Picture if you will, an idea: A real estate investor gets into their market and they start to do search engine optimization on their websites. They’ve got an InvestorCarrot site and they’re actively doing SEO, they’re building out content. They are building links, they are doing all the stuff that you’re supposed to do. They’re doing all this stuff that you are supposed to do, but they are not getting leads from it.

What ends up happening is that this investor will do this for three or six months then say, “I didn’t get any leads from this. This is not working for me. SEO doesn’t work.”

No one is saying that you should do marketing that isn’t profitable for you, right? This is kind of the baseline of business. It’s understanding what you put into something and what you get out of it. Understanding the investment that you make in your marketing and what you get out of it, understanding the ROI. That’s what real estate investing is all about. I’m not saying to ignore that. What I am saying is that a lot of times people think they are not profiting from the work they’re doing in SEO when they actually are.

The Money is Right Under Your Nose

One big problem is that a lot of times people do not understand where their leads are coming from. This is where something that we call lead attribution comes in. It’s the idea that when a lead comes in through the website, you know that it came from pay-per-click, or it came from direct mail, whatever it is.

The fact of the matter is it’s very difficult to accurately attribute leads. A lot of times people will get calls from people who search on Google, find their website and then call them, but they don’t think the call came from SEO, or they think they’re getting leads from their PPC when they’re really coming from their SEO or vice-versa.

What a mess! It’s not always easy to understand where our leads are coming from or why we’re getting them. So maybe you are getting leads, and they are from SEO, and you just don’t know that.

But let’s say you’re not getting any leads at all. Is it safe to say at that point that SEO was a waste of time and effort? And I would still argue no. I don’t mean that it’s always worth it. But I would say in a lot of cases, investors leave a lot of money on the table by not understanding how to value the work that they’ve done.

Let’s break this down. Have a look at SEO. Search engine optimization ranks your website on Google. It can’t create traffic. It can only attract it, correct?

You can’t create traffic, you can’t make people search. You can only get in front of the people that are searching.

So SEO, for example, might push your website up from nothing. As a new website, you won’t show up for any keywords in your market, any of the zip codes that you care about. You’re essentially nowhere. Your SEO might move you all the way from nothing through to the first page.

You went from nothing to being on the first page for most of your searches and target areas. What is that worth? We would argue quite a bit, even if there isn’t immediately money in your pockets.

We’ve had clients come in and pay tens of thousands of dollars to do SEO work, not get a deal in their first three months, and then delete their website. So not only did they pay all the money, they didn’t even get the work. That would be like buying an apartment building for $500,000, not making my money back in the first three months, and then just burning the building down with no insurance. That’s what it’s like. You would never do that.

So make sure if you are doing your search engine optimization that you understand the role that it has to play in your business. You will think that it’s way worse than it is, but you will leave tons of money on the table long-term.

Make that money. Know the value of SEO. Be patient.

Take care!

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