About Performance Based SEO & Marketing

ABOUT US

Who is Danny Garcia

My name is Danny Garcia, I am the founder of PerformanceBasedSEO.org. This company has been, unbeknownst to me, in development for the last 15 years. I just realized the current version the last half of 2023.

I feel the about us page is one of the most important pages on any companies website, this is especially true when dealing with smaller business where the owner is involved in the day to day operations. This being the case I will share some information about myself, my family, my faith, and my experiences.

I am a 56 year old Christian man who has been married for over 20 years to my wonderful stay at home wife Kim. We live in Salisbury, NC a town outside of Charlotte. Kim and I have 2 adult daughters and a 10 year old son we adopted when he was 1. We also have our 17 year old "adopted nephew" living with us who we first met when we fostered him for the first 7 months of his life. His mom graciously has allowed us to continue being a part of his and his 8 brothers and sisters lives ever since.

I work full time from our home while my wife takes care of the family and homeschools our son.

Faith

I was "saved" and was born again shortly before meeting my wife 21 years ago, my first prayer was for a wife :). Although I was saved I didn't really change. Change didn't really start happening to me until maybe a year or so ago when I decided it was time to learn about Jesus and read the bible daily. Our family goes to a great little church in Charlotte on Sunday's and Wednesdays.

I do my best to keep a solid work/life balanced schedule by working M-F till about 5pm each day. I rarely work on Saturdays and almost never work on Sundays.

I went to some Catholic churches when I was a boy, didn't go to church as an adult until right after I was saved, My wife and I went to church sporadically throughout the years and started to go regularly for about the last 3 years. Although we were going to church on a regular basis there always seemed to be something missing.

A couple who once owned my house told us about a Christian teacher named Andrew Wommack and I started listening to him, after several hours I was hooked. We were soon led to a church in Charlotte NC who shared most of the same beliefs and we finally found our "home" church.

We believe the words in the bible. We believe Jesus died for our sins and was risen 3 days later. I believe God has led my business to this point so I can be prosperous myself and help other businesses see prosperity in their lives too. We don't believe in prosperity just to get rich, we want to be able to help and give wherever God directs us. We hope that by blessing businesses we will help them become a blessing to their employees as well as their communities.

Experience

I have been an entreprenuer for over 25 years. My first real crack at self employment was becoming a mortgage broker in 1999. I was laid off at my sales job with Sprint and decided to be a mortgage broker based on the advice of a broker who knew I had some credit repair knowledge and could help create my own customers by targeting people with bad credit, fixing their credit and turning them into homeowners.

One of the clients I was doing credit repair for referred her aunt to me. Her aunt was a real estate investor out of San Diego, CA she needed an emergency mortgage as she had an accidental late payment added to her credit just a week before she was supposed to close. I assisted her in fixing the item and soon closed her loan.

I enjoyed the completely different experience of working with real estate investors I decided to focus on providing investor loans only.

Soon after, I started to see a lot of success and my mortgage business was growing. In about 2007 I decided that I wanted to expand my business and explored the prospect of paying for search engine optimization services (SEO). I did some research and found a company that promised to get me on the top of Google for my main keyword "Investor Mortgage" in 2007 the cost to me for this service was $5,000 per month. Although this was a big number I understood the amount of traffic I could expect and I knew that my closing rate was pretty high. I was sure I could easily do at least $15,000 in sales monthly and I also know many of these investor clients would be repeat customers.

I said yes and told them to send me the paperwork. I reviewed the paperwork and noticed that there was a stipulation that wasn't discussed with me. The paperwork indicated that it would take about 10 months before my website was ranking and would get any calls.

I could not see a way to pay $50,000 (10 months at $5,000 per month) before getting any leads. I had no choice but to say no. I was terribly bummed out. Not being one to completely quit on an idea and knowing that I was pretty technically savvy I started reading books on how to get myself ranked on the first page of google myself.

I found a ton of stuff and started implementing everything I could. I then kept looking my website up for several weeks. After about a month of doing everything they said I did not see my site anywhere so I gave up thinking I was thankful that I didn't waste the $50,000 with the SEO company I almost hired. I was convinced it was a scam!

Fast forward about 5 months.... I'm still doing investor loans and now its early 2008, I had become the preferred mortgage broker of a large real estate investor group in San Diego and all was good. One day I get a call from a prospect who greeted me with a "Congratulations", I said thanks and asked why? He said he found me listed number ONE when he searched for "investor mortgage" on Google. I quickly checked it myself and there I was, Number 1 on Google! No wonder my calls were increasing, I knew I had more calls but for some reason thought they all came from the investor group and word of mouth.

I guess SEO wasn't a scam after all. I was very excited and got back to doing even more SEO for my Investor Mortgage Business.

While I was in the Mortgage Business I was doing well partially because of the SEO work but also in part because of a unique pricing model I created a couple of years earlier. It was a concept I called "Flat Fee Mortgage". Instead of my company getting a broker fee that was a percentage of the loan value, I instead offered a flat fee to do a loan. I didn't think it was fair that someone paid thousands more in fees just because the value of the home was more. There was absolutely no difference in the work involved. For the last 2 years of my mortgage business I prospered because of my innovative common sense pricing model.

Then came 2008......

In 2008 the entire mortgage market crashed, the very first type of loans to dissapear were loans to real estate investors. I was out of business pretty much overnight. (Good thing I didn't invest the $50,000 as nobody saw that coming) The lender I worked through filed bankruptcy without paying me on any of the closings I completed within the last 30 days. I was now broke and unemployed!

As I was trying to figure out what to do next a local real estate investor who knew I had a history of doing credit repair called me and wanted to open up a credit repair business and have me run it. He would finance the startup of the business. I not only did the credit repair but added the marketing for it as well. Within 9 months the company had a staff of 15 people and hit a million dollars in sales. This was achieved using the same SEO that I used with my mortgage business. I decided at that moment that SEO was some sort of secret superpower.

The partnership eventually had a falling out and we went our separate ways. I stayed in credit repair and started doing search engine optimization for others.

Innovation

I moved on to my own credit repair company in 2009, however I could now do it my way. In 2010 I innovated again by offering my credit repair customers the ability to pay for credit repair on a pay after deletion basis. They could now do credit repair on a based on my performance. They no longer had to pay monthly fees. I've been operating that business under the performance based model ever since.

While doing that I started offering my SEO service to businesses throughout the country. One of the first issues I noticed was that the practice of SEO was expensive to complete, now I know where the $5,000 per month came in. I remembered how bummed I was when I couldn't take advantage of SEO because of the ten month delay.

I wanted to offer clients a service that would help them succeed while at the same time allow them to get as fast of a return on investment as possible. I decided to offer a performance based program. There were others offering this type of pricing model but they were doing it completely wrong.

Problem 1 - No Tiered Pricing - Most companies who offered pay after ranking charged a large fee of $100 - $150 per keyword per month to get on the first page. The problem with that is a ranking near the bottom of the first page got very little traffic compared to the top of page one, many even charged starting on page 2.

Problem 2 - This didn't include Google Business Profile Optimization - GBP is rankings in the MAPs section, this is where most leads come from and that was a completely separate charge and was nevr done on performance based pricing.

Problem 3 - Cost per keyword was still very expensive and had limited success. This meant that ROI's were almost impossible to achieve. We discovered you needed to target several dozen keywords in order to get a good ROI.

2024 UPDATE

2024 has been a crazy year for SEO and Digital Marketing as a whole. Google has implemented a lot of changes that have decimated a huge portion of the industry. Here are just a few of the changes......

- Ranking Drop - Low Click Thru Rates - Number 1 Search Rankings are now showing up near the bottom of the page as Google has added a lot of features (known as feature snippets) to make life easier for their searchers. These features generally show up above the regular search results and as a result dropped the click through rates of companies that enjoyed a number 1 ranking. The exception were companies that had a lot of authority, they would many times show up in the "feature snippets" themselves and even above them. Small websites no longer had a chance to get traffic from popular keyword searches.

- Large Authoritative Websites Have a Huge Advantage - The first page, especially the top half of the first page is almost exclusively dominated by companies that have large to very large websites and a lot of "Authority". Large websites cost a lot the build, maintain, and update.

- GBP Proximity Issues and Reviews ARMs Race - The maps section is a Google feature and is still ranking pretty high but Google has recently limited the proximity where these listings show up to less than 1 mile away from the companies physical location, at the same time businesses who are ranking are having an ARMS race to get as many reviews as possible as reviews generally push up the rankings and is a huge ranking factor.

- Useful Content Update - Due to the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) Google has made changes regarding the quality and source of content. Website content must be put out by people who are proven subject matter experts, it is now harder and more expensive to get writers for website content, especially if now you need more pages on your website to become an authoritative website.

- Holistic Internet Footprint - In an effort to battle spam and AI Google is putting more weight of a companies overall online internet footprint. This means that in order to be successful with digital marketing you must have an active presence all throughout the internet.

As an innovator we have developed the solution, a solution that not only solves all the issues above but is also future proof. To cap it off we are able to still offer these services while doing the bulk of our fees on a performance based level. We even cover the bulk of the implementation costs ourselves.