Estate Agents: Four areas of discussion to kickstart your blog!

For any online company, A blog is an effective way to boost your SEO, establish yourself as a thought leader and create new content for your followers.

Within Estate Agency, blogging wouldn’t necessarily be something you consider critical for your business, however with operating online it becomes a key, cost effective cog at generating traffic, boosting your search rankings and giving a great way to network with others within the industry.

A previous blog showed how blogging is a key tool for SEO, but now you want to start one, what topics can you discuss?

By looking at what other top players are discussing in their blogs, you can understand a quick way to kickstart your blogs, sharing your own unique expertise in each area.

There are wide varieties of topics that can be covered, however by looking through different agents’ blogs, you can see certain topics crop up and provide a great basis for discussion around the industry:

  1. Elements in the local area 2. Resources for Buyers and Sellers 3. Home Maintenance 4. Finance

Further discussion on this topic:


Elements in the Local Area:

A key topic for buyers and sellers in the local area, looking to gain a full perspective of the local community. This is very dependant on where you are based, e.g. London versus Brighton versus smaller towns and villages.

Furthermore, content ideas are never too far away. Local newspapers and online communities provide great topics that are current and relevant to your target market.

You will still find many areas that can be discussed, regardless of size. Here are some suggestions:

  • Information about local amnesties: Schools, Jobs etc
  • Focus on local businesses
  • Cost of living discussion
  • upcoming events in the area: Gigs, Sport events and other interesting activities

Here are some blogs written by other agents:

Further ideas can be generated by making sure you are keeping an eye on local news. Interacting with other businesses creates opportunities to cross-promote.


 Resources for Buyers and sellers 

A key area for estate agents. Providing as much useful information to buyers and sellers as possible increases the chances they’ll trust you to use your services. This provides an opportunity to establish the estate agency reputation as reliable and trust worthy. Content ideas should naturally come to estate agents in this area. Particularly consider the blog ideas from the perspective of the customer, to avoid bland and boring blog ideas. Keeping ideas specific with unique insights to each topic should ensure they remain relevant and interesting.

Here are some key areas you can discuss:

  • Checklists before moving home
  • Step-by-step process of closing a deal
  • Comparison pieces explaining property prices
  • Tips for landlords
  • Mistakes people make when selling their homes

 


 Home Maintanance

Another area that you can provide great advice is in how to maintain your home. Wether this is advice in helping someone sell their home in great condition, or providing after-sales advice. This area helps cover the latest in building trends and safety regulations. Again another great opportunity for synergy by recommending local businesses in each area, like landscaping or plumbing.

Ideas for discussion

  • Building trends
  • Safety in your home
  • Pest Control
  • Gardening tips
  • Energy saving tips

They key here is to ensure relevancy to the readers and share extra insights and know how, to help make better decisions.


Finance

A huge area for anyone buying, selling or letting in the industry, as well as those behind the scenes in the industry. This is the area to share specialised relevant advice that directly affect the readers pocket. Discussion around mortgages, salaries, budgeting, value offerings of services etc should be well received. It is important to consider the role your blog has in the industry. If you focus on sales you may focus on price comparisons, credit scores and the local job market, whereas a landlord may focus more on home maintenance.

Further ideas:

  • mortgage advice
  • Credit Score advice
  • Tax insights
  • Property price discussion
  • Local cost of living
  • Jobs

These ideas above, with help from establish estate agency blogs, should help create new blog ideas within the property industry. Even if your company does not directly sell property, it can still offer value in each area. Furthermore, the blog acts as an outlet to discuss more than just the industry environment. It can help create discussion around certain topics and be a way for the company to share internal news, or create competitions etc.

Each area chosen is likely to be an area that really interests people, however, further considerations for SEO can be made, to include certain keywords and topics on your blogs.

Widening your blog strategy to create networking opportunities is also a great consideration. Exchanging guest blog opportunities creates connections as well as further backlinks. Reviewing businesses in exchange for services or advertisement placements is also possible.

Overall, these areas should provide a solid basis for content within your blogs, with further consideration and ideas can help develop and grow your networks, reach new customers and grow your business.

Example blogs can be accessed here:

Keatons

Your Move

Hunters

Tepilo

 

How blogging can improve your businesses SEO

SEO Image

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the process of which using different techniques, a business attempts to rank its search listings higher in search results. The aim of which is to create increased web traffic, creating more leads and ultimately increasing revenue.

According to Zhang & Cabbage (2016), SEO has three main strategies: Content, Link building & Social Sharing.

Blogs are an option which helps with every section of SEO, on top of its benefits for content marketing and brand building. Blogs can be adapted to budget and also provide ways to build new networks online and in your industry, creating two-way communications and deeper personal relationships with your target market.


Heres how blogs can help with your content, link building and social SEO Strategies:

Content:

Search Engine algorithms preferentially rank sites which are providing fresh content. A website publishing consistent new content will rank higher than an equal website that isn’t providing new content. By having a blog, you have the ability to consistently add new content to the website.

Googles algorithm prioritises content which can help solve peoples everyday problems. Remember, Search engines aim to provide the most useful and relevant search results. Furthermore, if you’re helping people solve problems, you’re content is more likely to be shared across social media and lead to higher SERPS (Search Engine Ranking positions).

You should aim to create content that can be seen as different or unique in the field you are in. incorporating various content types can help, such as: Photography, Videos, Podcasting or Tools & plugins.


Read more about content here: What kind of content will crush it for your business?

Link building:

For those new to SEO, “link building” or “Backlinking” may be new concepts, but are vital to good SEO. Blogs provide a great opportunity to create natural backlinks to your own content. Guest posting on blogs helps also create good backlinks, as well as creating a natural opportunity to network and share your expertise. You have to be vigilant with guest posting though: Quality content is king. Many guest posts out there could just be used as a way to build a high quantity of links, with little quality. Therefore, when using guest blogs, rather than see it as a link building exercise, see it as a chance to share high quality content then link build. Writing for blogs with higher domain authority could land you a higher SERPS, then with good quality anchor links lead to increased traffic to your site.

Further tips:

Don’t buy backlinks: Google and other Search engines are cracking down on blackhat SEO such as this and will remove you from search results if caught.

Domain authority matters: The quality of the backlink matters, a longstanding high authority link as well as .edu or .gov links will have a massive effect on your SEO.

Read more:

Beginners guide to to Backlinking

How to build high quality backlinks

Using Guestographics for SEO

Blackhat SEO: Techniques to avoid

 

Social Sharing:

Combining your blog with Social Media will help to extend your reach and attract new visits. High quality content will also mean your blogs share ability will be much higher. This means that your ranking will increase as search engines perceive highly shared content as relevant and trustworthy. Furthermore, this creates further links to your site and helps your SERPS.

Different platforms have different best practices, so reading further into that may help. However, in the same way that quality content is king for SEO, it also rules on social media; increasing engagement and therefore how much it is shared. Ensure you’re putting out the best content you can, then matched by a solid social media strategy can provide good results for SEO. Even better, if you have a decent budget for your blog, you could utilise paid social ads on Facebook for example, to ensure the content is seen by those most likely to enjoy it.

There has been discussion on to what extent sharing affects rankings, and whilst its been shown that it has a positive effect, engines are still using links as the long standing method of establishing authority.

Further tips:

Ensure you provide a call to action to share the blog, as this means people will be more likely to do so.

Keep share ability in mind when creating your content

 

Read more:

5 Ways to improve your blogs social sharing

8 plugins to help social sharing for wordpress

 

Other key points:

Each blog posts provides an opportunity to rank for a key word –

Take advantage of useful plugins and tools that can help with your SEO – Here are some suggestions:

  • Market Samurai: See where you and your competitors are getting backlinks from
  • Google Search Console: See how Google views your blog – How it appears in search, what position, how many people clicked the link etc
  • Google Sitemaps plugin: Generates a sitemap you can then submit to Google to help your rankings
  • All-in-one SEO Pack: Multiple little devices to help SEO.
  • There are many other tools & plugins designed to help for SEO. Check out this article to see various types and how they can help.

 

There are also plenty of other useful insights into SEO from other companies and bloggers which can help get stuck into the details of different topics, with blogs such as Moz or the plentiful results of a search (should be the case from SEO specialists!)

Overall, its best to keep in mind Google and other search engines aim to provide relevant and useful content to its users, therefore its algorithms will be setup to find those. Ensure the content you provide is top quality first in order to drive results, keeping in mind how you can solve peoples problems in your industry.


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