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What’s Going On Locally Has Everything to Do With Your Real Estate Brand!
Are you writing up local news & events?
If you’re not writing locally, you should be! Regardless of whether or not traditional local media covers the local events, it’s likely going to be minimal coverage yet coveted home buyers & sellers will be searching them.
You’re a local brand!
You’re an expert on local community! So why not be the enthusiastic local provider a searching home buyer or seller finds when searching anything going on locally?
For ideas beyond what you already know, see or hear keep an eye on local sources of information like community websites. Maybe the Town, the Chamber of Commerce or the County site’s run event calendars. Maybe they run useful blogs? Why NOT elaborate on what the local newspaper, TV, magazines and these sites are running? And remember, just because they run it first doesn’t mean you won’t add valuable local knowledge.
If you participate on local boards & committees, write up what’s being said or voted on,
“I recently attended a school board meeting and wrote up a summary of a very tense issue [Carmel River School Boundary] in the blog. I was quoted in both local papers (I made a comment about the real estate markets impact on enrollment—the topic of the meeting) and by having the blog post up before the next morning I was one of the first pages hit when folks searched for the issue. Obviously I was indexed immediately for the post, which is how they were able to find me. I also forwarded the blog entry to the school board to make sure I had my facts right. I think they appreciated that, and ended up referring other folks to the entry.” Malone Hodges Carmel CA Realtor
Real Estate Bloggers Using Local News to Their Business Advantage:
- Grovefest coming to Grand Lake June 18-21, 2009 - No. 1 Google
- Are You Up For A Little Monkey Bizness In Western Springs IL?
- Bank Opening Another Location in Baton Rouge LA
- Visit Vail, Co. this Weekend - Vail Events and Real Estate Hot Properties
- Santa Barbara Jesusita Fire is dissapating
chris@kineticknowledge.com
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Are You Getting The Targeted Real Estate Traffic You’re After?
Are you blogging for a target market?
A Thursday morning reminder for many [and a wake up call for others], but a discipline the real estate professional must use when blogging is to define a target market with regionally modified content. You simply can’t target a market that is searching locally unless you’re defining it for search engines in your coverage.
It does you little good to write up real estate industry & community oriented content unless you relate it back to local! That is unless you wish to attract all the people that will NOT buy. Never to suggest all non regional posts are worthless because some folks might find and link to OR recommend you, but focus on the most wins possible by repeatedly defining the target market!
Example: Immediate Search Optimization/ Search Visibility
Here’s an example achieved with a discipline for consistent and regionally specific content production:
Post Title: Estate-quality In-town Living In The Hinsdale Central High School District
Post Date: June 10th, 2009
Current Date/ Time: June 11th, 2009 10:30AM
Related Local Searches:
- estate hinsdale central high school district - No. 1 / 32,600 Results
- estate hinsdale high school district – No. 1 / 76,500
- hinsdale high school district estate – No. 1 / 77,000
- home hinsdale central high school district – No. 3 / 77,600
- hinsdale high school district home – No. 9 / 143,000
- hinsdale il home near high school – No. 3 / 122,000
- hinsdale il high school home - No. 1 / 914,000
- hinsdale il home - No. 2 / 2,550,000
Result: Virtually immediate search visibility for a long tail of potential local real estate searches = cost effective SEO!
Contributed by Chris Frereckschris@kineticknowledge.com
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Question Of The Day: What’s the Value in Traffic Analytics?
The value in traffic analytics is enormous!
This post may not do that enormity justice, but let’s take a quick stab at why you will definitely benefit from analyzing your traffic.
Here’s a list of the things I like to watch closely month over month:
- Bounce rate [the percentage of people that leave after one page view]
- Total page views
- Avg page views per day
- Avg page views per visitor [we're @ 5 nowadays, which is pretty good]
- Total unique new visitors
- Avg unique new visitors per day
- Return visitors
- Avg return visitors per day
- Referral websites [who's bring traffic to us]
- Most popular pages [anything popular we can expand on]
- Searches that bring us traffic
Benefits accruing directly from the analysis of our traffic includes:
Our bounce rate was above 70%, which means virtually everyone that found us was leaving. With a focus on sharing information and the development of trust, clearly we had to improve. We did some looking around, came up with some ideas we liked and decided to redesign. We chose a more democratic presentation of front and center content than solely blog posts. As you can see above, bouncing went down from 70+% to between 7 and 9%. Simultaneously, page views per visitor have increased 150%.
We had traffic, but no sign ups so we created the Business Bloggers’ Bible giveaway and more visible lead capture forms. Now we get tons of leads and our database keeps growing exponentially month over month.
We weren’t getting enough referral traffic from other sites so we began auto- feeding our content into various social networks. Now we see it coming in from places like Twitter, Realtown and Facebook every day.
And probably more I can’t recall… but I’m sure you get the picture.
Contributed by Chris Frereckschris@kineticknowledge.com
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Clozing The Loop On Real Estate News
Here’s an interesting new resource produced by respected Real Estate Social Marketing Consultant [and Real Estate Attorney] Joe Ferrara of Sellsius Real Estate Marketing Blog Fame.
Apparently, The Clozing … closes the loop on real estate news stories, but when I asked Joe about The Clozing he summarized, “Basically our goal is to aggregate and organize real estate news from mainstream media and social media to provide a quick one stop destination for professional and consumers. The site is updated every hour, so it’s like a RE news ticker.”
Joe added, “Feedreaders are cumbersome and many folks don’t even use them.”
Give The Clozing a look see… and thanks Joe!
Contributed by Chris Frereckschris@kineticknowledge.com
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Question Of The Day: Can Anyone Guarantee Top 5 Organic Search Results?
The dynamic nature of a networked web, the constant modification of search engine ranking methods and the random competitive activity surrounding local real estate content online makes organic search results unpredictable. So, the answer to ‘Can Anyone Promise Top 5 Organic Search Results?’ is probably “no.”
If anyone does guarantee top organic search results we might ask what proprietary information they have about the constant adjustments made to [content] ranking search algorithms. We might also ask, what - exactly - do they know about our competitors’ day to day online activity.
Even if there were proven techniques, the reality of the environment we compete in is… it’s never standing still. Logic would have that Google needs timely content from geographically relevant real estate experts for their search indexes. Logic would have Google wants to protect the quality of their search results by reducing the weight of signals that might easily be used to manipulate them [i.e. abusive meta data or non specific back links.] Logic would have that consistent relevant & timely content, and detectable activity stemming from that content, achieves & sustains organic search optimization.
And even beyond search, because RSS enables a blogs’ content to go wherever it is needed, Internet optimization should be our ultimate goal! Examples beyond search discovery include content that moves direct to subscribers, direct onto other sites and/ or direct into various social networks.
In an environment where our future customers leverage random resources online to research & discover, it is relevant & timely content activity that will:
- generate more qualified search discovery;
- generate more voluntary RSS subscription;
- generate more links, bookmarks, forwards, recommendations;
- differentiate as dedicated, knowledgeable, trustworthy;
- establish unique marketplace brand and
- generate lead opportunities!
Yes we need good blog solutions, but Google discloses good site standards for better indexing. Better blogs are a matter of site design & architecture, site maintenance and site advancement work. If you want to capture and funnel traffic into MLS Search/ lead capture based websites, blogs are still the cost effective way to do it.
Good active on-topic blogs make great search results possible; they achieve them sustainably and they make top organic search results cost-effective!
Contributed by Chris Frereckschris@kineticknowledge.com
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