If you’re a real estate blogger, you have undoubtedly heard the experts sing the praises of hyper-local blog posts.  And you may be a great hyper-local blogger yourself.  But, I saw a post recently on (what a surprise!) Active Rain that was written by Jeff Dowler, and he gave me a new perspective on those type of posts.

After attending Ross Hair’s Social Media Marketing Camp, he came away with the following:  Make sure your hyper-local posts are timeless.  Naturally, you want your posts to stay in search rankings – forever, if possible.  So, when you are writing a hyper-local post, think about what you can do to make it relevant now and in years to come.

What Makes a Hyper-Local Post Timeless?

What can you do to make your posts timeless?  Here are some ideas:

1.   Write Posts About Your Communities – If you write about a community, that information will still be interesting to people researching potential neighborhoods for years to come.  So, don’t concentrate entirely on current events in your communities – talk about the communities themselves.  People will really thank you for that.  As one who is often involved in researching communities to write content for clients – trust me - information about communities and neighborhoods is sorely lacking on the Internet.

Don’t ever think that what you know about a community is “common knowledge”.  I’m constantly amazed that even city websites don’t help promote the city.  Seems odd that the city lists their departments and contacts, garbage pickup schedules and meeting times for the City Council, for example, but they rarely talk about the city itself.  I just don’t know what their development folks are doing; they’re not reading the website for sure.

Think of what you’d like to know about an area before you’d buy a house there, and keep in mind that someone researching on the Internet will have a very difficult time finding out what it’s really like.

2.  Keep Your Posts Updated – To be timeless, you can’t have information from 5 years ago and expect that people will continue to find that information useful.  A comment on Jeff’s post talked about going back and updating hyper-local posts.  That’s a great way to add new content to the post to keep the search engines interested.

You could also create a tag called something like  Atlanta Community Updates, and assign that tag to your community overview posts.  Then, let’s say you post an update about a community each year – each of those posts would have something like this at the top:  Follow SmallTown’s Evolution With Our SmallTown Community Updates (a link to the related tag).  That way, you can keep fresh information at people’s fingertips.

3.  Date Your Event Posts - I guess this idea won’t keep all your event posts timeless, but you will be found easily for the latest one.  Based on Google’s search suggestions, it’s obvious that people often attach a year to their searches where the timing is important.  So, if your town has a Christmas Parade each year, write a post with the title: SmallTown Christmas Parade 2012.  For events, things change.  Different things will be happening each year, the event will be on different dates and may even be in different places.  So, make sure that people don’t get frustrated trying to find the current information.

How do you keep your posts timeless??

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