Real Estate Blogs - The Ultimate Guide to Traffic Generation
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by Brandon Cornett
Over the past few months, blogs have taken the real estate industry by storm. Sure, some real estate blogs have been around for years, but up until now they were few and far between. Lately, however, it seems every agent in the country wants to launch a real estate blog.
I can see this reasons for this. In fact, I recommend blogs to my real estate clients all the time. Why? Because a real estate blog is a great way to expand and enhance your website with fresh content. By extension, a blog can help you boost your search engine ranking, increase your website's traffic levels, and strengthen your overall web presence.
In a moment, I'll offer plenty of tips on achieving these things. But first, let's dispel a myth about real estate blogging. With regards to search engine visibility, a real estate blog is not magical. It will not leap onto the first page of Google in a month, they way some people seem to think they will. But blogs are extremely easy to publish, and that's the search engine advantage they have over regular websites.
Now with that disclaimer out of the way, let's talk about ways you can increase your blog's traffic and readership.
1. Blog Often
If you start a real estate blog and publish to it often (daily if possible), you will strengthen your web presence in several ways. First, you'll be increasing your search engine visibility with additional website content. Also, if your blog is really useful, unique or entertaining (item #2 below), other people will likely link to it. As you increase the number of inbound links steadily over time, you also increase your search engine ranking / visibility.
2. Make Your Blog Useful and Unique
A real estate blog is only as good as the person who publishes it. There are a lot of great real estate blogs on the Internet. There are also plenty of duds. Launching a blog is the easy part. It's the constant addition of useful, interesting content that sets the good blogs apart from the duds.
Think about it from a reader's perspective. Step out of your real estate shoes for a moment, and imagine you're not a real estate agent. Let's say you are selling a home in San Diego, California and preparing to move to Austin, Texas. So you scour the Internet in search of information on the Austin real estate market.
Now for the sake of simplicity, let's say you find three websites that seem to offer the information you need. They all have information about relocating to Austin, info about the real estate market there, etc.
But one of these websites is primarily a real estate blog, with new information added several times a week. The other two websites are fairly static, looking like they haven't been updated in a while.
Which real estate site would you bookmark and revisit -- the static websites, or the real estate blog with market updates and other information posted daily? You would obviously want to keep tabs on that blog!
3. Blog Your Key Phrases
Here's a relatively simple way to increase your real estate blog's search engine visibility for important phrases. Write one blog post for each of your top ten key phrases. Once you've covered all ten phrases, start the process over again or write about additional / related topics.
That's it. Seems pretty simple, doesn't it? Yet you'd be surprised how many real estate blogs lack the most fundamental element of search engine visibility -- content!
Your first step, of course, is to conduct some key phrase research to see what kinds of phrases you target audience is typing into search engines. For starters, just make a list of the top 10 - 20 phrases. Be realistic here. Remember, you'll be writing a page of content for each of those phrases.
The next step is to write a keyword-rich blog post on each of your key phrases. If one of your top phrases is "Condos in Happytown, Vermont," then you should write a content-rich blog post about condos in Happytown, Vermont. Keep the post focused on the one topic -- don't wander into other areas. Want to rank even higher for the phrase? Write two blog posts per key phrase. Like I said, it's not a hard "science" to figure out.
Of course, you'll need to point some inbound links to those new pages. But we will cover link building in the following tips.
4. Add Your Blog to Directories
A directory is basically a big catalog of websites (or in this case, blogs) that's edited and managed by people. With a blog directory, human editors review blogs for quality and relevance, and then add them to the proper category of the directory's database.
This "human intervention" is what makes a directory different from a search engine. Search engines also add websites and blogs to their databases, but they do it automatically and without much human intervention.
Every time a blog directory adds your real estate blog to its list, you gain another inbound link (from the directory to your website). If the blog directory is a niche directory focused on real estate, it's even better because now the inbound link is relevant to your blog. The more inbound links you have, the better your search engine visibility. The higher your search engine ranking for key phrases, the more traffic you'll get.
5. Add Your Blog to the Inman Wiki
If you've been in real estate for any length of time, I don't need to tell you who Inman News is. But did you know they now have a wiki serving as a "real estate encyclopedia"? And here's the best part. You can add your real estate blog to the wiki. If approved, your blog will have its own page on the Inman Wiki. (Here's my page.) And every time you publish content to your blog, your page on the Inman Wiki will self-update.
You can see the value of this in terms of making your real estate blog more visible online. The more you blog, the more posts you'll have on the Inman Wiki, linking back to your blog. This can provide direct traffic as well as search engine benefits.
6. Think Like a Publisher
Online advertisers present content they want people to read. Online publishers present content that people want. There's a world of difference in those two strategies. In my opinion, this is a key concept in real estate search engine optimization (SEO) -- so start thinking like a publisher.
Whether they work for a local magazine or a major Internet site, professional publishers all have one thing in common. They all know the importance of catering to the needs of their readers. They first find out what it is their readers want, and then they give it to them in spades. Otherwise, they are doomed for failure.
Whey you apply this "publisher's mentality" to your real estate blog, you will grow a Web presence that's built on information people want. And the more you do this, the more blog traffic you'll get. Better still, your traffic will be more inclined to become regular readers, since you're providing the information they want. This also makes your blog traffic easier to convert into business, because your readers will trust you and view you as a prominent expert in your local real estate market.
I truly believe this mindset is the "way of the future" for real estate marketing online. I believe that the agents who use their real estate blogs to connect with a specific audience by offering specific content will take the lion's share of business in their markets. In fact, we are starting to see this already. I know several agents who do no marketing beyond their real estate blog and basic online PR techniques.
7. Convert Posts Into Articles
Here's another tactic for building up your inbound links and blog traffic. Take one of your blog posts, expand on it, shape it into an article format, and then publish it through article directories such as EzineArticles.com (with links back to your blog). Now repeat this for your other blog posts as much as possible. You can begin to see the endless potential of this approach.
8. Socialize with Others
Real estate blogs are much more "social" than static real estate websites. Most blogs allow readers to comment on the posts, which makes them more of a dialogue than a lecture. So find like-minded bloggers and leave thoughtful comments on their blogs. Trade links with them. Share ideas. Start a dialogue. The more you tap into the social aspect of blogging, the more you'll be helping your search engine and traffic cause.
Learn More
Brandon Cornett is a real estate marketing specialist and the author of an e-book on real estate blogging. Download The Triangle Strategy today and learn how to drive your real estate blog up the search engine ranks.
