Today during a quick lunch break, I found myself thinking about a topic, which started to really get me excited. As most of you know, search engine optimization is a big passion of mine and it’s something I’ve been exploring and working with for a number of years, so this thought has to do with this.
So many people think SEO is about writing special things on websites to make them appear in the no1 position on Google and other search engines, but there’s just so much more to it. However, I’m not really going to talk about how to go about ensuring that your website is optimized, but rather how you could use SEO results to buy property.
Think about this – You run a website about real estate, in which you discuss various areas and just a general over view of property in a specific town. You log into your Google Analytics and take a look at your most popular keywords and start to notice a trend. You optimize your website for these keywords and draw more traffic. One step further, you make sure these keywords are in a fairly competitive market – After working actively on your website for several months, you find that you’re indexed really well for say ‘rondebosch flat rental’ and each month which goes by, you see more and more traffic coming to your site. This is where you take that hard earned money, you invest it in property in Rondebosch and you flip your site into a rental site for your flat in Rondebosch. Now, you might have spent some hard earned money on this investment, but you’ve got the audience to up sell your flat to.
If the traffic you’ve been getting is very good, you can push your rental prices up nicely and you could make a great deal of money back on the investment all thanks to SEO!
You can apply this to almost any industry! Now, most people will say, but that’s just backwards isn’t it? Well, yes, it is, but before you invest an incredible amount of money on property, you have the chance to test the waters and the audience and somewhat secure your position. So it might be backwards, but you could end up saving yourself a big bundle of money.
There’s so much more to SEO than the average person thinks. Even people in industry who think they know the space, actually know so little. That said, I decided to write this as a thought piece more than anything else, as it got my mind thinking quite a bit about this and hopefully it will strike up an interesting conversation around SEO, which doesn’t revolve around backlinks, anchor text and all the usual hogwash.
Very interesting point you make, I have never considered using SEO in this way to make money out of property. To a certain extent this is how many people making money from blogs got started. They didn’t start a site trying to make money, they only started making money from their site once they had the traffic and the audience. And the great thing about this is that this is how Google and the other search engines WANTS it to work. You don’t have to trick them into ranking your pages higher, or do something unscrupulous. All you need is patience and to put it some work to get the audience to your site.
Very interesting post indeed – this could possibly also work with the stocks / financial markets perhaps?
Great post Chris, and awesome idea!
mmm..you thought quite a lot during your “quick lunch break” I must say! :)
@Johann – Ye mate, it’s a way left field way of looking at SEO and when the thought came to me, my mind started racing, I almost fell of my chair :) I do agree, if Google could actually advocate this approach aposed to the typical approach, they might see an even bigger increase in usage. For me, it’s just another way of putting information about SEO out there into the world to educate the masses on just how important and useful it can be. This could be applied to any industry, property was just rather easy to use as an example.
@Rox – Absolutely, I think it’s limitless to be honest, it could be applied to any industry. What’s interested as well is a big website, which has wide topics, such as iMod, gather incredibly interesting stats and these stats I can actually use to see which markets are thriving the most – that’s nothing new, but it’s a little more interesting now that I came across this somewhat backward way of thinking.
@Louise – To be honest, this came to me and within literally 5 minutes, so many thoughts raced through my mind that I had to basically put it aside and wait until the calm of the evening to explore it again. Was interesting :)