There are 172,800 new blogs added to the internet every day so in such a crowded market are estate agent blogs worth considering? I certainly believe so. Let’s look at the bigger picture. Typically, every agent is after one thing – more leads, be it from landlords, vendors, tenants or buyers.

Your potential clients are at different stages of their buying process at any given time. Some may be thinking about moving or researching the market, some may not yet know that your services are just what they need others may be in the process of actively looking for an agent.

Relying on property portals means you are only engaging with prospects who are actively looking – you are missing those at an earlier stage of the process.

Relying on portals for leads means you are missing prospects who haven’t yet reached the portal watching stage.

Now, imagine how much easier it will be to convert a lead if they already know you, have a positive impression of your brand and are impressed by your knowledge of the market way before they needed your service.

BLOGGING BENEFITS

Blogs can easily be shared through social channels, such as Facebook and Twitter, and in turn give you free publicity.

They can help you with the selling process by informing or educating your clients – simply copy and paste the URL of a specific blog into an email to a client and off you go.

Some of your blogs will also rank with the search engines and bring you additional traffic, brand exposure and establish your business as an authoritative voice in the local property market.

Here are four questions that I was recently asked about blogging by some of our estate agent clients:

1 How often should we update our blog?
This depends on the size of your business and the market share you are after. We recommend that clients with 1-5 branches post one blog per week as a minimum.   Larger businesses should be posting two or three blogs each week.

2 How long should a blog post be?
Blogs should be at least 300 words otherwise your post will have too few words to rank in the search engines. They can go to 1000+ words, but I recommend aiming for 500-650 words because online readers do not typically want to read long articles.

3 How do I select the topics I should cover?
There are several ways to go about your content planning depending on the aim of the post.

If you want to attract more traffic through search engines, it’s best to research the keywords people searching for property type into Google. We typically use Google’s free keyword planner to identify popular long-tail keywords.

What’s a long-tail keyword? Phrases that don’t get as much search traffic as more generic terms, but are easier to get to the top of Google’s search page results, and more relevant to your target audience.

These days, if someone has a problem, the first thing they usually do is search Google for a solution.

If you have the expertise to answer people’s questions and provide solutions for problems specific to your area, write about it.

This means that not only are you targeting long-tail keywords, and reaching an audience specifically interested in your service, but you are establishing yourself as an authority on your subject.

If you want to cover a topic that many people will share through social media, you can check the topics that are trending on Facebook or Twitter and write your take on it.

Alternatively, you can research local events coming up and cover them in your blog. This type of content is a great way to engage with the local community.

We also find online forums a great source for inspiration – it shows you what prospects are worried about or want to know more about.

4 How many pictures should you use in a blog?
Ideally your blog posts should have at least one picture to complement the text. Using images that you own is the best approach because they are unique to your business.

If the titles of the images are property-related and you add an alt tag when you upload them to your blog, they can rank under Google Images.

One client got over 1000 visitors to a blog a few months ago because the image we uploaded ranked for the phrase ‘London’ under Google images. Of course, there is no guarantee this will happen.

Do you have a digital marketing question? Email the editor: [email protected] and Nelly Berova, from Art Division, will answer it in a future article.