Does SEO still work in Real Estate Investing?

[Jim S.]

I've been listening to the Bigger Pockets Podcasts every  morning while on the treadmill on the topics that interest me most- wholesaling, flipping and buy & hold and I've been doing so in chronological order.  Currently I'm up to podcasts from 2013.  A couple of the of the podcasts I've listened to over the past few days had portions where they discussed building your website and stressed the importance of SEO (search engine optimization).  They've mentioned that it is expensive but well worthwhile to spend money on SEO as it will help you rank highly in Google as well as the other search engines.

I'm wondering if those of you who were spending a lot of money on SEO in 2013 are still doing so today.  Here's why I ask- in my full time job we have drastically cut down on the amount of money that we spend on SEO over the last three or four years due to the fact that it just doesn't seem to be as effective as it was previously.  It's not just my industry but many others that I've read about on various SEO forums over the past few years.  Basically, Google has changed the rules on what causes a website to be highly ranked in organic searches and they aren't nearly as transparent as they used to be about what helps achieve a high ranking.  They also seem to change these rules on a fairly regular basis so that even if the SEO gurus can figure out what the current hot button is, before long it's changed again.  These forums are full of SEO people and small business owners who are at their wit's end due to having lost much or all of their organic traffic in recent years.

I could go on and on about how this has affected our company's online sales but that's not really the point of this post. Without suddenly jumping ahead to current podcasts and trying to find what people are saying about SEO today, I'm wondering what those of you who have websites that you use to get leads from are finding in 2018 regarding SEO.  I'm curious to know if what my industry (and many others too) has found regarding SEO is now true for real estate investing as well or if it's a different animal altogether.

Any input supporting this or countering this is appreciated.  Thanks!