SEO Musings & Recent Results!

Ranking your website is undoubtedly one of the most substantial aspects of “sell your house fast” marketing. SEO leads cost zero dollars directly. Time is money and I’m not ignoring that. The reverse is also true: money buys time. No money? Get money. Plain and simple: but the unvarnished truth. Anyone who says you can get started without money wants your money.

Priority and efficiency only go so far. So how do you find deals (to get you paid) without serious capital? You have a few options: get a license (novel thought!), a 9 to 5, borrow, grind MLS, Craig’s List, FSBO sites, networking. These options have “relatively minor” financial costs and “take considerable time.” You’re trading your time for money.

Step in SEO.

SEO has “relatively minor” financial costs – about $50/month for a site. Sorry, if you can’t afford that you need a job. Just like the other low-cost methods, you trade your time for money. Blogging, backlinks, social signals. It also simply takes passage of time.

Ironically, as I was writing this blog right now on Saturday morning, Bing Search SEO lead popped in my inbox: texted my acquisition manager to handle it because I’m out with family. Free lead and someone doing the work for me. That’s what I’m talking about! Check the time stamps and when this blog was posted : )

I personally value a ranking site above deal sourcing like grinding MLS. MLS might be a deal today or tomorrow, and perhaps for some people it works. For me, off-market in-bound marketing is my best deals – when I started this blog it was the first thing I wanted to write about. Comparatively speaking, leveling-up your site is building a lead engine. MLS never clicked like that for me.

Ranking your website is a lucrative goal because of how motivated the sellers are. Without exhaustively reviewing every lead: here are some notable SEO leads and results this last 2 months:

• Family member with a house needing an entire rehabilitation, resulting in a contract 3-weeks later. We canceled for now because this is a complex deal but I have verbal commitment we will go forward. Although verbal means nothing, we are working together every day to solve some of the problems to close – so I’m optimistic.
• A head of an estate in Northern Florida, where the prior person running the estate head passed away, and he’s trying to liquidate about 10 properties across the U.S.
• 10 leads “found us online” but I can’t pin-point how (I do have my Adwords with the specific phone number, but the “found your website online” leads could be bouncing from Adwords, to SEO, to social media: can’t be tracked. As an FYI, Google Analytics will not show you all queries for search engine traffic (only a small fraction).
• 5 wholesalers looking to move properties quickly. Not sure how “valuable” these are because wholesalers wait till the last minute, desperately search for a buyer online, and expect a buyer to front $500,000 deal in 72 hours. First, how many of us actually are “sitting on” $500,000 cash in the bank? Second, I’m not running to a lender asking for $500,000 in 3-days. Had the wholesaler approached me earlier, I would have said forget the wholesale, let’s contact my network and see what we can do and what price we need – but that’s a topic for another day.
• Home Depot manager called me for reduced rehab supplies. I don’t buy discount supplies because they are low stock, extra is often unavailable, and you could end on a mad dash for 48-hours hunting the right wood flooring, then doing emergency shipping from Canada. Still I asked “do you know anyone selling a house, sir?”

But this happened. I received an e-mail from a real estate agent 3 weeks ago that came across a blog, then to our website. Without my SEO efforts this never occurs. She gave me the phone/email of a “private angel” investor who wanted a proposal from us for him to finance our business. I don’t need a “business building” loan, but followed up if he did transactional lending: “yes, pitch your deal when it’s ready.”

Wait: a person contacted me because they want to lend money to me?!? After finding a blog I wrote and checking my website?!? Yup.Forget leads and deal or two – if I play this right, could be a game changer. I don’t care if bankroll is $10 or $1,000,000 we all NEED money, lots of it, and lots of people have a lots of it. Finding them and getting them to work with you is the trick : )

Anyways, hope I’ve sold you on growing your SEO! Happy deal hunting!