Do "We Buy Houses" PCC campaigns actually work?

[Samantha M.]

Out of curiosity has anyone tried a google adwords pay per click with success? I was considering giving it a shot, and alot of the words in my area like "we buy houses dallas" cost $10.00 + per click.

[Seth Williams]

Samantha M. - About 18 months ago, I paid $600 for SEO on my lead generating website and I can say with absolute certainty that it was effective (though it took about 4 months to really start kicking in).

Since the SEO was implemented, I've gotten hundreds (and probably well over a thousand) of lead submissions. The SEO work consisted of optimizing the words on my website and putting hundreds of back links all over the internet. Even since Google has changed their algorithm - I honestly haven't seen any negative effect in terms of the traffic that I get.

The traffic tends to come in waves - and is rather unpredictable. Sometimes I'll go a week without getting any leads, other times I'll get 6 - 8 submissions per day (this is on my absolute best of days).

The only downside is - these leads are coming in from all over the country, so it's difficult to keep my business concentrated to any one market (and it's definitely harder to make offers and sell properties in a market you don't fully understand). Nonetheless, the submissions I get are definitely coming from motivated sellers, because several of them have accepted some pretty ridiculous offers from me.

I'm not sure how much the same volume of traffic would have cost me if I had been using PPC - but I'm sure it would have set me back a lot further. Not to mention, I've been told that organic traffic tends to respond much better to the kind of website I have... so in my opinion, SEO (instead of PPC) has definitely been a good way for me to go.