Archive for Real Estate Blogs
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??
If you’re not a member of Active Rain, you may not be able to access the post(s) mentioned above. So sign up for Active Rain now. If you’re not a member of Active Rain, you should be anyway.
This guest post was contributed by Sam Chapman.
Sam specializes in homes in Austin, TX.
STEP ONE: Learn How to Tell if the Search Engines Know about a Web Page
Before a search engine can think about ranking a page from your website, it must first know that the page exists. “Indexing” a web page is the way search engines let you know that they’re aware of a page on your real estate website.
When a page is indexed, that means that the search engine has crawled (or read) the page and has stored it in its index. You can find out whether a page from your website is indexed on Google, for example. Do a search on Google like this one: info:www.buildrealestatewebsites.com/Portfolio/page_2042018.html
If the page is indexed, the result of the search will show a link to the page, along with other information such as related pages.
STEP TWO: Build Neighborhood Pages
Ranking higher in web searches is a product of many things. One is content – a lot of content. Think of your real estate website as if it was a bookstore. The more books it has, the more customers shop there. So how do you continue to add more books (web pages) and how do you let people and search engines know they exist?
Over time I have been adding neighborhood pages to my Austin real estate website in order to add content. Each page has a good title, unique text describing the neighborhood followed by framed listings in the neighborhood. Each page is 2 clicks from my home page and I think this is why many took a while to get indexed by Google.
STEP THREE: Blog Where It Counts
Google and other search engines appear to crawl Active Rain almost constantly because of the amazing amount of fresh content put on it every day. With all this crawling, Active Rain posts get indexed very quickly – sometimes within just a few minutes. Armed with this knowledge, I did an experiment using my ActiveRain blog.
I started posting about working with buyers and what neighborhoods they looked in and where they ended up buying. These posts were ideal places to insert links with appropriate anchor text pointing to my newest neighborhood pages. I have found some neighborhood pages to be indexed within hours of a post on ActiveRain. Over a 48 hour period of adding pages and posting to ActiveRain, I had an additional 12 or so pages indexed.
If you want to add neighborhood pages, make sure your content is unique to your site. I found one of my neighborhoods, West Cave Estates, not getting indexed for days after posting a link. When I studied it and other websites with similar pages I found that my content was similar to other pages even though I wrote it myself.
Where do you get content? Research each neighborhood online. You will probably find other real estate sites with neighborhood pages. You will also probably find a number of HOA pages and blogs as well as posts in forums like city-data. Take what you learn and put it in your own words just as you did with research papers back in school.
One last tip about using Active Rain for links: don’t overdo it. Include no more than 3 links back to your site in any post. Make sure the post is something that a person will actually read. As for neighborhood pages, these are just examples for this post. You can write about all sorts of things and link to other new pages as well.
This is a guest blog contributed by Ben Fisher, a real estate agent
at Summit Sotheby’s International Realty in Park City, UT. Ben’s service area
includes Park City Real Estate & Deer Valley Real Estate.
In my previous post, Two Strategies for Managing Your Real Estate Blog, I gave a few ideas for getting your blog active again and generating results.
Whether it be scheduling yourself posts throughout the week, or posting about new bank owned properties that hit the market, you must have a consistent schedule to keep your blog busy with fresh content.
With Google’s recent freshness update changing 35% of search results, this is more important now than ever.
How are you going to stay ahead of your competition in your local market? Consistently update your blog with local news!
Use Google Alerts For Research on the Competition
One tool I use frequently for keeping tabs on my competition online is Google Alerts. By entering your target keywords into Google Alerts, you will be notified (in my case every morning) of Google’s recent indexing of pages that match your specific terms.
Typically the news results are not accurate for my area since I am using very common keywords (Ex: Park City), but under the Web Results is where the real value comes. I can see who is recently adding pages to their site, doing press releases, or posting on blogs.
Blow the Competition Away
What can you do with this information on your competition? Let’s say a competitor is posting on their blog about a specific area within your community. In this case I would create my own blog post about this topic, make your post even better and add more content, and post a few backlinks to this blog post from other websites. Do everything you can to make your post outrank your competitors while improving your SEO at the same time. If you do this consistently, you will end up dominating numerous areas of your marketplace.
Use Google News to Make Your Blog the Freshest News Around
I recently began to utilize Google News to keep me updated on all of the local events in my marketplace. With ski resorts opening, local events taking place, and sometimes real estate news coming up, I have an unending list of topics to post on my blog about.
If you can consistently be one of the first to post on a certain subject in your marketplace, you can take advantage of Google’s recent freshness update and generate further streams of traffic to your website.
To Summarize: Regularly Update Your Blog with Local News
to Dominate Your Market
- Do the research on your competition
- Blow them away with even better content
- Be the first to post on local issues
- Generate leads to further your business!
Give it a try!
What? Oh, you don’t have a blog? I know, it’s a lot of work and trouble. And, thinking up topics to write about?? Excruciating. But, wait, you did read the post just below this one, didn’t you? If not, make sure you see it: Insider Insight: Two Strategies for Managing Your Real Estate Blog. And, of course, there is more information under the Real Estate Blogs category shown in the menu above.
If you’re still not convinced that a blog is worthwhile, or if you want some blog inspiration, you need to take a look at Susan Emo‘s post on Active Rain.
Susan talks specifically about the types of contacts she gets from specific types of posts. So, if you want some additional inspiration, you can add to your list of “real estate blog topics”.
If you’re not a member of Active Rain, you may not be able to access the post(s) mentioned above. So sign up for Active Rain now. If you’re not a member of Active Rain, you should be anyway.
This is a guest blog contributed by Ben Fisher, a real estate agent
at Summit Sotheby’s International Realty in Park City, UT. Ben’s service area
includes Park City Real Estate & Deer Valley Real Estate.
The Problem
In the past few years, blogging for real estate agents has become one of the most popular online strategies to generate traffic for their site in the hopes of gaining new clients.
While utilizing this strategy, you tend to run out of topics to blog about and this is when your blog can start becoming stale. The internet is filled with real estate blogs that started off with a huge push and then died off before they had seen any ounce of success. How can we overcome this?
Strategy #1: Make a Schedule
First you need to put your blog onto a schedule so that you never miss a beat. I am guilty of not sticking to my schedule as well, but am on a big push to get back on the horse. For me, I schedule 3 days a week to highlight a few different things.
Strategy #2: Define Global Topics
Monday is usually my “Deal of the Day” post. Thursday is “Featured Neighborhood of the Week”, and so on. I would stick with 3 scheduled posts a week so you will not spread yourself to thin in generating fresh and UNIQUE content.
I see a lot of agents doing this incorrectly. Simply posting about a property with a small paragraph of stats and a picture isn’t going to cut it to generate significant results. Your content needs to be eye catching and formatted in a friendly way.
Fill the page with unique content about the home, neighborhood, area, whatever you can come up with. Do this consistently with intermittent posts about news on your area, and you are on your way to seeing some great results, and paychecks.
Tune in next week for content ideas outside of properties and neighborhoods to feature on your blog!
