How Sell Direct Iowa Achieved a 10X ROI and Doubled Their Monthly Deal Volume with Strategic PPC & SEO
"Yeah, 800 dollars a deal. I'll buy as many as possible."
Sell Direct Iowa is a real estate investment company in Des Moines, founded by two locals who previously spent years in the automotive industry. After 12 years as a General Sales Manager at a Hyundai dealership, co-founder Matthew Young brought his sales expertise and digital marketing knowledge to real estate investing. The company buys houses for cash in any condition, offering flexible exit strategies including flips, buy-and-hold, novations, wholesale, wholetail, turnkey rentals, and in-house listings. Before working with us, Sell Direct Iowa relied only on cold calling and direct mail through a single marketing provider, generating 60-100 leads monthly and closing about 3-4 deals per month.
"Yeah, 800 dollars a deal. I'll buy as many as possible."
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THE CHALLENGE
Sell Direct Iowa faced critical obstacles preventing them from scaling past 3-4 deals per month:
- Zero digital presence: Their previous SEO provider stopped working without notice and pulled their website down entirely. Their Google Business Profile was suspended, eliminating any organic search visibility.
- Single-source dependency: They relied entirely on one vendor for cold calling and direct mail. While producing 60-100 leads monthly, they'd plateaued and needed new channels to scale.
- No PPC experience: Despite Matthew's automotive background where digital marketing drove the best ROI, they'd never run real estate PPC. When their existing provider offered PPC services, Matthew recognized they needed specialists: "If we're going to do PPC, we should do it with somebody that, that's what they do."
- Budget constraints: Operating on Profit First accounting with tight cash flow management, they needed to see clear, consistent ROI before committing significant marketing dollars.
"Our cost per contract right now is less than a 1,000 dollars. It's like 800 dollars, which is crazy. I think we have at least 60,000 dollars coming in this month. You guys are killing it...I'm pumped about it."
Matthew Young, Sell Direct Iowa
Co-Owner
at
Sell Direct Iowa
How we did it:
What We Did:
Google PPC Campaign
We set up dynamic landing pages that spoke directly to different seller situations - foreclosure, inherited properties, fast sales - with simple forms and advanced call tracking. We targeted a radius around their target markets and applied our proprietary bid strategies, refined from managing $117M+ in annual REI ad spend.
As we ran the campaign, we cut back on ad groups bringing in too many retail/listed leads and tested different landing page versions until we hit 15-20% conversion rates (beating the 12-17% industry standard). We kept budget use above 95% with steady lead flow. Monthly pipeline reviews showed Sell Direct Iowa converting at 3-4 leads per contract - far better than the industry average of 15-16 - with Matthew responding to leads in under 60 seconds.
Local SEO
We fixed their suspended Google Business Profile and built a natural backlink profile. Google Business Profile interactions jumped from 10 to 268 monthly (2,580% growth). Website traffic increased 65% from October to January. They went from ranking for 7 keywords on page one to 18+, with 60% organic engagement. This created a sustainable lead source that works alongside the paid ads.
The Results
Cost Per Contract
Traffic Growth in 3 months
Dominating the REI space with incredible results
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