Real Estate SEO

Posts Tagged ‘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).

If you are not already among the many Realtors on Twitter then let me ask this, what’s keeping you? If you are on Twitter, are you posting regularly? Besides SEO experts, Realtors are among the highest proffessionals “micro-blogging” on Twitter.

Here’s why: it’s an easy account to set up, only 160 characters for your profile, though that seems to be a challenge for some, you can link to virtually anything or anyone, it drives traffic, establish a direct connect to your blog, and could generate leads…

I digress…

This post is actually meant to remind, nay urge, you to keep up with your writing.  Whether you are on Twitter, Active Rain, your own blog or any other forum for that matter, you have to stick to your guns! I know that we’ve said this before, we’ve even given you tips on things to write about.

The reason I bring up Twitter, again as I said there are lots of Realtors using it, is that I noticed that there is a large number of Realtors who join and then post once or twice, or otherwise only once every few weeks. Really, to gain more followers and potential leads you have to keep writing. If people see that you are genuinely connecting to the readers and/or followers then they will keep coming back, not to mention they will share what you write. And really what is the excuse, Twitter after all is a “micro” blog where each post only requires 140 characters. You can also download (most free, just google twitter applications) applications to your desktop or smartphone, just so you can twitter at your own convenience any time you want, from anywhere too.

If you follow us on Twitter we even give you tips on things you can talk about. Our tips don’t only apply to Twitter either. Tips such as: talked about a featured property, pose questions to your readers and/or yourself, give advice, neighborhood news, current events etc., can be practiced on any forum. So, give it a try, you never know unless you give it a try and stick to it.

I’ve read a few blogs out there say that successful blogging means NOT blogging daily. I’m gonna come right out and say it. I think that’s weak.

The reasons they give all center around running out of steam. Again, that’s weak. If you’re going to blog, do it whenever you can and as often as you want.

If you’re trying to achieve superior real estate seo, and you’re going to blog, do it when the inspiration comes. It could be twice today and then another post 3 days from now. I don’t much care when you blog, just make sure you do it regularly, blog about engaging interesting topics, and stay focussed.

Also, if you think that keeping your real estate blog current is going to be tough, get some help. Team up with someone who will write for you. Invite guest bloggers to write posts for you. Get a team of bloggers together and ask each of them to submit one post a week. If there are 7 of you, then all you need to do is blog once a week.

You’ve heard me say it before, If you’re going to blog, you have to be a writer. If you’re not someone who can come up with a few paragraphs on a regular basis, then your blog is a waste of time and money. If you want to achieve good real estate seo and blogging is part of your plan, then you need to be prepared to post content regularly. Someone does have to write it.

Lastly, if you’re in the real estate business and you work all day in this industry, you can’t really tell me that there’s nothing to write about. We write about real estate seo. If you think Real Estate SEO is a focussed topic and we might run out of things to talk about, you’re half right. There’s certainly a lot to write about. Our clients come to us with issues, we read other sites, blogs, newsletters, you name it. Also, we interact with real estate brokers and agents all day long. So, we always have new stuff to include in this real estate seo blog.

That’s about it. I know this has been a bit of a rant today. Sorry about that. I’ll probably write something more technical tomorrow. :O)

Dave