Real Estate SEO

Posts Tagged ‘Blogging’

Are you one of those that thinks having your own blog is too much work and, well, what do I get from it anyway?

Here’s a list of reasons why you should have your own blog:

• It’s good for Real Estate SEO.
• Your blog should be part of your real estate website i.e. http://www.domain.com/blog.
• Blogs offer great link bait.
• Blogs attract visitors.
• Blogs will help generate leads.
• Having your blog as part of your own website (rather than only ActiveRain or Trulia) will give your site credit for inbound links.
• Inbound links are of a huge value in calculating Google’s PageRank.
• Blog posts will help your website rank for terms.
• Whether hosted through a blog platform or part of your website’s CMS each new blog post/article acts as a new page to your website, which means it’s new content added, and thus a new page to be crawled by search engines.
• You can write content and safe drafts and thus publish at a later date.
• You can have multiple people write for you, or someone else all together if writing is not your thing.

To sum it up, blogging = more fresh (optimized and relevant) content = more inbound links. All of which = more relevant traffic = more sharing, commenting and more links, and finally LEADS.  Remember: Anything that you put quality time into will give you quality results. Individuals now more than ever are jearning for trust and thus will do their research prior to buying…what a better way than through you blog to present yourself and/or your company.

Happy Blogging.

Ever wonder how some blogs seem to be cranking out posts every single day and you see their content everywhere. Part of the magic of Real Estate SEO is to share the best ways for you to leverage your web presence through your blog…and I’m going to let you in on something good…the secret is in the sauce.

Really though there is no mystique about it. What you have to do, if you want to have a successful blog, the main thing obviously is to write regularly, but, here’s the kicker, you need to be willing to share some of the ingredients to your secret sauce. Give people the inside scoop, share with them how things work…empower your readers.

I recently came across a great article that posed a whole bunch of questions that realtors can answer through their blog, these are just some of the ways that you can share your secrets (you should read the full post when you have time, but here’s a snippet):

Ideas on things to share with your readers…

1. About Me-Introduce yourself to the world by creating a biography for your blog. Include your experience level, education, accomplishments, affiliations, and interests. Tell visitors why they should choose you to buy or sell their home. This will sell you to potential clients so keep it professional!
2. How to Sell Your Home in a Buyer’s Market-HOT topic!
3. How to Convince a Seller to Accept Your Offer
4. Why You Should Hire a Real Estate Professional to Sell Your Home
5. What to Look for When Purchasing a Foreclosure or Short Sale-HOT topic!
6. Staging Your Home for a Speedy Sale
7. Why You Should Buy A Home Now in (enter your farm area here)
8. How to Price Your Home for a Quick Sale-HOT topic!
9. What is a Conventional Mortgage?
10. What To Avoid When Remodeling Your Home
11. What is an Adjustable Rate Mortgage?
12. Why You Need A Real Estate Professional To Buy A Home
13. How To Use A CMA: For Sellers
14. How To Use A CMA: For Buyers
15. The Closing Process: For Sellers
16. The Closing Process: For Buyers
17. What is a FHA-insured mortgage?
18. What You Should Know About (enter your farm area here)-go to www.bestplaces.net for statistics and information on your farm area
19. Why You Should Be Buying Instead of Renting
20. New Homes vs. Existing Homes-Which One Is Right For You?
21. 5 Things You Can Do Now To Increase Your Home’s Resale Value
22. Why Now Is The Best Time To Buy Real Estate in (enter your farm area here)
23. How Rising Foreclosure Rates Affect Your Home’s Value-HOT topic!
24. How To Choose The Right Home For You
25. Negotiating with a Seller in a Buyer’s Market-HOT topic!
26. Do You Qualify For A VA Mortgage?
27. How To Properly Prepare To Purchase A Home
28. How To Know How Much Home You Can Afford
29. How To Use Technology To Find Your New Home Now
30. How To Invest in (enter your farm area here) Real Estate

Real Estate Agent, Brokerage and Mortgage Blogs

Readers come to you for answers. You are the expert! So you need to position yourself as one. They come to you for guidance and to seek your opinion. Sharing the how to’s and answers to the what if’s (regularly) will make your blog a worthy investment and a great source for link bait to boot.

Are there any other questions you can think of? Let us know.

How many ways do you think Social Media can contribute to good real estate SEO? Jot down a list and then compare it to mine. If I left off any major ones, please let me know. Here goes:

1. Blogs are social media. Blogs only get read when there’s new content. New content helps your search engine placement.
2. You can syndicate your content (let’s say from your blog) to social media sites. You could even feed your real estate listings, by RSS to your twitter and Facebook profiles.
3. Many social media site pages are public. These pages are bound to have links back to your site. Linking will improve your SEO.
4. Social bookmarking links on your site will produce back links from those sites (Digg, Reddit, Stumble, etc.) to your site. Again, these links will improve your SEO, your rank, and bring you more traffic and more leads. Remember real estate buyer and seller leads are the goal, not just ranking!
5. Users spend a lot of time on Facebook, Twitter, and many other social media sites. The referral traffic will help you gain more visitors, more clients and sell more real estate.
6. Promotions have more power with social media. Post a promotion on your site, edit your PPC ads accordingly to drive clicks, broadcast the promotion to your Twitter followers, Facebook friends, and LinkedIn connections and watch your traffic spike.
7. Remember that real estate SEO is about leads and customers. What you care about isn’t always ranking but leads and real estate transactions that come from those leads. Use your analytics system, like Google analytics,  to look at the social media sites that are driving traffic and leads to your site. My money says that you’ll see a good conversion rate on this traffic.
8. Chatter on Facebook and Twitter can fuel your blog. Look at what the people are saying about your real estate market, your real estate business, even you as a real estate agent. You’re likely to get inspired and find a topic to blog about. Also, here’s another post about blogging inspiration that could be helpful.
9. Social media is all about linking and showing the world what you’re up to. As a result, your friends and followers are likely to check out the stuff that you’re pointing them to. So, engage your community, send them to your site - full of great resources and information - and they’ll convert into leads.

Ok, that about exhausts my list of how Social Media can improve your Real Estate SEO. I’m sure there are many others that I forgot, but I have to get back to SEOing a couple of sites today. I look forward to your additions to my list. Leave them as comments please. Thanks.

This is one of the top questions I get when we start a client out with a new blog. My answer is always the same, as long as you write with a purpose and bring across your point clearly your post can be as long or as brief as you want it to be. 

This of course depends on the type of blog that you manage. Is it tied to your business? If so, I recommend that you maintain a professional blog and keep the personal stories a minimum in which case all of your posts should have some kind of point to it. Thus, each blog post should have a few good, poignant paragraphs - and generally, don’t stress about it.

A few tips: go back to what you learned way, way back when. Hear that voice telling you, “Have a solid introduction, a body and a conclusion.” That gives you about three paragraphs right there. Make sure to include some links as references (if for instance a source is not well known, you will want to link to that site). You can also include an image or two (with the appropriate Alt Tag too of course). And voila, you are done!

Hope this helps take a little bit of pressure off your weekly to do list. Oh and look, three paragraphs and I made my point.

Happy blogging.

Answer this honestly: Are you hitting the wall when it comes to maintaining your blog? Are you standing out amongst your peers? Perhaps the creative juices aren’t flowing, or you are uninspired or maybe you are just starting out and simply do not get this blogging spiel … It comes down to this … Do you want to be found when people in your area are looking for real estate? What I am trying to impress upon you is that regardless of your interest, topic, or motivation etc. you must publish a post on a regular basis once your blog goes live because you have plenty to offer! If you want to create an online presence that will create visibility and leads for your business, you have to publish consistently.

Keep the following in mind:

• Through your blog, you can become a trusted and respected source of information on real estate.
• Your blog is a means of publishing more content and keeping your site fresh and up to date.
• Your real estate blog can become a means of connecting with your fans and establishing long term relationships (take that Dr. Phil).
• Your blog is a way to connect with your audience in order to market your business and services.
• Your blog is a gateway to nurturing potential customers who for now are either in the research stage or following you to see if you are the right fit for them.

By providing valuable insight into the business of real estate, your readers will come to see you as knowledgeable and experienced which will then cause them to choose you over your competition when it comes time for them to buy or sell their home. Many people who are not ready to engage in a sales process will subscribe to or bookmark your blog to stay informed about your industry. Think of it this way 57 million (and counting) Americans read blogs, 12 million American adults maintain their own blog, and over 120,000 new blogs are created daily (lots of competition) … and you are one among many.

So what makes you stand out?

Real Estate has the unique opportunity to be very geographically driven. That virtue knocks out a good portion of online competition. Take advantage of that. Your KEYWORDS should target your geographic location. And don’t use broad terms but (in most cases) State and/or market specific phrases.

Let’s take the keyword “Boston MA Real Estate” for example. As you know by now, the incorporation of your keywords is important (use convention where applicable and creativity when warranted) in the URL, Title, Header or Headline (your page’s H1 tag), and a few times throughout the body, and preferably at least once as a link to a relevant page/source. Your options are to use the phrase as Boston, Real Estate, Real Estate in Boston, Boston Real Estate, or Boston area Real Estate, etc. There are many different ways you can make known to readers and search engines that your post is “truly” about a stated topic.

The more relevant content you add via your blog, the more your site gets visited, and the better the search engine placement will be. But in the end, as that old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it incorporate keywords in its blog posts (or something like that).