Getting to work with Realtors so closely, I’ve had the privilege to see first hand what problems arise in the process of building an ‘online presence.’ Two of the biggest complaints I hear are “I’m not a good writer nor do I have endless amounts of time to grind out a post.”

So today, I want to try to solve these problems in the easiest way possible.

First of all, I don’t consider myself a natural ‘writer.’  In fact, if you read any of the stuff I put out three years ago, you’d probably laugh at how bad it was! Seriously, a 3rd grader would have shaken his head. But in the process of writing junk, I eventually found writing was just like riding a bike; you fall a lot but eventually you get the hang of it and figure how to string a few words together in a way that makes sense.

So below, I’ve laid out the process I use when writing a blog post.

Choosing a Topic

Writing an Outline

It’s good to know what you’re going to write about before hand.  This prevents rambling and getting off on unnecessary tangents that have little to do with the topic at hand. I know it’s hard to NOT relate the current market conditions to your recent fly fishing trip but keep it relevant or you’ll just end up confusing people.

-Short conclusion

Priming the Pump

The best writing is that which delivers the most value and flows naturally.  The flow part is always the most challenging.  One of the best ways to get into ‘flow’ is it to first speak what you’re going to say, out loud.  If you want to take it a step farther, stand up and pretend your delivering it as a motivational speech to a knowledge hungry crowd.  And what this does is allows you to articulate your thoughts and connect to your voice. If you haven’t tried priming the pump like this, I highly suggest giving it a go.

Putting it on Paper

The next step is taking a seat at the ol’ computer and writing it out.  Don’t worry too much about perfect spelling and grammar just yet, simply get the words out of you. Working with your outline, create sub topics (like this post) and write within each.  It doesn’t have to be flowery or use big words that make you sound smart, in fact it shouldn’t. Your language should be in line with your target audience namely buyers and other Realtors; not Shakespeare critics!

Edit

Though I’ve grown tremendously, this is still probably my weakest link.  I hate editing with a passion but it’s very important and can make or break the authority of what you’re trying to say.    Nobody is going to care how much you know about real estate, if you cannnt dun rite it douwn gud.  The easiest way to edit is to reread your post out loud.  This will show you what works and what doesn’t allowing you to make appropriate changes.

Titles and Tags

Interestingly, the last thing you’re going to do is come up with a title for your post.  Yes, google is our internet superpower and right now everything you create should be done so with the intent that it will eventually show up in the search results.  The first step is going to google keyword tool and doing a little research to see what keywords get traffic but don’t have an overwhelming amount of competition.  Once you’ve got your title, go through your post and see if you can’t change some of words to match the optimized keywords you’re going after.  Though keyword density is far less relevant than in the past, it can still make a difference.

Warning: Don’t go overboard here, stuffing too many keywords in the post, will compromise your content and can get you slapped by google. Moderation is key!  Lastly, tag the post with the proper keywords.  Use anything you can think of that would be relevant.  If you’ve got Wordpress there’s an excellent plugin that allows you do all of this called Headspace.

The balance that needs to be implemented in any search engine marketing plan is that of quality AND quantity. Dominating an online market involves a strategy of achieving top search engine placement for all relevant search terms and driving lots of targeted visitors who will ultimately convert into quality leads. So how do we accomplish this?

The Problem With Targeting Short Tail Keywords

The search phrase “Real Estate” is entered into Google 45,500,000 times/month and is highly competitive. For an example let’s think about this from the perspective of a someone looking to dominate the Seattle Washington market. Only a fraction of those 45,500,000 searches for “Real Estate” would find a Seattle real estate related website useful.

Would a Seattle website ranking at the top of this search term generate leads? Sure! But with such a general “Real Estate” term some of these leads may be looking at Seattle, Denver, Miami or other cities. The extra effort targeting such a generic search term would have been better used targeting other highly search Seattle related terms.

The Problem With Targeting Long Tail Keywords

Long tail keywords by definition are very specific search phrases with low competition. An example of a long tail keyword is “Queen Anne 2 Bedroom Home For Sale” (Note: Queen Anne is a popular view neighborhood in Seattle, WA) and ranking well for this phrase is relatively easy.

Unfortunately, taking a quick glance at the search volume for “Queen Anne 2 Bedroom Home For Sale” using the Google Keyword Tool there is “Not Enough Data” to report the search volume meaning this phrase is hardly searched. Despite the fact that very specific search phrases enjoy higher conversion rates into leads, even #1 ranking for this term will generate little business. So, how do we capture many of these long tails and optimize and rank for high volume related search phrases?

Finding The Balance – Quality AND Quantity

Initially keyword research and then a long-term strategy, balancing what will produce the quantity and quality of search results, are invaluable in dominating a local market. Accomplishing this takes a two-fold approach.

1. BUILD AUTHORITY FOR THE MID TAIL:
First this involves selecting a ‘mid tail’ keyword phrase, something that is highly search and relevant to the website. Based on these factors for the Seattle market the keyword phrase “Seattle Real Estate” fits wells with 8,100 searches/month, enough volume to support lots of lead generation if ranked well and the visitors will be specific enough that they will convert at a decent percentage. Optimize the main page of the website for this keyword phrase by building links and Google authority.

(Disclosure: Working The Magic manages the #1 ranked website for “Seattle Real Estate” in Google with 10,000 visitors/month that converts roughly 5% of all visitors into leads)

2. CREATE CONTENT FOR THE LONG TAIL:
Once authority is built into the website, the second part of balancing quality and quantity is to then generate content for the long tail. This involves blogging, neighborhood and community information and additional commentary on the website. Using the long tail example from above it would make sense to add content to a Seattle website about Queen Anne 2 bedroom homes that would likely rank well for that search term. The additional content will add relevancy to the website as a whole and those pages will show up in results for all types of long tail keywords.

To make some sense of this the average cost per visit for the keyword “Seattle real estate” is $5.03 or an amazing $100 for 20 visits. Wow, seems expensive to me but if a website is converting visitors into leads and closings at a rate that produces a positive return on investment, even though that site is probably not maximizing profit, it can make sense especially if work is being done to improve organic rankings in the interim.

Thinking about it, here are a few reasons PPC is appealing…

1. Immediate results. Start a PPC campaign right now and you can be sending visitors to your site for a specific search term by the end of the day.
2. Easy to calculate return on investment. At the end of the day marketers and site owners want to be able to crunch the numbers and report their return on investment. I can understand this and believe this is the biggest reason there is such a large disconnect between PPC vs. search engine optimization (SEO) spending despite the real opportunity that “SEO drives 75%+ of all search traffic, yet garners less than 15% of marketing budgets for SEM campaigns. PPC receives less than 25% of all search traffic, yet earns 80%+ of SEM campaign budgets”. What effective marketers need to do is weigh the daily ROI decisions against the yearly and long term ROI to make a clear decision. If it is any indicator, the #1 organically ranked website for “Seattle real estate” has traffic valued at $37,400/month.
3. Keyword testing for SEO. PPC allows sites to bid and drive traffic for specific keywords and then analyze the conversion rates based of those keywords. Keyword testing is useful to examine if “Seattle real estate” or “Seattle homes for sale” converts visitors into leads and at what percentage. This can be useful to give direction as to how the best use of resources for managing an SEO campaign can be spent.

And the downside of PPC…

1. Lower conversion rates. The overall conversion rate or the rate at which searchers take a desired action on a site is higher for unpaid search results than the rate for paid (4.2% vs. 3.6%). On Google, 72.3 percent of users surveyed felt that organic results were more relevant, while only 27.7 percent rated paid results as more relevant.
2. Not as many visits for a given keyword. 30 percent of search engine users click on paid listings, leaving 70 percent who are clicking the organic listings or refining their search.
3. Infinite investment required. Immediate results are a double edged sword, site traffic stops just as abruptly as it starts. There is a constant infusion of PPC spend needed to maintain traffic levels.

I specialize in finding the very best online marketing strategy for real estate professionals and am very interested in hearing your success and struggles for the benefit of everyone, please share! Until next time.