dan: Yeah, let me wrap this up folks. First of all, first thing you need to know. If you are listening to this, since September is not over, you can still enter the SEO for REI September Mega-Bundle Giveaway. It is at www.AdWordsNerds.com/contest. There will be a link, along with Show Notes for this episode. You can go there. It's free to enter. You can enter multiple times. We're giving away almost $9000 worth of SEO courses and coaching and books and tools and pretty much everything else. Everything you need to crush it in your market with SEO. You can get it for free. That's www.AdWordsNerds.com/contest. Enter to win. We will be picking one lucky real estate investor to get all that stuff. Secondly – secondly, secondly! [0:32:03.2]

All September, we have been posting SEO content in the REI Marketing Nerds Facebook Group. If you are not in there, go to www.AdWordsNerds.com/group. Check out all the free stuff. It's amazing, and the finally – finally – I want to say, thank you to my dear friend, and a true and consummate professional, someone who is literally out there in the trenches grinding every single day, helping real estate investors get more deals with SEO, is Patti Dalessio. Thank you so much for being on all these shows, Patti! It's been really fun, and I appreciate it very much.

Patti: Thank you, thank you! You what I just realized, too?

Dan: What's that?

Patti: September is my birthday month. I think that's why we're going this!

Dan: Yes, well, that's why September is SEO month!

Patti: Yeah, okay!

Dan: Did I not say that?

Patti: It's about me, yeah.

Dan: Yeah. It's not only SEO month, it's Dalessio month.

Patti: Okay, that… [laughter]

Dan: That's how it ends!

Patti: [laughter]

Dan: Every year, we celebrate the coming of the Patti… She arises from the pumpkin patch every year and just bestows on us a series of
high quality links and killer on-page content. [0:33:10.9]

Patti: Perfect!

Dan: Patti, thank you so much. If people want to find you online to follow up with your and follow what you're saying and stuff, do you have a way that you want people to do that?

Patti: Yeah! I mean, Twitter might be fun… I'm SEO Patty on Twitter.

Dan: Patti with an I.

Patti: Patti with an I.

Dan: So SEOPatti@SEOPatti. Follow her on Twitter. I highly recommend that you do that. She is also pithy and pragmatic and actionable in her tweets. So…

Patti: [laughter]

Dan: [laughter] As always, I will be back next week as always. Thank you as always for listening to the REI Marketing Nerds Podcast. This is Daniel Barrett from Ad Words Nerds signing off. I hope you had an amazing SEO September. Let me know what you thought. I hope you got some value out of this, and I will be talking to you guys soon.

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