Turning Browsers Into Buyers: 9 Content Marketing Tips for Residential Real Estate Brands

In the online marketing game, residential real estate agents have a steep mountain to climb. With hundreds, if not thousands, of agents and brokers in each city, there’s a lot of competition for a few prime Google spots. But the situation isn’t as bleak as you might fear — only a small percentage of your competitors are doing it right. The ones that are succeeding are combining a smart content marketing strategy with savvy search engine optimization (SEO), the crucial process that can help you vault up the search rankings when potential customers look for real estate services online.

Indeed, great content marketing and smart SEO go hand in hand when it comes to forging your success online. With that in mind, here are nine tips to help you create great content that’s optimized to help you scale Mount Google.

1. Quantity is good, but quality is key

Although longer content does tend to perform better in search rankings, the quality of that content is still of primary importance. Your content, in other words, must deliver value to your readers. Tedious, poor-quality content may help you with Google, but if it doesn’t capture your reader’s interest, it’s useless. You might be able to get people to come to your site, but if your content is no good, they’re not going to stay, and they’re not going to hire you to help them sell their house.

2. Cut the fluff and get local

The internet is littered with generic real estate content: “10 Ways to Stage your Home” or “How to Incorporate the Color Blue.” When creating content, try to stick with topics that are relevant to your area and market. Instead of writing the next nonspecific “Home Staging Tips” article, consider instead crafting something like “5 Reasons Why Home Staging is Critical in [Your City].” Not only will it attract more readers, but it will also show your extensive knowledge of the area and help establish reader trust.

3. Focus on your clients 

Remember, the best content is about them, not you. Focus on client-oriented content. Create a “20XX Market Update” blog post that outlines industry trends for the year, or an e-book chock full of local real estate tips to help your clients successfully navigate your local market. Promoting your content on social media is a smart idea, especially when combined with a call-to-action that will get your visitors’ contact information. 

4. Publish optimized market updates

Prospective home buyers and sellers will appreciate it if you pay heed to their (often urgent) need for up-to-date local market data. These folks frequently use localized keywords to find real estate market updates on Google. You can double down on your strategy to deliver helpful localized content by publishing market updates that give recent figures specific to your market. People generally search for “market report” or “market update” along with the year and city. So use the right keywords; for example, “September [Your City] Real Estate Market Update.”

5. Urge them to action

We’ve seen it time and time again: a great blog post, but no call to action — the writer has forgotten to encourage readers to follow up. Content marketing is more than creating content people can find easily and read happily. It’s also about motivating them to act. Without an effective call to action, your readers will say nothing more than, “Great content — thanks, bye!” 

6. Look to the numbers

Without analytics, content marketing is like wandering around in the dark. Analytics provide you with critical information about how people interact with your website. They tell you what content visitors love and what content they don’t. They also show you your top-converting pages, so you can funnel traffic there. There are tons of analytical solutions out there, from a basic Google Analytics account to advanced A/B testing options like Optimizely and Visual Website Optimizer.

7. Consider spicing up your content with visuals

The written word is king when it comes to delivering high-quality, useful content for real estate audiences, but pictures and videos can help that content get more attention. Using relevant media in your content can boost reader engagement, as well as provide useful breaks in text. When adding pictures and videos, make sure to incorporate your keywords into the metadata associated with those media (file name, etc.) so that they’re also optimized for search.

8. Think in chunks

Longer content is great, as we discussed. But it’s easy to forget that it still needs to be readable. Writing that goes on for days without so much as a carriage return is going to seriously tax your readers and cause them to bail on your page. Use subheads, short paragraphs, lists, and bullet points to break up your content into more digestible, bite-size pieces.

9. Hook them with the heading

Last, but not least, don’t forget the headline. Your headline is your first opportunity to grab a reader’s attention, and if it isn’t catchy, it will likely be your last. Headlines with numbers — particularly random numbers, like “12 [Your City] Market Stats Every Homeowner Needs to Know” — are a great way to catch readers’ attention.

Real estate agents and brokers are busy — we get it. Your schedule ebbs and flows, so you may not have the time to sit down and create a steady stream of quality content that will score high with Google and bring in tons of viable leads.

Prose Media can help. We know how to create real estate content that’s localized, relevant, up-to-date, highly readable and eminently useful — all of the things that will help you score high in the SEO game and demonstrate your value to potential customers. By combining the skills of our professional writers with our expertise in optimizing content for great SEO performance, we can help raise your website’s online profile and get you the traffic you need. Sign up today for free, no-obligation access to our platform.