August 06 2018
The question is "How do we create good real estate website content?" NOT "Why do we need it?" As the Internet has become one of our most powerful marketing venues, the value of a comprehensive and relevant real estate website has become crucial. Even if you are out networking and marketing through print and other traditional media, once contacted, the vast majority of prospects will check you out on the web before making a decision.
Another question is how to create or get good, relevant website content without having to create it all yourself or spend a lot of money. I'm sure you didn't miss the word "free" in the title, and I'll show you here how to get great and highly relevant content for your website for free, and in the process, you'll meet new people and build your networking effort.
Sure, articles and blog posts about real estate law, the home buying process, listing a home, buying your first home, etc. are all relevant, but real estate is homes and homes are part of a community. Community content is relevant to real estate, and your website will benefit both for SEO and visitor interest if you include lots of community content of the right types.
You're probably already seeing or reading this type of community information, but it's time to pay attention to the quality, sources, and the relevance of the content to your site's real estate website content goals.
For every source you locate, evaluate the content for these three criteria and choose those that fit your goals. Then you're going to take the next very crucial step.
You may already be getting emailed newsletters from some of thse sources, but you should try to subscribe to every one that you can. This way, you'll find the best for your needs. Then you want to do some online searches with whole paragraphs out of the content. Your goal here is to NOT find it. Many of these sources do the email newsletters with content they do not also place on their websites. There can be several reasons, but perhaps the most frequent is that they don't want to pay a website person to do it. They simply put a link on their website with a call to action to subscribe to their newsletter.
Once you have a target source, meet with them or make first contact via email on their website. After you say good things about their newsletter or other print/email content, you want to ask two questions:
What you want is to get their permission, and you'll often find that they'll be enthusiastic about it. If you create a page or navigation destination on the site just for their newsletters, they'll be even happier and probably end up sending the link to others, especially those who ask for previous newsletters.
Actually, there's very little process to set up. Have them send you every issue of their email newsletter, or their word processing version of the print material. Then copy and paste it into your website or blog. Two steps and it's done.
You don't need to set up reminders, as receiving the email takes care of that. Make it a habit to very quickly get their material up on your site. If they told you that they eventually get their newsletters up on the site with weeks or months of delay, you don't have to tell them that you'll beat them to the punch for the SEO credit.
You want to build value in the eyes of your sources, so you want to show them that you're doing what you said you would. This means sending them a link to the new page or blog post after it is live on your site.
If you have the ability to track visits to your pages and posts through Google Analytics or some other tracking service, you'll want to periodically let your souces know who is seeing their content, and even more importantly, who is taking the link to their site from yours. You just sent them business.
Do all of this and you'll get thousands of words of new content monthly for your website, and all of it full of relevant key phrases that become some of your most valuable real estate website content.
To view the original article, visit the WebsiteBox blog.