In this episode, we talk to Seth Price, Managing Partner and CEO of BluShark Digital, about search engine optimization and when it makes sense for real estate agents to spend money on search marketing. Price takes us through the four factors that lead to optimization: 1) high quality content; 2) authoritative links; 3) the structure of your website; and 4) your local presence through Google My Business. When these four factors are strong, then you have a good shot at a high Google ranking. The goal is to show that you are the most authoritative through persuasive content, links from other people and a strong, robust local presence on Google. We also discuss maximizing the value of paid SEM.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Gayle Weiswasser:
Welcome to the Homesnap Snapshot, a podcast about digital marketing for real estate agents. Each episode, we talk to agents just like you, who are successfully using some type of digital marketing to build their brand. When it’s over, you’ll walk away with concrete ideas that you can use in your own marketing to help grow your business.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Today’s guest on the show is Seth Price, who is the managing partner and CEO of BluShark Digital. Seth, how are you?
Seth Price:
Doing great. Thanks for having me, Gayle.
Gayle Weiswasser:
I’m glad to have you. Seth and I go way back. We have a mutual friend who introduced us a long time ago and we have sort of circled each other professionally. But most importantly, we share a very strong bond, which is our deep abiding love of the Washington Nationals.
Seth Price:
It has been a fun run growing up a Yankee fan. It has been fun to have, I always had like a National League team, and when coming to DC, the Nats are just such a great, charismatic bunch that the access that you have in a smaller market like this has made it where you really feel like you know the players. Whereas growing up, they were always like… In New York, you never had access to the players, and the idea that they have Fan Fest here where you actually get to talk to and play games with them is kind of surreal.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Yeah, it’s awesome. You have some great season seats, too, which I believe I’ve seen you in before because I’ve sat near you. I’m going to date stamp this episode. I’ve been doing that since the pandemic started because things change so quickly that I find sometimes I record a show and then two months later when it airs it’s like, already seems outdated. So I’ll date stamp today as March 30th. We are one week and two days out from opening day, which is very exciting.
Seth Price:
And I feel very blessed that I was able to catch the Nats-Marlins in spring training in the pod so we had our, literally a third of a section to ourselves in the West Palm Beach stadium, and it was quite an experience.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Oh, nice. I had tickets to go to a game in West Palm on March 12th of last year, and it ended up being the last game that was played before they resumed in July. And I ended up not going because it was right before… Everything was closing down, and I was supposed to take my son with me and we were supposed to go to a meeting and the meeting got canceled and we ended up canceling the whole trip. And I’m still so sad about it, so I’m envious that you went this year. That’s great.
Gayle Weiswasser:
All right. So let’s talk a little bit about BluShark Digital. Seth is not in real estate so we have a nice, refreshing perspective today from somebody who is not within the industry, but he’s in an adjacent industry or at least an industry that I believe is similar in terms of how clients and practitioners find each other. So you work in, among many things, marketing lawyers. And because I think real estate is similar, that people choose lawyers in many ways through a similar process by which they may choose a real estate agent. Talk to us about BluShark Digital and what you do.
Seth Price:
Sure. I’ll take a step back, which was, I’m a lawyer by training and did the big law thing and went to New York to make my kazillions during the first dot-com bubble in the late ’90s. And I was a founding employer for something called USLaw.com, which is a precursor to what you may now know as like a LegalZoom or an Avvo, matching up consumers with legal information and eventually lawyers. Ahead of its time, the bubble burst, all the tens of millions of dollars that had been raised or was on the table was gone, and I had to reinvent myself. And a long-time buddy of mine, Dave Benowitz, who I went to college and law school with, he really wanted to practice law, and I really didn’t. So we decided to divide and conquer, and I built out the marketing operations side of our little two-person law firm, which over the last decade, we’ve grown to a 40-lawyer shop, DC, Maryland, Virginia and South Carolina, all consumer facing.
Seth Price:
You’re right, Gayle. This is a lot of similarities between real estate and the law in that we are consumer facing and that consumers in their time of need, whether they’ve been injured or arrested or need a will or whatever it is that they need, they’re figuring out what to do. And my digital agency, BluShark Digital, grew out. It was our in-house marketing team. I didn’t see anything I liked in the space doing it my way so I built my own marketing team, and that team is what now is BluShark Digital that represents 150 professional service people, primarily lawyers, but a whole bunch of people in other areas doing their marketing.
Seth Price:
And in fact, recently we started something, [HomeShark 00:04:26] Digital, for the home services space. Not necessarily real estate agents, and we’ll talk about that in a moment, but the idea is all of the different areas where people have the need, whether it be roofers or plumbers or HVAC or whatever it is, the idea it’s the same basic thought process that people go through. And the team at BluShark is really, really good at SEO optimization, which is sort of like, they may not have heard of you before, but when they see your website that gives you at least a shot at getting the business.
Gayle Weiswasser:
All right. Well, today we’re going to focus on SEO, and we’re going to talk about how SEO can help real estate agents build their businesses. So talk about generally, how do people search for professionals today? We all have, as consumers of anything from products to services, we have myriad options in front of us for how we can get recommendations, research products, research reputation, things like that. Specifically, what have you learned about lawyers and what would you conjecture about how people are finding real estate agents?
Seth Price:
Sure, and I’ll talk about lawyers and I think that’ll pivot into real estate agents. So with consumer facing lawyers, there’s a whole spectrum of different places. There are places, and I think that maybe the injury lawyer is probably very similar to a real estate agent, not in what they do with the sausage-making but in the idea that there are a lot of different ways you may get to a real estate agent or an injury lawyer. There are TV ads, there are print ads, you could ask your friends, you can do a search. And search is my passion, which is when somebody goes on Google with intent that says, “Hey, I’m moving to Austin. I need a realtor in Austin.” That is something that is actionable and can lead to a viable opportunity that turns into a client, and hopefully a lifetime client.
Seth Price:
And so when looking at a space, I’m always looking at, is search the right way to go? And in certain areas, if you were looking for something that’s in the B2B space, search doesn’t do as well because a lot of these connections come through word of mouth and speaking at conferences and thought leadership. But in the consumer space, search plays a component, and depending on a bunch of factors… So for instance, in the criminal space, if you’re a DUI lawyer, search is really, really important because people don’t want to talk to their friends and neighbors. They’re not checking on social, they don’t want to see their cache filled with different things. They’re doing a quick search, they’re finding a bunch of options and they’re making a decision.
Seth Price:
I think that realtors in general, in my experience, are somewhere in between in the sense that there are so many different ways for real estate agents to get business that search is a piece of it, but may not be the only way. And in certain areas and things we can talk about, it may be much more advantageous. And in certain areas it probably isn’t the first way to go, depending upon where you are with your agency or your practice and what resources you have, what the geography is, and what type of agent you are; commercial versus residential, et cetera. All of those go into play. And that in certain instances I could see search being really, really important. In certain instances, it wouldn’t be likely the place where you’d want to spend your first dollars of marketing effort.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Does search ever play like a secondary role where maybe people have gotten the name of an agent or they’ve heard of one or they’ve seen them in their feed or something, and then they go to search just to kind of confirm or get a second opinion?
Seth Price:
Absolutely. I see that all the time. And in fact, actually our good mutual friend, like Andrew [Herman’s 00:07:58] is a great example. He’s not making his livelihood on search. He’s known as one of the elite lawyers in his area of law, but if somebody gets his name on a short list and then they do their own independent search, it’s awesome if they were to find that as well. It’s an extra touch point. So I think with a realtor, you may go to your friends first, you may go to social first, you may go to a bunch of different places. And as you know, if you put something out in a Facebook group and say, “Hey, I need a real estate agent in this place,” you’re going to get a ton, especially in our hood, a ton of different options. But sometimes it’s overwhelming and people are like, “You know what? I’m going to go do my own search,” whether it’s in addition to, in front of, or sort of like as a reinforcing of things.
Seth Price:
And so to me, I want to be everywhere. That’s my attitude as the legal marketer, and I think that for, depending on resources… and I talk a lot about this when I speak publicly. In the legal space, I sort of have a philosophy that… Let me take one step back. Two types of Google search; there’s paid search where you’re paying for every click that you get, and there’s organic, quote, unquote, “free”, which is really anything but free. But you’re not paying per click; you have to pay somebody to optimize your page. And that’s what we do.
Seth Price:
So that for people who are deciding how to allocate their marketing budget, if it’s sort of a myriad of questions you ask yourself about where people are finding you, if search is a viable place, and depending on what the competition is of other people who are already doing it, you figure out, what would it take for us to buy clicks? Or what would it take to optimize the website to be found in front of other people? So that when somebody is searching, whether it’s as a first impression or whether it’s a reinforcing or a second opinion after getting friends’ and family’s recommendations, that it gives you the best chance of being highest up in the search engines being seen, and giving yourself a shot at that business.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Got it. Okay. So I think of many real estate agents as small business owners. I mean, they may be part of a larger brokerage, but generally they operate rather independently. They have smaller staffs or smaller teams or groups or whatever it is, so they’re really like a small business. So how much do you think the average small business owner, regardless of what profession they’re in, knows about SEO? How familiar are they with this very important aspect of their marketing?
Seth Price:
Probably not very. And I can tell you in 30 seconds, tell your audience in about 20, 30 seconds, what the four factors are. It’s not rocket science, it’s not a secret; Google will tell you. To do well in search engine optimization, it’s high-quality content, the words on the page. Authoritative links; votes or links from other websites pointing at your website to say “we trust this website”. This is authoritative. It is the coding or how your website is structured, not the look and feel. I assume you’re going to have a beautiful site that has an emotive feel that shows you’re a person in the community who’s going to help them get the house, but is this one that Google can crawl easily? Is it structured in a way that Google understands who you are and what you do?
Seth Price:
And then finally, there’s the local component and optimizing your Google My Business, which is free. Everybody has one. And that, as you mentioned, depending on your relationship with your brokerage and/or a larger organization that you’re under, you need to make sure that you are first easily found-able for referral business. You want to make sure that your name is found, and that’s usually pretty doable but not to be taken for granted, especially if it’s a more common name. And then secondarily, how do you then try to make sure that somebody who’s never heard of you before.
Seth Price:
That’s my goal, is if all four of those factors; if you’re working on content and links, the technical backend of your website and structure, as well as the Google My Business. When you optimize all of that, you have a chance that when somebody’s Googling and searching for an agent in a given area, that you will have a shot at that business. And that’s my passion.
Gayle Weiswasser:
So one thing I want to mention is that at Homesnap, we have a product Homesnap Pro+, and one of the features you get if you upgrade to Homesnap Pro+ is that we will apply for, create, optimize and maintain your Google business profile. So we will populate it with information about your recent transactions. We will pull in testimonials, and we’ll make sure that that content is current and fresh. So as Seth mentioned, it’s super important to have an active, vibrant, up to date with photo, everything, Google business profile. This is the information that comes up on the right rail of a Google search. And like you said, it is free to do, but it’s not always that easy to do. And at Homesnap, we make it very easy and then we provide an ongoing service of keeping it current. So I just want to throw that in there.
Seth Price:
No, no, absolutely. And look, the Google My Business, why that’s a great product is the Google My Business is Google’s real estate, and if they could, they’d never have people leave Google. You can now book a hotel room, book a flight. When you Google for a lawyer, you can look at reviews and see posts and watch videos never leaving the Google My Business. And then click on a phone number or send a form through that Google My Business; all of that’s there. So Google, look, they want to make money, they want it to be… have a great user experience so people don’t go to some other search engine. Not that there’s any real choices today, but they want that captive audience. So when you’re doing that, you’re essentially almost maintaining your own mini Google website for people.
Seth Price:
Within Google My Business, as you’re mentioning, uploading photos, uploading of videos, keeping your hours up to date, making sure that there are opportunities to use posts that disappear every seven days. You could put a different sort of community service message up or some special or some holiday greeting, whatever it is. If you utilize descriptions and posts, and take advantage of all of the different bells and whistles that are there, that’s the sort of fundamental beginnings of SEO. That allows you to have a fighting chance against everybody else. And frankly, for most people, it’s the optimization of the referral business in that… Look, there are a gazillion real estate agents in a market, and I’m looking at some friends of mine who have recently transitioned into this with the service economy down. A number of people have gone there, and these are well-entrenched people in the community.
Seth Price:
They’re not going to win any optimization contest and they just started to be in business, but when people go there, they want that aura that they are authoritative in what they do. And that’s what it sounds like your product does for pretty reasonable, is it gives you the opportunity to populate all of that. You’re never going to do it yourself. And so that, at least for these people who are starting out, and then as you progress, it’s sort of a fundamental baseline. And it allows, when somebody comes to you and looks at you, that somebody says, “Okay, this is a viable answer for what I want and who I need to solve my problem,” meaning buying or selling a house.
Seth Price:
And that’s what I see real estate agents in general, they’re so busy basically pounding the pavement, talking to people in the community, that this piece often gets overlooked. And it is so, so important to make sure that you take advantage of that Google real estate because not to have it is just a missed opportunity, in my opinion.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Yep. Absolutely. All right. So one of the things you said when I first asked you about SEO was, one of the cornerstones of having good SEO is providing good content. So talk about that content. Maybe if you can focus on the real estate side of it, but what is that type of content that you’re recommending people provide, produce, create, that is going to help their SEO?
Seth Price:
Right. So if you want to rank for SEO, great content is the start. And it’s sort of counterintuitive, because a lot of people who are real estate agents that are all referral-based, and they may advertise in the local, color, glossy magazines or however they’ve generated they’re raving horde of fans, they’re out there. And their websites are all emotive. It’s just beautiful photos of people holding hands. If you want to be found in the search engines, you have to provide Google with content showing what you do and where you do it. So the idea that you’re a realtor or a real estate agent or broker in X jurisdiction, and you cover these sub jurisdictions, that’s the game.
Seth Price:
And that to do that, you have to provide Google with written content of 500 words or more, is a best practice. And if you’re in a competitive market for your money landing pages, your sort of home page, you need to have something possibly 1,000 words or more. That’s the game we play. We play very competitive SEO where those phone calls are precious. And each of those phone calls can be turned into thousands of dollars of monetizable business, short term into potential even larger, lifetime value of a customer. And so everything that I focus on, and then if anybody who is serious about SEO, whether it be… in any area; it doesn’t have to be law. It could be real estate, it could be elective medicine. When you’re doing these different things, you need to be able to show Google this content, and not just one page of content but dozens of pages or hundreds of pages of content, in order to demonstrate digitally that you’re an authority.
Seth Price:
And that’s sort of the jump that… If you look at what SEO really is, in a way it’s digital PR. And that what we’re trying to demonstrate to Google is that you may know you’re great, and you may know that you’re the agent of agents and everybody loves you and knows you in the community, but if we can’t demonstrate that to the Google bot then it’s not going to show you the love in the search engine result pages, the SERPs, and you’re not going to end up high enough on the page to get meaningful search traffic. Not that you won’t have an amazing practice, but that’s the key.
Seth Price:
If you can demonstrate… again, I’ll use just Austin, because I had a friend early on who was doing a really good job of SEOing in that market. If you provide a ton of content about the Austin market and what goes on in a transaction and what the pitfalls are and what vendors you may want to consider, and articles about trends in the market; if you show Google through content that you are the most authoritative. And Google’s getting more and more sophisticated. Their algorithms and the linguists they’ve hired and the patents they’ve been obtaining have demonstrated they know more and more what that content represents. And they want to show that when somebody comes to a page looking for an Austin realtor, that the page they’re showing gives the best answers to people’s questions. And so it’s a combination of addressing what I’ll call the money terms, Austin real estate agent, as well as in-depth information on all the different subtopics that might be relevant.
Seth Price:
And one of the great ways to do that is by answering FAQs, or frequently asked questions, to create content. You know that every client that comes to you is going to have a dozen basic questions in some form or fashion. Everybody may have a subset. Somebody may ask three of those, somebody may ask five of them, but you know over time what your basic questions are. And taking what you know people are thinking and asking you when they see you in person and turning that into web content, such that when somebody searches for it, because you can be sure they’re asking you in person; they’re going to be Google searching for these questions to be answered. If you provide the best, most relevant answer in your area, that is what’s going to move the needle. And that’s what we focus on with higher level SEO.
Gayle Weiswasser:
All right. What about paid SEO? What is that?
Seth Price:
Well, paid search. It’s not paid SEO. I mean, paid SEO is hiring an agency, so there’s hiring an agency to do it versus building the content and links yourself. But paid search is buying of the Google ads. The ads are at the top and it’s an auction, so you can bid on ‘Austin real estate agent’ or any version thereof. You can bid on the different keywords, and so can all your competitors. And whoever bids the most, this is the first position, and depending on… they may show four different answers for any given search. And you’ll bid, and then you put together an ad. And depending on how many people click through on the ad and get to your page and get the answers they want, Google monitors all of that and increases your quality score. The higher the quality score of your ad and your ad campaign, the less you pay for each click.
Seth Price:
And so you want to make sure that you don’t just have like a one-page website populating a single ad, but rather… let’s go back to the Austin example. If you had, let’s say an ad for Austin relocation agent, something like that, that if you have a page of content that answers the question about what people need to know about a relocation for a corporate contract, what would they need to know; if you place a paid ad and it lands on a page that answers that question, the quality score for that will be higher and you’ll pay less for the clicks. And by paying less for clicks you end up with a better ROI overall, when you’re looking at what your cost per client or cost per call, whatever methodology you’re using. This is all about ROI to make you money. And so you’re pretty much looking for the different ways to get the cheapest, relevant clicks you can.
Seth Price:
So there’s paid search where you’re paying per click, and then there’s the organic side where you are creating and optimizing content and curating these links in order to be shown in the, quote, unquote, “free” part. The middle area is the 3-Pack where there’s a map usually, and they may show three results featuring the Google My Business that you guys help them fill out and populate. And right now, the sort of big talk of the town is the review section there, and that has been what’s really been moving the needle. Google’s been putting a lot of weight on those reviews, and I know that there are a gazillion places that realtors want to get reviews in different closed environments, but the group for… in the law, and then for certain, for people that are playing the search game, the Google reviews are everything for us.
Seth Price:
A little bit less so in realtor, but again, if you own a market with Google reviews, that is one way. You may not win other forums that are out there, but if you get Google reviews, add content, add links, manage your Google My Business, that is what pops and what has been really successful for our clients in the SEO area.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Okay. So let’s talk about social media, and how does a practitioner; legal, real estate, whatever, how does their… actually, I think this applies really much more to real estate than it does to law, which is so highly regulated. But how does a real estate agent’s social media platforms help hurt or otherwise affect their search ranking?
Seth Price:
Okay. So search ranking, generally, there’s not a ton of correlation except if you’re really, really good at social or you pay a lot, because social has the same two components, right? There’s your free social, where I see your personal Facebook and that gets pretty good range. But the moment that you take your personal out of the game and you have your own agency or brokerage Facebook page or Instagram page, those business accounts get almost zero love unless you pay to boost or advertise on them. So to answer your question, traffic from those social places and/or possibly reviews that you get on those social platforms that may be shown in a Google search ranking, it’s not as much of a ranking factor that I would be concerned about. It’s with those social platforms, how can you get more clicks, calls or contact forms? Is sort of the game that I’m always thinking about.
Seth Price:
And so if it is a business account, the only way for most people to move the needle is by paid social, just like the paid ads that Google has. That is what allows you to gain visibility. Your personal account, if you have a large circle of friends and Facebook allows up to 5,000 people, you can create a raving herd that will see your content. But it’s sort of a mixed bag because when I follow you on social, I love your posts because you’re always sort of like family, baseball, pictures, and other types of posts, but if everything you had was about your work and what promotion was being run, or buy, buy, buy, people aren’t going to get excited and they’re not going to like and share and do things with it.
Seth Price:
Even on the personal algorithm for Facebook, they’ll show a post to a handful of people. If nobody likes it, it’s not going to the rest of your friends. And so there’s always a balance, I find, between making sure that you have a strong herd and your friends that are out there, but just like they always said, that early analogy, it’s like a cocktail party. If you just talk about yourself, it’s not going to go very far. I think for most real estate agents, especially smaller ones, leveraging the juice that Google allows you with your personal profile… you’re not supposed to; if it’s a business, they’ll shut you down. But you get a certain amount of flexibility with your personal post that gets much greater reach rather than your business profile, which only really gets love if you boost and pay for it.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Okay. Last question about real estate, and this may be out of your comfort zone although I do think it has a corollary with law. So most agents work within a brokerage, and so they’ve got their broker brand and then they have their own personal local brand. Should they be doing anything to promote their brokerage? How do they achieve the right balance between which of those terms, which of those brands, which of those identities, they’re investing in?
Seth Price:
Great question. I think that for most people, it’s their personal brand that’s going to get them differentiated. Now it’s very tough because all of the big brokerages have big national practices, and a very authoritative website that may be hard to cut through the herd if you’re trying to optimize for local search, because if a national group, let’s say Compass, puts pages out on an authoritative website locally, that’s going to be tough for you to compete against. That said, I think the way to do it is to, in fact, with your brand. Now your brand may include the authoritative brokerage name with it, but that to me, if it’s my money, I want to push myself or my team because that, when the phone rings, makes you money. If somebody calls the national brokerage phone number, if it even exists, or fills out a form, you’re in a lottery probably to get that lead. I want every ounce of energy focused on that branding, that when it works it brings revenue back to you and your team, and not just hoping that it trickles down from corporate.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Got it. Okay. No, that’s super helpful. Okay. Well, we’re getting towards the end of the show. Anything else you want to add? I guess one thing, just maybe talk a little bit about how you work with your clients, and a little bit about BluShark and how agents can take advantage of that.
Seth Price:
Sure. And I would say I’m a terrible salesperson because I generally will want people to be successful. My attitude is that unless I can make somebody better off with me than without me, I don’t want to do business with them. And I say that with love, and I think that there are different levels or stages. If somebody’s starting out, just needs a website, cheap. Doesn’t matter if you’re optimizing it. You really just need somebody to basically give you a home that when somebody comes, there’s a picture of you and a phone number. Great. And very often your brokerage may even provide it. Awesome. Once you start doing revenue, not talking sales but revenue of $350,000, $400,000 plus, and you’re able to justify a marketing budget, is when I get excited about spending money on SEO. And I always say to people, “Have you done the things…” This is outside of law, where I know search is not the number one thing for realtors because there are so many different ways they can make money and get leads and make connections.
Seth Price:
And so I’m reticent to sort of say this, but assuming that you’re at the point with a marketing budget, my question to somebody would be, “Okay, is your jurisdiction one that is going to be searchable where there’s geography that you have a chance to win or own?” If you’re like one of many agents in the middle of New York City, it may be very different than hypothetically if you were, let’s say, in Albuquerque where there’s a finite number of agents and that you’re able to win a market and own it. And let’s say you can’t own Albuquerque but you’re in the DC market, and you say, “You know what? I’m going to become the Queen of Kensington,” and you’re going to be all things Kensington. Now it’s tough because you want to be able to still pick up the other suburbs in the area, but from a search point of view there are opportunities to pick up meaningful traffic if you focus on an area. Google will give you, especially with the 3-Pack, a surrounding area.
Seth Price:
So what I say to people is, “Think about what the objectives are, where you are in the business life cycle as far as marketing budget, and what your timeline was.” Just like we talked before, buying clicks gets you instant gratification, but the ROI is usually much lower. It’s very expensive and the money is up front. Whereas organic, it takes a while before it pops and you see any ROI, but once you’re authoritative in an area and if you build out your Google My Business and you put your reviews, that you’re able to sort of own an area geographically on Google, that to me ends up being gift that keeps on giving. It’s the stuff I love working with.
Seth Price:
And I generally see it with people who are more established with small teams that have the resources to start to do this, that the individuals don’t generally have the bandwidth to do this. But that as people have scaled and put people together and leveraged the work of many, those are the places that I have seen SEO in the real estate markets do really well, where it’s worth putting the effort in, in order to allow people to have that additional iron in the fire when it comes to opportunity to gain clients.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Got it. Okay. All right. Well, before I let you go, I’m going to ask you my trademark Snapshot question, which is, tell me about some apps on your phone that you’re using for productivity, for entertainment, for relaxation, that maybe our audience hasn’t heard of before.
Seth Price:
Well, I’m going to give you one that sort of… We like going to ball games, and you buy your tickets and you do all of that, and then you don’t really… the parking can be as much as the tickets or more. And I have been playing around… and for a while, but it’s just near and dear to my heart because I’m driving up to New York this week. That Parking Panda and SpotHero allowing you to get into parking spaces for a third or less of what they are. Maybe that brings the fact that I like saving money that much, it says more about me than not bringing up the calm app. But I find that I really hate paying $50 or $60 to park at Nats games, and when I pull into some place for $10, it’s a three-block walk away, it puts a smile on my face. So I’ll go with those today.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Okay. What did you say the names of them? You said them pretty fast.
Seth Price:
Parking Panda and SpotHero.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Got it.
Seth Price:
They may even be owned by the same corporation now, but two different apps where you put your address in that you’re going or an event. It’ll say… I remember I needed to do this for the World Series because it was so… MLB controlled the lots and they were $100 a spot by the stadium. Walking to the Safeway five blocks away, I think it was $12 for the night and it was the best money. And I think I had scooted over the rest of the way. But headed to New York, and SpotHero got me a spot for the minivan for five days at $125, when the hotel would have been $600. So anyway, that’s my heads up for the day.
Gayle Weiswasser:
So the app that I usually use… it’s now been so long since I’ve driven down to Nats Park and it’s really sad. Well, since I’ve really driven anywhere that needed a parking space. I’ve used ParkWhiz, which I think is a good one. And I know there’s other ones of them out there.
Seth Price:
When it first came out, Parking Panda now has these scans at the properties. Again, it’s all about… and it’s like anything else; you check a few of them. What I find eventually is that the markets have gotten that saturated where there’s… and there are days when you get huge deals and there are days when you get there and it’s the same exact price and they’ve charged you $1 service fee. So it’s not a panacea, but in places where it… going into cities. In real estate, agents sometimes do that. You may be the suburban agent, but you have to go meet somebody for coffee or lunch to sign them up, and rather than get a ticket, you need something. I find that having that on the phone readily available, knowing how to use it, makes it such that it really can save you a lot of money.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Got it. All right. Seth, it’s been great talking to you. Tell everybody where they can find you, and more about BluShark.
Seth Price:
Sure. We can be found at blusharkdigital; B-L-U, sharkdigital, dot com. My email is Seth@blusharkdigital, and don’t feel like you have to buy anything. If you want to talk SEO, I’m always willing to geek out and point you in the right direction. To me, it’s figuring out what’s right for a given… It’s almost more of a business consultancy, to figure out what is right for somebody at their stage of growth in their market, trying to get their type of client, and that it really varies. And that for a percentage of those people, search is really awesome, but for many people there are lots of other ways to acquire clients that probably come before search. But for those that are at the point where search works, happy to talk to any and all people about that.
Gayle Weiswasser:
I got to ask you, why did you leave the E out of the Blu?
Seth Price:
It’s a very good question. This actually comes back to a DC sports story. When I started the company, I just needed a name. And I always liked blue, like the color blue, and I liked spark, just like… there are a lot of dot-coms with spark in it. And I put those two together and was thrilled, and then a couple of months in, I got a cease and desist letter. And I called my IP lawyer friend and said, “What do I do?” And they said, “You could pay us $80,000 and then change the name, or you can just change the name now,” so I’m like, “okay.” and we were walking through the Caps-Sharks game, and it came upon us that we should be BluShark. I think it was probably, the URL was available, A. And B, it just seemed cool. So in the old days, wasn’t there an ad, ‘leave the last “s” off for savings’?
Gayle Weiswasser:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Seth Price:
And we could get the URL, and it seemed hipper to be B-L-U, Shark. I think that the Radisson has a line of really cool hotels, one of which I stayed in Amsterdam, which was Radisson Blu, B-L-U, and I just… and it’s cool.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Got it. Oh, good. I like it. I like that it has a DC element to it, too.
Seth Price:
Absolutely.
Gayle Weiswasser:
All right, Seth. Well, thanks for coming on. I appreciate it. I leave you with my wishes for a fantastic Nats season. Hopefully we’ll get one again.
Seth Price:
Yes, I can’t wait to be back in the ballpark. And I think that, based on what I saw them doing in spring training, I think it won’t be long before we’re back in the parks.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Yep. Looks like it. All right. Well, great talking to you. Have a good week.
Seth Price:
Thanks so much. Bye-bye.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Bye.
Gayle Weiswasser:
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