Lead generating website help

[Rob Grove]

First of all, I wish I knew what I was doing but as they say in the military, fake it till you make it, and that's sort of what I am doing. 

Anyway, to the point. 

I decided to buy a lead generating website this morning. I came across leadpropeller.com which affiliates with BP and BP offers discount, and for PRO members (which I just signed up for) you get three websites for the price of one. Sign me up! 

I created my first website that i am using as my brand, Sell Not Remodel. With what little knowledge I have about websites and search engines, the idea (I think) is to get as many combinations of search phrases to get directed to a number of your lead generating websites. So I googled what came up when I searched a few similar phrases of, sell my house fast Minnesota, etc. I created two more websites with similar phrases in hopes of one day I'll be on the front page of the Google search with all three or more websites.  I know there are PPC methods etc but I'm def not there yet. My question is, on my mailings, on my business cards, and my other marketing things I plan to do, should I advertise all three websites? Or just my brand? If just my brand, what should I do with the other websites? 

Thanks in advance. 

[Sean Dolan]

First off, if you spend 3 hours a day on one site's SEO, you will fare much better than spending 1 hour a day on three sites. You don't want to split SEO value between sites. If you have 3 hours to spend, spend it all on one site, not 3 sites. 

You can always use branded urls to redirect users to the page you intend to rank well in search engine results. So, you can put www.buyhousesnow.com on a bandit sign, with a 301 directive on that site to redirect all visitors of www.buyhousesnow.com to sellnotremodel.com. If you're doing radio or tv, similarly, you'll want a 'vanity' domain to redirect to your actual domain - which may not be as memorable. But, SellNotRemodel.com isn't exactly the hardest name to spell or remember, and small enough to fit on a bandit sign, the only downside is the domain doesn't clearly state what you do. So, you just need to see what works for you, but my point is that you have options, and you should keep one end-point domain for all traffic and links to go to. That's another consideration, if you have vanity domains redirecting, any links will flow through those vanity domains, and you will lose some link value through the redirect. 

Now, if your asking this because you want sellnotremodel as a brand, and you're planning on buying a more keyword-rich domain like sellmyhousefastmn.com, I would recommend that you don't head down that route. If anything, find a mixture of branded and keywords domains, don't go pure keyword or exact match. What if you grow outside of Minnesota? You can't if your domain specifies MN, at least not without a lot of work and loss of SEO value in the transfer to a new domain. 

Also, keep in mind with SEO, that it's not "free" traffic. Any keyword worth ranking for, if there's valuable traffic, somebody's there, they know it, and they are motivated to either keep it, or rank higher to get more of it). Whether it is sweat equity, or money paid to an SEO provider, you will ALWAYS be paying for this. Once you rank #1, the guy who you pushed back to #2 is going to get his *** in gear to get his rankings back. There is no 'set it and forget it' SEO strategy. If someone shows you they rank for term "xxx" and they don't have to do any more SEO, I want to see their Search Console (Webmaster tools) report that shows that the terms actually brings in traffic. It's easy to rank for low-value terms, and many low-value terms sound like they should be valuable, but they are not.

With that said, let's say you DO rank #1? Yay! Let's see how that looks on Google again *for competitive terms worth ranking for*. 

My agency ranks #2 for: ppc management. 

See PushFire.com? We're organically #2, but with all of the ads above us, we're sitting at #5. Why are there so many ads? Because this term is highly competitive. So, after all of that work improving your SEO, we are now fighting to maintain our rankings, to *at best* be in the 4th spot. 

It gets worse. Check out what a #2 ranking on mobile does for you? Do you even see any organic results? Not a damn one. Greedy bastards. ;)

So, if you're paying someone (or spending time) learning SEO - let's say to the tune of $2500/month. Divide that number by how many leads you receive from SEO. And don't confuse SEO traffic as people searching your brand name because they got a business card, or saw a bandit sign, or were referred by a friend.

Some SEO providers will show you an increase in organic traffic, but there is going to be an increase in organic traffic as your business grows. Not all of that traffic is worth anything, and some of it is irrelevant of ranking - ranking for your brand name is a gimme. 

So, SEO is a wonderful channel, but cheap SEO is worse than no SEO, and if you're going to learn how to do it yourself, why not learn Adwords, or Facebook Ads? The learning curve is not as steep, and it's a more stable investment of your time and money. 

Overall, I just think people assume Adwords is expensive, and SEO is free, and it's just not true, when Adwords is done well. Both can be expensive, but SEO is trying to 'beat' the system, while Adwords is joining the system. Adwords isn't going anywhere, and it's taking over more and more real estate on the search engine results page.

SEO is like building your business website on sand, and Adwords is building your business website on a concrete slab. That's really my point.