Cracking the SEO Code: How Commercial Real Estate Brokers Can Rank in 2025

Aviva (00:22)
week's listener of the week is CX.

CX. Thank you so much for leaving us a five star review. And for those of you listening, if you leave us a five star review below, you might be next week's listener of the week, week, week. This week on Commercial Real Estate Secrets, we have Travis Bliffen. Travis is the CEO of Stellar SEO. Travis, thank you for being on the show today.

Travis Bliffen (00:52)
Yes, thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Aviva (00:55)
Yeah. Travis, can you tell the listeners who you are, what you do, and why we are here today?

Travis Bliffen (01:02)
Yeah, so as you mentioned, I'm the founder of Stellar SEO. We've been around since 2012 and we do search engine optimization. For those of you not familiar with that, it's just a marketing channel we use pretty effectively to generate leads online. And I'm sure we'll go into that more in a minute, but that's the 30 second overview of myself.

Aviva (01:25)
And you specialize in real estate exclusively, correct?

Travis Bliffen (01:29)
So we do a few related industries. So we do real estate, finance, and legal. And it just so happens there's a decent overlap with those three fields. So like real estate finance or real estate legal, and we do personal injury, but a big focus in the real estate market, especially mortgage brokers, that kind of stuff. So we're super familiar with the industry overall.

Aviva (01:54)
So for the listener who doesn't know what SEO is, can you give a fifth-grader explanation as to what SEO is?

Travis Bliffen (02:03)
Yeah, so basically you go to Google, you search for something, you're gonna see a few things, paid ads at the very top. Below that, you might see a map pack, so you're gonna see three businesses with reviews, that's local SEO. And then anything you see below that until you get to the ads is an organic SEO result.

And so people hire us so that they can show up more commonly for frequent terms people use whenever they're going to search for the solution to a problem, or if they're at the very bottom of the funnel, if they're looking for a particular service or product to resolve the problem.

And so that's really what we do is we improve the visibility of people with a target audience, which is fairly exclusive to inbound marketing versus some outbound stuff. So that's why it's taken off like crazy and will be around for a long time.

Aviva (02:54)
So why is SEO important in 2024?

Travis Bliffen (02:59)
Yeah, so the big thing is there's a lot of noise everywhere you go, right? Facebook, social media, people get blind to ads sometimes, and there are very creative ads that break through and they work out really well, but it's also about the timing. So what makes SEO really important is if I go to Google and I do a search for something related and you show up, the timing's always right. Whereas if you catch me with a call, you catch me with an ad, whatever, maybe it's not the right time, and so you have the great message, you have the perfect solution, but I'm just not really

in the mood to hear about it. And so that's kind of the key distinction with SEO and why it's important is because you reach people in a very, very busy world at the right time because that's when they've set aside time to find it. Beyond that, of course, it's important because it's a great way to produce revenue for your business, get a good ROI, business continues to grow. Us, for example, we're in our 12th year in business. We were still on the 5,000 list this year. We grew 137 % over

the past 36 months and so it works now, it works in the beginning and it continues as you continue to expand your presence. So it's very effective and it's very targeted. So that's why I think it's important.

Aviva (04:15)
So a common misconception with SEO is that you like start and it works like that. What are the timeframes you're seeing with your SEO efforts right now?

Travis Bliffen (04:23)
Yeah.

Yep, so first I'll add one thing to your common misconception. The other one that we hear from people all the time is two really big questions. How long is this going to take to work? people use paid ads. And so they're used to, I'll spend $100. I see I made $110, so let me scale that up.

So they come to SEO sometimes with the mindset, let me test SEO out and then if it works, I'll spend more money. Well, the bad news is if you could spend less money and it worked, you wouldn't need to spend more money, right? There's no reason to do that. So there's a certain amount that you have to do to be successful with SEO. And that's what a lot of SEO companies don't really tell you. And that's why these timelines are very hard to pin down. And sometimes it's never, right?

If you look at very broadly, you talk to an SEO agency, they don't tell you exactly what you need to do, and they say on average, SEO takes six to 12 months to work. And why would they do that? Because then you can pay them for six to 12 months, you realize that you wasted your money, and now you move on to a new agency, and in the meantime, they replaced you in the last three months of your contract. So that's, it's a business model for agencies, which I hate.

So the way that we answer your question, because it's the most common one that we get and it is answerable, is we break SEO into two things. We have a campaign, but the first thing we do is an audit and roadmap. So a lot of SEO agencies, throw out, we will give free audits, free audits, free audits. That's their offer. We actually charge for those, right? Because we're pulling the audit, but we're building a roadmap.

The reason why is because we can then look at it and say, okay, here's what you wanted to accomplish. Here's who's already accomplished it. Here are the exact things that you do not have that everybody else has who's accomplished what you want to. And here's how much that costs. And so then we know we're working towards a very fixed goal. And with that, know, here's how much it costs to accomplish this. And then your monthly budget determines the timeline.

So if it costs and you said, okay, let's do that in five months, or you said, let's do that in 12 months, that's going to impact it because there's a certain amount of work we have to do. And once we do the work, we can expect to see the payoff of it. So that's why it's not as cut and dry as people would have you believe.

Aviva (06:54)
So what's an average budget for a commercial or for a real estate agency or brokerage or broker that they should expect with a company? Yeah.

Travis Bliffen (07:03)
It's really, it's all over

the place depending on your location and how aggressive you want to be as well. Right? So you could be $2,500 per month, or you could be in excess of $100,000 per month. And there's campaigns if you look at major like Tick Nerd Wallet, right? They have a multi-million dollar content marketing plan that's a part of their overall ICO plan.

So there's a very broad range. That's the second part of why we do the audit and the roadmap actually is because we want to figure out if you're going to make any money. Like you can hire us, we can rank stuff all day. It doesn't mean you're going to make any money. And if you're not going to make money, there's what's the point unless you have some other point. But if you're a business, you generally want to make money. So that's the other part we look at in the beginning is, okay, based on your competition, we think it would cost this many dollars.

But based off of the math, click-through rates, average conversion rate, customer lifetime value, we know that it will produce this much money. So there's either gonna be a return there or not. That's why certain industries work really well. Real estate, commercial real estate investors, mortgage brokers, it's hard to mess up a campaign if you successfully rank the things that you should because there's generally a good margin there. We bought last year, last November, we just bought, we invested

in the house, it had been on the market for a while, they weren't able to sell it. As soon as we bought it and closed on it, there was about $180,000 in equity. We just got a great deal on the house because they couldn't sell it and they had to get out, right? And so if I had paid an SEO company 60 grand or $70,000 and they brought that to me, I've doubled my money, you I'd be pretty happy with it. But if I, you know, I paid him 180,000 and I only made 90, 90 would be very high. So that's why it's

not as cut and dry on the price. There's a minimum amount you have to do based on your competitors. And that's what we uncover with the audit roadmap part. But beyond that, you can also start to then push the boundaries. Do you want to go and do things that they haven't done yet and continue to be aggressive? And so we look at it as we can rank anything in any industry, but should we do it? That's the important question, because sometimes it makes money and sometimes it doesn't. Reason why somebody may be better at monetizing something than you are.

And so if they can monetize it for double the value, they can spend twice as much as you and still see a good return. And that's the biggest thing. Also, I feel in general, lot of SEO companies don't want to tell you that part of it because it tends to get into the weeds a little bit. But that's how we look at it. And that's why it is such a broad range. And we have clients literally on both ends of the spectrum.

with that. it's very much about your competition, about your situation, and about putting together something that accomplishes what you want it to. Because if it can't do that, you might as well spend the money somewhere else that can.

Aviva (10:03)
Alrighty, let's get into it. I own a small but mighty commercial real estate brokerage where we only transact warehouses in the Denver metro area. Okay, we transact in Colorado warehouses. I have built our company off of online marketing very successfully. I struggle with SEO.

Travis Bliffen (10:20)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Aviva (10:31)
And when I type in commercial real estate broker Denver, industrial real estate broker Denver, I see the big companies come up, but then I see a few local shops rank really high.

Travis Bliffen (10:45)
Mm-hmm.

Aviva (10:47)
am having a hard time. You know, I've hired SEO companies, I've fired SEO companies. I'm not doing any SEO right now. What am I doing wrong? And how do I rank in the top three? Because I want it bad.

Travis Bliffen (11:05)
Yeah, did you start with a free audit and then pay a retainer with no clear plan by chance? That's 90 % of the time.

Aviva (11:10)
Probably.

Travis Bliffen (11:14)
So there's a couple of things there. One, it comes down to keyword selection, right? So you have the broad ones, you may say commercial real estate broker, but there can be sub keywords of that, which are more friendly to smaller websites that will also have a high value. And so that's probably the first thing that may have went wrong is they either didn't look far enough into the keywords to figure out which ones other local sites were able to rank for versus only large websites,

or part two is they found the right keywords, but then they skipped that part where they explained to you what was happening between the large websites and the smaller websites. And that's probably the missing part of the SEO puzzle there is they didn't want to scare you off. So they didn't say, here's what may happen. It may not happen. You may be able to rank faster, but we like to average everything out. We like to use numbers as much as we can. And so when I say that, I mean everything.

number of links, amount of content, content length, anchor text ratios, everything is based off of averages and numbers and stats because it helps us establish a range. And we've just found that to be really effective over the years. And every time any industry, you go to an industry you've never worked in, you still pull out the averages and you're able to come up with a plan that's pretty accurate and that it works. So I'd say that that's where it went wrong. Now there could be other things without knowing, you know, do those other people have a storefront location

Aviva (12:25)
Sure.

Travis Bliffen (12:45)
and maybe you have a service area or you only do online. There's a lot of small things there that would also impact your ability to rank, whether it's organic or it's local, two different set of ranking factors there as well. So it would be hard to say exactly what happened, but I'd say month one in the strategy part is when your SEO plan failed. That's when most SEO plans sink or swim is when they make the plan. And the rest of the time you're just waiting to find out whether or not you got it right.

Aviva (13:12)
up.

That's so funny. Can you explain to the listeners when I say top three, you know what I'm talking about. But if somebody doesn't know what I'm talking about, what's top three and why is it so important in relation to SEO?

Travis Bliffen (13:29)
Yeah, so top three could either be, again, going back to the map pack. It could be those three listings, or it could be the top three below the map pack.

So it basically be the top three of either that isn't paid ads. The reason it's important is because click-through rates, the amount of people who actually click on your website, goes down very sharply. Position one may get 30 to 40 % of clicks, whereas position three may drop all the way down to 18 to 20%. And there's various stats around there, but basically you could see about a 50 % reduction between position one and three. And so...

One of our favorite things is when people come to us and say, how long will it take to see some results? And they have a bunch of keywords, say in the top five, but they're not in spot one or two, you move those up a few spots and you're really off to the races with that. So to go back to that question a little bit, your starting situation will have a big impact on timeline as well for that very reason. If all of your keywords ranked number four and we only had to move them up one spot.

Aviva (14:07)
crazy.

Travis Bliffen (14:31)
a couple months and you're going to see a big improvement versus somebody who has to go through the entire process start to finish and then get them into the top three. But yeah, the top three by and large, the clicks will go there. If you get a really high search volume term, you will see traffic a little further down the page. But I've seen it to the extent where position five versus position one was close to three X and it was a really high volume term DSCR loans. So about

50,000 searches a month and the click-through rate was roughly tripled between position five and one.

Aviva (15:08)
Wow. So what are other ways besides hiring an SEO company that a small or medium sized commercial real estate broker could do? What are the steps that a commercial real estate broker could do to increase their SEO before they come to you to just smooth out a whole package?

Travis Bliffen (15:29)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so basically the biggest thing with SEO is looking at what's already there. Google says a lot of stuff and most of it doesn't really matter. Sometimes it does if you get yourself in trouble, but you really sometimes have to be pretty egregious in your efforts to get penalized.

It's about looking at your competitors. So if you have your site and you have three other people, just even without a really deep understanding of SEO, click through the website. What pages do they have? What are they talking about in their blog section or resources section? What kind of questions are they answering? And then look further at that. If they're answering a question, is it a couple of paragraphs? Is it 2000 words long? Did they include a bunch of resources or statistics? Have they curated firsthand data? What are they actually doing?

to be successful and can you go and replicate that yourself? And if you have the time and effort, you can do a lot of those things yourself. You just, you take extra time. It's kind of like developing real estate. I'm not a real estate developer, but from what I gather, it takes about forever to get the land flattened and ready. And then as soon as they pour the foundation, the whole house is up in like three days. So the same thing with SEO, right? Very similar. You need to spend a lot of time mapping

Aviva (16:50)
Hmm.

Travis Bliffen (16:52)
out exactly what you're going to do and planning and then once you do that the rest of it can come together pretty quickly. And so you break it down but that's what I would do of course if you're not familiar at all with ICO you need to go online you need to read read free resources look at stuff but keep in mind it really comes down to your your industry because there's going to be a lot of advice that's not bad advice and in some industries it's the perfect advice.

But in your case, it may not work. A simple example of this is anchor text ratios. So 10 years ago, Google decided if you over-optimized your anchor text profile, we're not going to rank you anymore. That's what happened with the 2011, 2012 updates. Before, if you wanted to rank for red shoes, every anchor text to your website should say red shoes. Google flipped the search and said, no, no, that doesn't seem right. Now we're going to just crash all those sites, and we need to see diversity. So for 10 years, 12

Aviva (17:40)
Hmph.

Travis Bliffen (17:49)
years now, the answer has been you have to have diversified anchor text, don't over optimize, could be bad. If you go to some local markets and you look, their anchor text profile is insanely over optimized, 60, 70 % all the sites that rank. Now, if you tried that in the wrong industry, you would be in big trouble. But in some cases, it's literally the only way to accomplish it for a small business is you need to replicate what's there.

So it's about just be as granular as you can with everything that has to do with your website and start checking them off. Whichever ones you can check off yourself, do those first.

Aviva (18:31)
Let me ask you, with Google rolling out the AI platform, what does the future of SEO look like?

Travis Bliffen (18:41)
So I don't think it's going to change quite as much as you it. So AI sounds really fun.

Okay, but if you look at the AI overview, a lot of what they're doing is they're just pulling the answers from high authority websites. So the future of AI for now is just go and get published on high authority sites and there's a good likelihood that will get pulled into the AI overview. We actually, a growing lead source that we have, which is very funny because it tracks the source for all the leads we have is chat GPT.

And so what they're doing is they're finding us listed on third party list of being the best at various things. And then it's just pulling those in because it's an authoritative site like Clutch or one of those sites. And then they're contacting us. So it's in the future, AI may really be AI, but right now it's more so data. It's a really advanced version of scraping and rewriting the original things. And you can tell by those links that they put there, like it's not, they're not doing a

Aviva (19:27)
Hmph.

Yeah.

Travis Bliffen (19:44)
really good job of surfacing hidden magic. They're just pulling from authority sites. And so I don't see how they'll change that a lot either. Because if you think about it, say they want to give AI results in medical. Are you going to trust a site that you've never heard of, or are they probably going to go and want to show results from the Mayo Clinic or one of those other more trusted sources? a lot of that will be same thing. If you're in commercial real estate, Google all the things you can think of, look at the site links and see if you notice

the trends, you may see these are all sites I could go and get listed on. So even before my own SEO takes off, I'm able to get listed on this site and I'm probably going to start showing up in the AI overview. So I think we've got a while before there's a major, major change because it's, you know, it's just not as advanced as it sounds. lot of it. Now, don't get me wrong, it's very advanced, but for the trivial part of it, they're just pulling authority sites for now.

Aviva (20:36)
sure.

Travis Bliffen (20:42)
by and large. There's exceptions to that.

Aviva (20:46)
It's so cool. think I am so jazzed up about the internet and the intersection with commercial real estate. But obviously if you're listening to this, you know that and clearly Travis, you get it. Cause you're a guest on the show. Travis, what makes you happy with what you do in real estate SEO in your day today?

Travis Bliffen (21:14)
Yeah, so two things I like on a personal level, like being very selfish.

I like that it's an ever evolving industry. So every day I get to play detective a little bit to figure out what's changed, what's going on, what's happening. And so it's not gotten boring in all of this time. You know, and of course now running the company as the CEO versus when I started the company, it was a one person company. So I don't know if you would call it a company at that point. So as that evolved, I really enjoyed that. So problem solving, it keeps things very interesting. And that's my selfish joy of

it. On the flip side of that, course, we have had big businesses, they're general, okay, we have had small clients come to us, and they have a problem, they got a bad SEO agency, like it really was very damaging to them. And one comes to mind, they had a charter boat in the Virgin Islands. And so they had hired another SEO company, they lost all of their rankings. Like it was bad, like they were about to have to sell the boat, that was their main source of income, like it was a bad deal. And it was, it was a small project that

generally wouldn't take on, but I felt horrible for the people. And so I said, okay, look, we're going to do an audit and that's it. We're going to tell you what to fix. You can fix it yourself and your problem will be solved. And so we did, we did the full audit form. gave them very detailed directions. We gave it back to them. We never touched their website again. And they've just implemented everything we told them to. And they've got their rankings back in the area. So now the income's back. Whole thing is, is back. So those things, a second one, a real estate investor.

came to us, he got his site penalized during the helpful content update last year. Right? So his traffic, his leads plummeted. It's him and his father, smaller company scenario there as well. And he had lost all of his traffic. He hired us to recover the penalty. And we actually were able to do that once Google rolled out. We revised his entire website. Google rolled out their updates a month or two ago. And his traffic is higher than it's ever been historically. And so those ones I like because it

really makes a big impact. Whereas a very large company, it makes an impact and it's safe job it does. But sometimes on the very personal level connection, you can see like this, if they chose us versus somebody else, they could have a completely different life on the other side of this because of their decision. And so that really is very powerful when you're able to pull that out for people like that.

Aviva (23:48)
Amazing. Travis, where can the listeners find you, follow you, contact you, etc.

Travis Bliffen (23:55)
Yeah, so to contact us, just go to StellarSEO.com. It's hard not to find a way to contact us once you're there.

I'm only really active on LinkedIn. So LinkedIn, forward slash Travis Bliffen, pretty straightforward. There you can find me. But yeah, definitely check out our site, our blog. We have a lot of good information on there. So if you are at this stage, especially where you want to try to do it yourself, the information that we have on our blog is based on firsthand experience and less on theory. So you will really be able to take that and implement it. Because a lot of it I've produced myself where I've helped with the production of.

And so I know for sure that it's stuff that works because we use it ourselves. So definitely check that out. It won't be a waste of time.

Aviva (24:45)
Travis, we really appreciate you on Commercial Real Estate Secrets and for everybody listening, we'll see you next week.