SEO is definitely great in terms of developing a large portfolio of backlinks, strong keywords and traffic.

We are doing pitches for reporters to get backlinks and trying to get at least one new backlink per month.

Backlinks are way more helpful.

I'm looking to spend a few hours a week on helping to do this and I'll be spending more time looking at IC's resources, but it's definitely been challenging as I know nothing about SEO marketing so I'm not sure what i've done is even effective.What are the best tools to track SEO results and websites to comment and drive SEO by back linking?

This definitely includes spreading content among a wider variety of sites for more diverse back links, and using a variety of different back link text.

Besides BP, Houzz, Angies List, what are some other good "Profile" sites to start building some backlinks, leads, to your real estate lead gen. website?

This post isn't about them though, but what I want to know is why I look at my site at ahrefs.com and compare my stats vs my competitors why the heck are they ranking better than me when I have about triple to quadruple the backlinks, more of a social media presence, and just overall better content.

Google's pigeon algorithm looks for more quality content and is more focused on local so building out a site is more now than just giving it a massive number of backlinks.4.  

I didn't understand HTML, wordpress, widgets, plugins, SEO, Backlinking etc...As time went on I got better and better.  

If you don't know how to clean it up then you'll have to pay someone to do it and it doesn't come cheap.After you've cleaned up the back links you're then left with a website that no longer ranks.