Real Estate SEO

Posts Tagged ‘real estate blogging’

Overcoming blogger’s block.

I’ve been working at Boston Logic now for 2 months, 2 days, 16 hours, and 57 minutes.  As an online marketer, blogging is a part of my job. I know I need to do it.  I know I can do it…but what should I write? There are over 171,476 words in the English language (I Googled it), and it feels like there is  no original combination left.

I know I’m not alone out there. There are real estate professionals all over saying, “yeah yeah I know I should start a  blog”‘ or “yeah yeah I know I need to blog more”, but what’s stopping us? We’re busy, we’re unsure, and maybe we’re afraid. I’m not talking Robert DeNiro on your houseboat fear, but maybe just fear of commitment.  Fear of needing to write something every week.

We talk a lot about WHY blogging is important for real estate online marketing and what to do to optimize our existing real estate blog.

But what about HOW? How do we get over that fear. My suggestion—let go.

Write from your phone when you’re on the bus. Write from Starbucks. Write whenever you’re thinking about something. This morning on the bus with my coffee I thought—gees why haven’t I blogged yet? And look…a blog post.

Write after you show a listing and talk about the questions asked. Write after you read an industry article that gets you thinking.

Don’t spend 2 months, 2 days, 16 hours, and 57 minutes worrying about HOW. Just do. Your keywords and links will find there way in if you write about what you know—your neighborhood,  your business, your industry.

We’re in this together, so let go and let me know what you think.

Real Estate offices are, all too often, made up of agents who are in competition with one another. The reason for this is quite basic really. The compensation structure of most offices doesn’t foster team work.

But, without changing the way your entire office works, I want to give you some suggestions on how each member of your team can put in a little work each month to help your office website rank better in the search engines. If you have the right systems setup, then you’ll see more leads for everyone.

1. Make sure there’s at least one link on your real estate agent site to your real estate office’s site.  Inbound linking is very helpful when you’re trying to SEO a site. The best links for your real estate seo will be from other real estate websites to your site.
   1. Make sure the link is HTML text and not an image.
   2. Compose the text of the link carefully. If you practice real estate in Newport, then the text of the link should read “Newport Real Estate” or “Newport Homes.” If you practice in Boston, then the link might read “Boston Real Estate”  or “Boston Condos.” Choose terms for which you’d like your office site to appear higher in the search engine results and make that the text in the link.
2. Start an office blog and divvy up the writing assignments. The average real estate office in the USA has 10 agents working in it. If each agent writes a post every other month, then your blog will be well populated before you know it and you’ll start to see reader traffic, comments, and leads. Here are some tips on how to make that blog engaging. Also, if you didn’t know that blogging was good for real estate SEO, there are plenty of posts on this blog that will explain why and how to do it better.
3. Each agent in your office should use social bookmarking websites to promote your site and each post to your blog. Every real estate agent and even the admins in your office should learn how to use StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, and other social bookmarking sites. When a new post goes up, a few members of your staff should bookmark each post on each of these sites. This should take no more than a couple of minutes. Have a look at the bottom of this post and you’ll see links to lots of social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking will bring referral traffic to your site and the backlinks will help your search engine ranking.
4. Make sure every agent in your office has accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Linked In. Make sure the office has a page on these sites too and that you’re all fans of or connected to the office page. If you don’t know how that works or if the last sentence I wrote makes no sense to you, you need to learn more about social media sites. Call Boston Logic immediately. Social networking sites are a great source of referral traffic, don’t miss out on these visitors!
5. Aggregate email lists. Make sure the office is sending out a newsletter at least once a month. The content can be pulled from or at least reused on the blog you’re going to start.

Ok, these are all simple SEO tasks that just about any agent in your office should be able to do. If you’re reading this post and thinking how great it would be to get the whole office behind an effort like this, just remember that people love to follow leadership. Be the leader in your real estate office who starts the organic SEO effort. Your colleagues will thank you.

Have a great weekend.

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).

It happens to the best bloggers. Sometimes, you just don’t know what to write about. The first rule of blogging is that you should be creating original, engaging content on a regular basis. But how?

Here’s a simple answer. Start a conversation.

Craft your content so that it elicits responses from your readers. Then, you can react or respond to their comments and questions. Your blog readers will actually give you the topics you’re looking for. Problem solved.

Common question: Why don’t I get any comments on my blog?

If all you ever post on your real estate blog is factual or one way communication then you’re not going to get a lot of responses. Ask questions of your readers. Ask for their input. Your blog should be a conversation with your readers, and not a speech to the silent masses.

Be topical, this will help your Real Estate SEO the most.

In every market, there’s a hot topic! This might change monthly, or weekly, or even daily. If you blog about a timely topic, more people will be searching for information on that topic NOW.

Here’s an example, a client of ours has a real estate website in a town where IBM has a large office complex. IBM recently closed another facility and is moving those employees to offices in our client’s town. Of course, this will have an effect on the local real estate market. This was the post on the home page of his site for a week.

Think about all of the opportunities that this can bring him.

• People relocating
• IBMers who want to rent
• Residents who want to know how this might affect their property value

These are all great opportunities. If you can identify the hot topics and SEO your real estate site around these topics. you will see the benefits of traffic and an active reader audience.

In the end, this all comes down to the age old problem known as writer’s block. Maybe we should start calling it Blogger’s Block?

Tell us your story of blogger’s block and how you get around it. We’ll be sharing the conversation with all of our readers.

About a month ago, Rebecca composed a great post called “Real Estate marketing during tough economic times.” Apropos indeed, a client of ours called me the other day. He mentioned that the current real estate market was going to make him less lazy. He realized that he was going to need to be conservative and spend less. He’d have to dedicate his time rather than his cash.

The way to make this work in a real estate SEO campaign is obvious. Blogging is the answer. You can buy almost as many paid clicks as your budget will allow, but what happens when your budget shrinks? How do you keep those search engine visitors coming to your site? How do you keep your leads coming?

If you’re dedicated to blogging, you can replace those paid clicks with organic search engine traffic. No, you can’t flick the PPC switch off on Monday and turn on the organic SEO visitor stream on Tuesday, but you can start blogging regularly now and see the traffic in a month or two.

Also, start using social media. Twitter, Facebook, social bookmarking sites like Stumble, Reddit, and Digg, they’ll all bring you visitors. One of the largest traffic sources for this site is Twitter. Also, we post on Sphinn all the time since it’s highly applicable to our blog’s topic, real estate marketing and real estate seo. This brings us traffic too. Sure, the search engines are our main traffic source, but there are lots of others and we don’t pay for any of the traffic that comes to this blog, not out of pocket anyway.

Now, we’re not narrow minded. We know that time is money and if you’re going to invest your time into writing blog posts and using social media, one could argue that there’s still a cost. I couldn’t agree more. SEO is not free in any way. What I’m saying here is that SEO is an investment. Virtually all investments take time to mature and we have to invest with what we have. If we have cash, we can invest those funds in paid clicks. If we have time, SEO allows us to invest that time in order to achieve better search engine placement. This, in turn brings future users to your site, some of whom will turn into customers at a later date and bring you a pay check one day. It all started with your investment of time.

I’ve saved the best for last. This is time you have. I sometimes blog when I’m watching TV. I blog on weekends. I Digg at the end of the day when I’m too tired to be productive at much else. You can passively make this happen and invest yours in between time. So, even if you are busy, you still can invest in real estate seo. It’s not hard to keep a real estate blog going, it’s just a few minutes a day, if you’re a quick typer. This blog post took me about 15 minutes.

Lastly, we love to hear from you. So, please tell us, how are you saving money in your marketing these days? Also, if you have a question about whether or not you’re spending wisely, we’ll be happy to answer it.

Happy Blogging and Happy New Year.