How to Drive More Organic Traffic to Your Real Estate Website

Fact: No matter how great you think your real estate website is, if you simply sit back and expect it to get tons of organic search traffic and therefore tons of leads, you are going to be greatly, greatly disappointed.

If you are in this boat, don't feel bad. Week in and week, out we hear agents tell us how they paid tons of money for a custom website and it just isn't working. While it is theoretically possible that there could be some SEO problems with the site in question, more often than not, that is not the case. The reason these sites "Aren't Working" is because the real estate agent has spent no time planning or deploying a content marketing strategy to build organic search traffic.

A solid inbound marketing plan, and a content marketing strategy to go along with it, is critical if you want to succeed in the organic search game. Besides just driving traffic, your inbound marketing plan should be targeted so that you don't get just "any traffic" but the specific traffic you want that is comprised of your ideal clients.

Because this is such a frequent misconception about websites, and because content marketing seems to be such a tough thing to get ramped up for many agents, today I thought I would share three tips to consider when planning your content marketing strategy.

1) It all starts with Client Personas

Before you type one word, set up one social media or blog site, or start researching topics that you will write about, you HAVE TO create your client personas. Client personas are the foundation of everything you will do with your inbound marketing and content strategy.

Client personas are:

Semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer based on real data and some select educated speculation about customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals.

While these personas do require you do some market research, it's not as difficult as it sounds. There are plenty of online sites describing great detailed demographic information about your marketplace and the people that live in your marketplace.

While you are building these client personas, remember that:

• They are not specific, real people
• They are not influenced by target markets
• They are not influenced by changes in technology

For more information on this, you can read a blog post we wrote about client personas.

2) Now that You Are Ready to Write, WHAT Do You Write About?

Your client persona dictates literally EVERYTHING about the content you are going to be writing. Using the client personas you have developed, you need to put yourself in the minds of these personas and try to figure out what exactly they would be typing into Google's search engine. In other words, what are they interested in?

The things they are typing into the search engine are referred to as "Long Tail Keywords." The way it works is simple:

1. Your target audience searches for something
2. You create content for what they are searching for
3. You get organic traffic to your website

To get started, do research on your target audience and pinpoint about a half dozen long tail keywords you are confident they will be specifically searching for. When you come up with these, remember to be specific. For instance, "Condos for sale" would be a very generic keyword you would want to stay away from. Then again, if you choose something like "Downtown San Francisco luxury condo lofts for sale," you are generating a keyword that is much more niche specific and likely to return results.

Once you have your long tail keywords picked, start writing. Write articles that use variants of this keyword phrase naturally throughout your article. There is a little bit of science to this, but I promise it is not that difficult.

3) Content Marketing Requires Frequency and Consistency

As a rule of thumb, we are creatures of habit. The more quickly you settle into the habit of regularly putting out compelling content on your blog, the better off you will be.

First off, search engines love regular content. The more frequently you are posting new content, the more favorably the search engines are going to be looking at you. You should plan on posting at least two blog posts per week.

The prospects reading your blog will appreciate the frequency and consistency as well. Nobody wants to wonder where to go to find information, or worse yet, "if" there is going to be more information. If you set a regular blogging schedule, your prospects will become accustomed to the schedule and look forward to what is to come. This regularity will ensure that the highest number of people are reading your posts.

It does require some work to set up a solid content marketing strategy. As they say, though, "Anything worthwhile never comes easy." If you want your website to perform on the internet, you have to develop a solid content marketing strategy.

To view the original article, visit the Leading Agent blog.