On today’s episode of Confessions of a Top Producing Real Estate Agent, we’re talking about SEO search engine optimization and why you should never pay for it. Welcome to this episode of Confessions of a Top Producing Real Estate Agent I’m your host Jennifer Myers listen in, as I share exactly what I did to go from not being able to sell a house for years to becoming one of the top 1% of agents in the US to even opening my own brokerage full of agents taught me, serve all their clients that were coming my way. I taught those Agents the same strategies I use on day two became Top Producing Agents. Now through this, Podcast an agent grad school.com. I’m sharing those same modern marketing and business strategies with you. Most of which I learned from looking outside of the real estate industry, no fluff, no theory, no outdated sales techniques or paying for leads, just the exact steps to get you the real estate business you’ve always wanted. And the life outside of your business, you’ve always wanted to let’s make it happen and dive into today’s episode. Before we dive into today’s episode, I just want to say thanks so much for being here and thanks for listening. I love the emails I get. I love the reviews that you leave. And I also just found out that this little podcast is now one of Apple’s top 100 podcasts when it comes to the careers categories and not just real estate, but all have careers in Apple podcasts. We are, I think, as of today, number 78 on the charts. So thank you so much for making this a chart-topping Podcast by simply listening. Okay. Onto today’s episode, this is going to be a short and sweet episode, tying a little bow around website month for the last four episodes. I concentrated on the strategies that you can use to grow your real estate business using your own website. So I started out this series with a podcast called turning your website into a lead generating machine. Then I moved on to the five reasons that you aren’t getting leads and clients from your website and how to fix it. Then I did an episode about the two lead generators, the weight, like the two things you need on your website, a at a minimum to get leads and clients from your website. And then last but not least, I talked about, I had an episode on what you need to do to, after you get a lead from your website, which is follow up and how you can do a, have a complete follow-up system in as little as one email per week. And I explain how to do that. And so in today’s episode, I want to talk about something that comes up a lot. When I start talking to real estate agents about using their website, they say to me, okay, great. Sounds good. Sounds good. Well, how do I, what about SEO? How do I, how do I get my website to rank high on Google? And I, that’s not something that you need to be focusing on in the, the beginning of having a website that brings you leads and clients, and, and using your website to grow your real estate agent, your real estate business. I never, ever, ever, first of all, never, ever, ever pay for SEO for your website. And here is why. Because for a single Agent or a small team of agents like you and I, we will never win the battle of paying for SEO. There are big-name companies, billion dollar companies that are paying thousands and thousands of dollars per month, probably hundreds of thousands. I don’t know their budget, but it’s more money than we will ever spend for a month on trying to be the first on the first page of Google. And so you and I should not be competing with that because we will forever lose. So I don’t know about you, but at least once a week, I get a phone call from somebody who says, are you interested in having more leads and clients, a tool for your real estate business? Well, we can, we can show you how, you know, we can get you ranked on the first page of Google on all this stuff, right? So the reason the point of this episode is if you ever get those phone calls, or if you’re ever, you know, pitched the idea of paying somebody to increase your SEO, I implore you to decline, do not spend any time or energy, or, you know, you know, decision-making, you know, thought analysis don’t spend any time thinking about whether this is a way for you to get clients. I’m not saying it doesn’t work. I’m just saying it’s a very expensive way to try to win that battle of ending up where your clients are going to see you. But more than that, there are ways to drive traffic with SEO that are, are very beneficial, even more so than paying for traffic. You can do this organically for free, and I’ll give you a perfect example. You know, when I teach in agent grad school and how I built my a million dollar per year real estate business, how I became one of the top agents in the U S was to use my website and create content on my website, that organically brought traffic to my website. And so there’s an art and science to this, and I teach Agents how to do this insight agent Grad School. In fact, I even give it a template for the content that you can then, you know, change slightly and make it your own. And, you know, for example, this strategy works so much better than paid advertising or paid search engine optimization. Because just as an example, sometimes I will search something for our client, for example, how to become a landlord in Washington, DC and I put that in the search term because what I really actually wanted was the government entities website on a link on here are the steps to. And I thought it would just, you know, turn up first thing. Well, when I typed in how to become a landlord in Washington, DC, lo and behold, my link to my website was the first thing that came up on Google even before a post from the Washington post, even before the government entities own website that had the instructions. So that is how powerful organic SEO can be, because I don’t know that I could have paid to have that on my website show up. That’s just one example of one search term. And yes, that may not have led to any clients necessarily, but If, but, but I was able to get in front of landlords, people who are landlords and there’s other search terms that also, you know, I show up on. So there are ways to CR to increase your SEO for free. And for real estate agents that are solo, you know, entrepreneurs, solar, a solo Agents like you and me or small teams, we will never be able to have a big enough budget to win the war on paying for SEO, paying to be on the top. Now, organic SEO does take a little bit longer. It does take a little bit more creativity, a little bit more kind of thinking involved, but it’s free. And it’s in the search engines like organic traffic most. And so those are going to bump up to the very, very top and they’re going to have a square around them. And so they favor organic searches, even more than ads. And oftentimes they’ll, they’ll say that it’s an ad. So I’m not saying paying for SEO is doesn’t work. I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying I’m 100% works, and that’s why people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars doing it every single month. I’m just saying, it’s not an effective strategy. If you are a solo agent and don’t have such a huge budget, that’s Why, if you get those phone calls that, you know, I always get, and you’re probably getting them to, I want you to just confidently say thanks, but no thanks. That’s not a strategy that I plan on using in my real estate business. And then you can learn the strategies to create that same effect, that same result and your business, you know, without having to pay for it. So I know when it comes to websites, a big buzzword is SEO people are focused on SEO truly, there are ways to drive traffic organically without spending a lot of Money. And that is exactly what we teach inside agent grad school. So, although as of this recording, and as of whenever you hear this, we are not open for enrollment. We will be opening for a moment soon. So if you want to learn how to do this in your real estate business, go to agent grad school.com forward slash waitlist. And you can be notified when we open enrollment again. And we even give you a website to start all that looks like, you know, optimized. And all you have to do is plug in certain phrases that will help drive traffic and organic traffic to your website. So we can show you exactly how to do all this, but no matter what you do, whether you join a new grad school or not, please, please do not spend money. That is just truly a waste of time and money to try to end up on the first page of Google. And that’s really all I want you to walk away with on the short bonus episode. So this is the conclusion of our website month on our website series. And if you missed any of those episodes that I talked about earlier, go to Agent grad school.com forward slash Podcast, and you can listen to them again, but using a website is in my opinion, because it is my personal experience, the number one way to grow your real estate business, and truly have something that you can stand on a foundation in a place to have to drive people To over and over again, to answer that question, why should they choose you? Now? There is a specific strategy that works. So not just, just having a website, isn’t going to work. You have to know exactly what to put on your website, what to say, how to say it, what it needs to look like. And then after you finish it, actually how to drive traffic to it in an organic way and not pay thousands and thousands of dollars a month. That’s the other thing to be always thinking about as you’re starting to think about which marketing strategies that you want to use, really, I want you to also be, to be focused on what is scalable or what is something that I can maybe stop doing eventually. And so one reason I teach content marketing is because once you create content, you can use it over and over and over again. But if you’re paying for leads or paying for traffic or paying for SEO, what happens when you start paying, if you don’t have anything. So that’s not a scalable business, that’s not a sustainable independent business, because if you stop paying you stop getting clients. So instead of what I urge you to do is thinking about, think about marketing strategies and business strategies that grow your business that are scalable. And what that means is not spending more time or more money as your business grows to keep feeding it, but actually doing the exact opposite. Spend Money now, excuse me, since Spend time now investing into your business, creating content, creating articles, creating things that you can use over and over again, to drive business, to drive traffic. And then as your business grows, you’re actually spending less time and less money lead-generating. So there is a way to do that. There’s a framework that I teach on how exactly to do that. And the whole entire goal of marketing is to have clients coming to you, not you having to pay for them, but to organically have people say that real estate agent is for me and have them reaching out to you. That should be the goal here. So that’s what we teach you how to do here at agent grad school. I hope these last couple of weeks have given you just a little bit of a glimpse of how, of the website strategy, obviously on just a few episodes, I can’t necessarily kind of drill down into your exact business or, you know, all the little details, but my hope is that your starting to see the framework, how to use your website to generate leads and clients, and how to follow up with them and how you, what you should pay for it when it comes to your website, when you shouldn’t pay for, and how to the most important part when after you build the website is to drive traffic there. And SEO is one way to do that. There’s organic, there’s paid there’s other ways to drive traffic to your website and the more traffic that you keep driving to your website consistently, the more you’re going to wake up those search engines, and you’re going to the traffic will build more traffic coming to you, which will outperform paying for it every day of the week with the budget that, you know, a solo agents have like you and may not the big companies, the big companies, they’re going to spend a lot of money on SEO and they should, and they can, but NOT you and I, so don’t spend money on, SEO created yourself. You use content and drive traffic. So I look forward to seeing you next week on another episode of Confessions of a Top Producing Real Estate Agent thanks so much for being here. I just heard that w that this Podcast is now one of the top 100 Podcast and I really appreciate it. If you like this podcast, it would really help. It gets into the hands of other real estate agents. If you left a review, wherever you’re listening. So if you liked this podcast, I’d love for you to just spend a few minutes doing that. I read every single email that you send. I read every single one of your reviews, and I can’t thank you enough for listening, for telling your agent friends about this podcast and for coming back week after week. I hope this is helpful. Can’t wait to see you next week. On another episode of Confessions of a Top Producing Real Estate Agent see you then. Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode. Remember change happens when you take action. So apply what you learned today to your own real estate business. If this episode has helped you subscribe, leave a review and share it with all your real estate agent friends, and as always, if you want even more great resources to create the real estate business you’ve always wanted and have the life you want outside of your business, to head over to agent grad school.com and sign up for the free weekly trainings, you’ll get free classes, discounts, and other goodies that only go out to real estate agents on that email list. See you next week, right here on Confessions of a Top Producing Real Estate Agent the Agent Grad School Podcast.