Content marketing is the way to go.. but not just words, good words, catching words and words that inform. If you’re not giving the reader something to learn or be interested in, you’re losing them and then no one finds value in your content including the search engines. But what if you can’t blog on your site or add pages? It can be very difficult to build out a site. This seems to be the case with a lot of real estate websites. Real estate agents seems stuck with a site because it offers everything they need for real estate business including a CRM, IDX and a basic site except for the ability to customize pages. IT can be very easy for agents to just sign up and leave their site as is but it’s not working for them or really doing anything for them.
This is the case with one of our clients in the Palm Desert real estate market. Her website only allows her specific pages, of which are very limited to the meta data allowed. This makes customizing the page very difficult. For instance, she has a communities and neighborhoods page that is very extensive but because we can’t customize the title and description of the page, Search engines may never find it for what it actually is. However, the site has a good CRM and provides an IDX (property search) feature and she prefers to keep it al in one place. So then how are we to conduct content marketing?
It’s fine to have one source for all the major information a home buyer or seller would need and then direct those clients to that site by a variety of outside sources. These sources can come from a myriad of places such as social media to other people’s blogs and sites. This is what we must do for this client. By blogging about her, for her and linking to her site, it creates a natural web of back links all directing traffic and search engines back to the main website. Unfortunately, when search engines reach the site they don’t find any new content so this is why having an IDX is important. It’s the only new content that the site provides, yet it may be enough to create fresh activity on a site we can’t add new content.
But what if you want to get your information out on your own site?
This is where you would need some sort of blogging platform. There are hundreds of sites out there and you can create one of your own, or build off of something that already has weight. These sites may include ActiveRain, RealTown, Tumblr or a Zillow Blog. Tumblr can be created on your own but you are still blogging on their site and because Tumblr is trusted, you may find yourself showing up faster on the search engines than if you had created a Blogger, Blogspot or WordPress site from scratch. If you prefer not to be in the real estate world, Tumblr is a great place to blog. You can customize your site and add tags and promote on social media.
Read more: Free vs Paid WordPress site
ActiveRain and similarly RealTown, is a blogging platform just for the real estate industry. You can blog about whatever you want, customize the title and description and because ActiveRain is so well trusted, it will show up on the search engines within hours of publishing. However, many of these sites also require monthly fees. This may or may not be an option based on your marketing budget.
Then There’s Social
Social media is also a great way to get your information out there. Perhaps you don’t have 500 words to say, but just 100. Social media is a great place to get out a small snippet of your information with a link, image and content. Also, many social media networks such as Google Plus, Pinterest and Facebook are actually search engine friendly, so what you post as a status in your business page may actually turn up as a result on the SERPS.
Related: What impact does social media have on SEO?
Using social media to share your content or even just refer back to a page on your website creates more back links and buzz to the site. You never know when you’ll hit the right audience that could be looking for exactly what you’re selling.
There are ways around this pesky no-additional-pages bit but it does take some creativity. We’ve had success with our client and it can be done. For more information about content marketing and blogging for business, give us a call or browse our website for more tips and SEO information.