In today’s digital landscape, the importance of real estate content marketing can never be overestimated. Indeed, it often serves as a marketing cure-all provided you’re doing it right. Just think about it – you can talk to clients before even meeting them! There are, however, some critical mistakes that can hinder your efforts and weaken the digital impressions your website is delivering.
One of the most common reasons agents still haven’t embraced a content marketing mindset is it doesn’t yield apparent, quick rewards. Yes, it takes a long time to produce great real estate content, let alone for it to reach your target audience and convert the traffic into leads. The benefits are huge though, – and most importantly, long-term (more on that in #1).
Let’s take a look at some don’ts that keep your online marketing efforts from delivering outstanding results.
6 real estate content marketing mistakes to avoid
1) Not blogging whatsoever
The benefits of real estate content marketing are well enough for a few posts to be covered. But probably the best one is that a real estate blog can be your primary source of free and qualified traffic which then translates into more inquiries and closings.
Here are just a few crucial goals it lets you achieve:
- strengthens your SEO rankings and gets your website found organically easier;
- drive qualified traffic to your site;
- convert visitors into leads;
- power your social media marketing;
- build you a reputation of being a local real estate expert;
- turn your real estate website into a long-term asset that keeps bringing you leads months after your content was first published.
Now that looks like many goals reached with just one strategy, right? If you think that’s too much to lose, you might want to start with real estate content marketing right away if you haven’t already.
2) Not aiming at local SEO
The best (and probably the only way) to outrank big property portals and competition in search results is to focus on local real estate SEO.
This is where your real estate content comes in handy. It should help you achieve an important SEO goal: signal to search engines that your website is all about real estate in this particular area.
The best way to get started is to jot down the target keywords which you can then use when producing your real estate content. The best tool for identifying these search queries is Google Keyword Planner (it’s free and quite accurate).
Once you have that list ready, make sure to optimize your content for these keywords, whether it’s your landing pages, neighborhood pages, or blog posts. You can have a few pages optimized for nationwide keywords but, on the whole, avoid focusing too much on them. Your primary focus is your local area so make sure to cover locally relevant keywords, both high-volume and long-tail ones.
Local SEO is a very extensive area to be highlighted in this post so use our guide: Get on the Map: 21 Brilliant Ways to Get Started with Local Real Estate SEO.
3) Only targeting topics about the final sales stages
Oftentimes, it might be tempting to jump into covering topics that deal with last stages of the buyer’s journey, for example the closing process.
Remember that your audience is not equally sales-ready. Some people are evaluating the area on the whole, some are looking at a few property options and others landed on your website for the first time.
To catch up with all of these people, you need content tailored to their interests. It’s not at all complicated. Just make sure you create content that answers different types of questions: first-time homebuyer information, general info about your area and its neighborhood, investment opportunities, market updates, buyer and seller guides, etc. This way your real estate content will be diverse and naturally highlight various questions different audiences might have.
[Related post: 7 Types of Real Estate SEO Content That Make an Exceptional Blog].
4) Not providing an easy opportunity to opt-in
Real estate content marketing offers one important long-term advantage: you’re getting permission to have a relationship with these people over time. In other words, when someone signs up for your newsletter and market updates or downloads your guides, you can keep interacting with that person through content in the future.
Stats confirm that people who have already joined your sphere of influence are much more likely to convert into sales-ready leads than first-time visitors.
That’s why you’d want to make sure people can subscribe easily. Place your opt-in forms on all pages of your website so it really takes people just a few clicks to join you.
[Related post: How to Effectively Target Your Real Estate Niche Via Your Website].
5) Not creating neighborhood landing pages
People do enjoy reading neighborhood pages on real estate websites. It gives them a perfect opportunity to learn more about the area and what’s so great about living here.
Neighborhood pages are excellent examples of the cornerstone, evergreen content for your website. They do a lot of useful work for you:
- enhance your local real estate SEO;
- brilliantly showcase local markets and the best they have to offer;
- educate your website visitors on your neighborhood and area at large;
- help you stand out from the competition;
- instantly add credibility and trustworthiness to your site.
We’ve got a guide on how to create a remarkably good neighborhood landing page: How to Write a Perfect Neighborhood Page in 5 Easy Steps. Be sure to make these pages part of your real estate content marketing strategy.
6) Overlooking analytics
Lastly, an important real estate content marketing mistake to avoid is ignoring your performance stats. It really helps to take time and reflect on these figures as they show you what you’re good / not very good at.
Make sure to be using Google Analytics to capture crucial intelligence like website traffic, traffic channels, pageviews, audience overview, bounce rate and loads more. These metrics will then help you figure out what resonates with your audience best of all and what to focus on next.
Identify your top-performing content, produce more of it, promote it and analyze the outcomes again. The effort is worth the time as it empowers you to find the best ways of converting your traffic into customers.
[Related Post: 5 Insightful Real Estate Marketing Reports Agents Can’t Do Without].
What’s next?
Here you go – 6 most common real estate content marketing mistakes to stop doing today. After all, 70 percent of customers learn about a company through content rather than ads, and that is an exciting lead generation opportunity to capitalize on.
