In the studio today is Douglas Karr of Martech Zone and DK New Media and we are discussing a recent blog post on Martech Zone called How to Optimize Your Blog’s Next Article for Maximum Impact and how it applies to Real Estate SEO and Blogging.
Podcast Takeaways
- Page and Post Title – Two different and valuable components of Real Estate SEO
- Page Slug – A slight variance on this can increase your ranking in search engines
- Sharing and Featured Image – Make it easy and appealing for others to share your real estate blog posts
- Page Hierarchy – A structured post is more digestible and better read
- Visuals – visuals can increase the appeal of the page while illustrating the post points effectively
- Linking – link to other sites that support your real estate blog post, this won’t impact your real estate seo negatively
- Categories and Tags – a structured approach to your posts make the rest of your site more readable by search engines
- Meta Descriptions – show up in search engine page descriptions, so make them pique curiousity
- Grammer and Spelling – just a basic factor in appearing professional and knowledgable
- Promote and Repurpose – once the real estate blog post is live it helps if you promote and share it too
Real Estate SEO and Blogging – Optimizing Your Blog Posts Podcast Transcript
Adam Small: Hello, and welcome to the Real Estate Marketing Minute. I’m your host Adam Small and with me today is Mr. Douglas Karr. Hey, Doug, how you doing today?
Douglas Karr: Fantastic.
Adam Small: Awesome. So good to have you on the show again. It’s been a little while.
Douglas Karr: It has been. It’s been too long, sorry.
Adam Small: It has. It always is. It’s a funny thing. We started doing interviews and stuff and Real Estate Marketing Minutes and we haven’t really gone back to some of our technical stuff. I was thinking today that we would hit some technical stuff, especially centered around Real Estate SEO and Real Estate Blogging. We’re about to launch our own content management system and real estate agent websites–
Douglas Karr: Congratulations.
Adam Small: Well, thank you very much. Appreciate that. It’s really timely especially since you just did a post on your martech.zone marketing technology blog about … What’s it called and it’s specific? It’s actually-
Douglas Karr: It’s ‘How to Optimize Your Blog’s Next Article for Maximum Impact’.
Adam Small: Right. The interesting thing about that is that a lot of what you’ve got on there isn’t really just for blog posts. It could work for any-
Douglas Karr: Any article.
Adam Small: … page, any article, any content on your website, right?
Douglas Karr: Right. Absolutely.
Adam Small: Let’s kick off. What’s the first thing you would do to optimize a blog post, an article, content on the web for Real Estate SEO purposes?
Douglas Karr: Let’s take one step back and one of the things that I-
Adam Small: Let’s define SEO maybe and Real Estate SEO specifically?
Douglas Karr: Well, yeah. We could talk about that. It’s search engine optimization. I think a lot of people underestimate that if you do some … and, we’re not talking about massive amounts of work … but if you get a checklist together of things to do before you publish on your real estate blog, then your chances of your page getting found by search goes up dramatically. I have one client that we’ve gotten their search engine optimization traffic, that’s people searching on search engines for what they do, up about 73% without him writing differently, just the presentation of it, the speed of the site, mobile optimization. Then, we’ll go through this checklist.
Douglas Karr: Some of the things I’m going to assume for your listeners are that they have a good site. It’s fast. It works well on a mobile device. This is strictly about when I sit down to write a blog post or I write an article, what do I make sure that I get down when I do that?
Adam Small: Right, so this isn’t really the “technical” pieces of it that we’re talking about, right?
Douglas Karr: Right.
Adam Small: ‘Cause you’re right. There’s so many technical things.
Douglas Karr: It’s not about your domain. It’s not about your content management system.
Adam Small: It’s not about how fast it serves up. This isn’t about any of that stuff. This is about the actual content itself, right?
Douglas Karr: Yeah, so if I was going to write a blog post on another friend’s site or I was going to write an article for a publication online, these are the things that I would look out for.
Adam Small: Right. Okay, great. Then, with that said, what’s the first item that you look at? I’m not calling it the number one item, I’m saying the first item in your list, there is a difference there.
Real Estate SEO Page and Post Title
Douglas Karr: It is really the most important and that’s the title of your real estate blog post or title of your article. That’s what’s going to grab people’s eye. Some people are used to old journalism-type headlines that are just factual, that just say what it is. This one, I might have named it, ‘Before I Publish, What I Optimize’.
Adam Small: Right, right. Kind of dry, kind of boring.
Douglas Karr: Exactly.
Adam Small: It’s like, “Okay, I don’t know what the Hell that’s about, but-
Douglas Karr: It’s exactly what’s in there, but-
Adam Small: … doesn’t pique my interest.”
Douglas Karr: Exactly.
Adam Small: Instead, you named it …
Douglas Karr: Yeah, ‘How to Optimize … I used the word ‘your’ so I’m talking to the person and then ‘Your Blog’s Next Article for Maximum Impact’. I’m trying to get them to understand that, okay, so there’s things that I can do just to lift the impact of it.
Adam Small: Right, right, right.
Douglas Karr: A title is everything from a search engine standpoint because when people do a keyword search or search for a real estate agent Indianapolis, what needs to come up? Typically, a site with a page that’s titled …
Adam Small: That has something strong enough to make them want to click through, right?
Douglas Karr: Exactly.
Adam Small: It’s very similar, in fact, to the subject line of an email. A lot of times, especially with your marketing emails, if that subject line isn’t good and optimized then people are not going to open it.
Douglas Karr: That’s a great example.
Adam Small: My own personal experience, we’ve got a couple of drip campaigns that we sent out. In the first iteration of one of them, our second email, the open rate on it was only half of what the first email was and actually, it was half of the third, fourth, and fifth emails as well. It was because the title on it was really … Not title, but the subject was not as intriguing as the rest and so we went in and we changed it. Now, it’s on par with all the rest of them.
Douglas Karr: Yeah. There’s a lot of things that people do called clickbait too, which there’s good clickbait and bad. Bad clickbait is you’re really lying to people about what’s in the article.
Adam Small: Right, so you have to be real careful with that. You don’t want to put a title out there that’s not … I don’t want to use the word factual, ’cause you use that when you were talking about the journalism thing, but an inaccurate title.
Douglas Karr: Inaccurate, yeah.
Adam Small: You don’t want to mislead people. You don’t want it to be …
Douglas Karr: ‘Cause that might get people to your page, but then they’re going to leave and they’re not going to trust you anymore.
Adam Small: Right, right.
Douglas Karr: Some of the things that people do with clickbait that’s good are raising curiosity. On here I might have said, “You might be surprised at the ten things that you can do to optimize a blog post.”
Adam Small: Right.
Douglas Karr: Right?
Adam Small: Right.
Douglas Karr: Now, you’ve raised that intrigue level with people.
Adam Small: Yeah, what’s going to surprise me here and what can I do?
Douglas Karr: I find it a little bit hokey and I’ve not done that typically so I never really wanted to make that transition, but …
Adam Small: So, your dad joke persona hasn’t spread over into your Martech’s persona.
Douglas Karr: Thanks, yeah, exactly. But, I am always talking to the person and that’s-
Adam Small: It’s conversational. It’s not …
Douglas Karr: Instead of being third-person and everything else, I really try to be like I’m talking to you.
Adam Small: Right, right. This is a conversation. This isn’t scripted. It’s nothing dry. It’s not a lecture. It’s not a classroom, right?
Real Estate SEO and The Page Slug
Douglas Karr: Right. The second thing which you may or may not have control over is called a slug. For people listening, it’s when you click on a link, there’s the domain and there’s a slash and then there’s that URL, the information…
Adam Small: Right.
Douglas Karr: That’s called a slug. What I see a lot of people do is, you take a look at my title and there’s one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, ten words in my title. If I just left it as is, my post slug would be ten words long. It would be this ridiculously long title or URL. I switched that up and I just said, how to … I used how to ’cause those are important.
Adam Small: That’s a keyword, phrasing, Real Estate SEO.
Douglas Karr: Yeah, it’s a phrase that people are using, but how to optimize a blog post. That’s it. Kept it nice and simple, but it’s easy for people to see on a search engine result or if they put it in an email to someone, they could see that. If you can optimize the post slug, I always like a nice, short post slug ’cause it’s easy to be-
Adam Small: Concise, right?
Douglas Karr: Yeah.
Adam Small: Yep.
Douglas Karr: You run into an email sometimes where if you have a text email and it wraps the URL, it breaks the link.
Adam Small: It breaks it, right, right, right.
Douglas Karr: Yeah, so you don’t want that either. I do pay attention to the post slug. The next is different from the page title, but it’s the post title. This is going to confuse people.
Adam Small: Let’s try not to do that.
Douglas Karr: But, just because you name your article something doesn’t mean that the page is named that. This is a Real Estate SEO technique that a lot of people use, but for search engines, I might want that intriguing information. Maybe within my website, I want something a little bit more basic for my title. The opportunity there is you can do both. You can have a page title that’s one thing and your article title is something different. That’s typically within a Real Estate SEO title, a meta field-
Adam Small: Right, right, right.
Douglas Karr: … within … Like I said, it’s not something … I would say these aren’t in order. That’s a secondary thing.
Adam Small: Right, one of the benefits to that is that you can actually work with different phrasings of the same topic and help you rank for both of the phrasings there.
Douglas Karr: Yeah, an example would be if I’m writing about business to business. In my page title, I might say B2B. In my article title, I might write out business to business that’s Real Estate SEO for both terms.
Adam Small: Business to business.
Douglas Karr: Now, I’ve covered both.
Adam Small: Right, right, right.
Sharing and Featured Image
Douglas Karr: The next one is sharing and this is another one that I just see people miss the opportunity. I’ve done it too where people have written to me and they’ve said, “Hey, how do I share this?” Do you have buttons on your site? Do you have a method for people to share it? Make sure that you have some kind of sharable buttons there.
Adam Small: Right, and that’s your social sharing to various social services out there, social media networks that sort of thing, right?
Douglas Karr: Yeah. Featured image, people don’t know what this is, but it’s really important.
Adam Small: Right, I was actually going to actually have you define what that is first and then talk about where it can be used and why it’s so important.
Douglas Karr: Here’s an example. Let’s say you read a great article and you want to share it on Facebook. You put the URL on Facebook and up comes a blank picture and just a title.
Adam Small: Right, or the other thing that happens sometimes is that it’s the site’s logo or some other random image from the page.
Douglas Karr: Yeah. Basically, what content management systems allow you to do is set an image that’s associated with your article. I always try to use something that plants the seed in someone’s head that this is what they’re about to read.
Adam Small: Something relevant to what they’re going to read, right?
Douglas Karr: Yeah, so I did a rant post the other day and I had a lady with smoke blowing out of her ears.
Adam Small: Right, right.
Douglas Karr: I tried to get something compelling.
Adam Small: Something that, like you said, compelling, that piques the interest. They go, “Oh, well this might … ” ‘Cause it catches the eye. The thing with social in particular, social media, is they’re scrolling through, flipping through, and if it’s just text or if it’s just some weird logo or whatever, they’re just going to keep right on going, but if you … Why does that woman have steam coming out of her ears?
Douglas Karr: Exactly. That’s exactly it. It’s a funny picture-
Adam Small: Oh, that might be interesting. Let me have a look at that.
Douglas Karr: Yeah, it’s a funny picture. I’m going to click through on it.
Adam Small: Exactly.
Douglas Karr: A featured image is really, really important. Again, imagery, we’ll talk about it in a second here is just critical to capture people’s eyes.
Page Hierarchy
Douglas Karr: The next one is something that a lot of people don’t think about, but the hierarchy of your writing. What I mean by that is people don’t read a page from top to bottom. They read the title and then they scan. They might even scan and scroll. The thing is is if all you have is a one massive text block …
Adam Small: If you’ve got a novel sitting there without any breaks and headings or visuals and pictures, which you said we’ll talk about in a moment, but basically, that give them an opportunity if you put headings in there or even lists, it gives them an opportunity to go, “Oh, well, this is section that I’m going to be interested in, so I’m going to stop here and I’m going to read this.”
Douglas Karr: Subheadings, bulleted lists, numbered lists, blockquotes, so having a quote from someone or something, images within … If you’re telling a story or something, what additional images can you put in there? Is there a chart or diagram that you can put in or whatever?
Douglas Karr: All of those things are going to be capturing that person’s eye. Now, the interesting thing that happens is, people will read the post title, they’ll start scrolling down the page, they’ll see a headline and see a picture, and then they’ll read that section.
Adam Small: Right, right, right.
Douglas Karr: They might not even read the rest of the article.
Adam Small: They may not. It may pique them. They may go, “Okay, I need to read the rest of this,” and they may go up and start all over or they may just read that one little bit and walk away with whatever that bit of information was.
Douglas Karr: Now, without that, the problem is is that people will go to the page, just see that it’s a big text block, and they’ll go back to the search engine. Now, that doesn’t mean that you didn’t write a great article.
Adam Small: It just means that you didn’t get them to see what they were looking for.
Douglas Karr: That’s exactly it.
Adam Small: They weren’t able to find what they were looking for quickly because our attention span … I hate the phrase that our attention spans have shortened ’cause that’s not really what it is, but we’re looking for one thing and if you don’t make it easy for me to find it, I’m going to go somewhere else where it is easy to find it.
Douglas Karr: Yeah, in fact, you’re saying it the right way. If you write hierarchically, I don’t know if that’s a word, but if you write-
Adam Small: It is now.
Douglas Karr: It is now. If you write that way-
Adam Small: Trademark.
Douglas Karr: … you will get people to stay longer. You will capture their attention.
Adam Small: And, they’ll most likely come back because they’re looking for that topic for a reason and they’ll most likely come back because in their head, “Oh, that was easy to read. I’m going to come back and I’m going to look at other things that this person has written.”
Douglas Karr: You and I have … We probably do it a hundred times a day. We go search for something online and we keep searching for it until we find it. There wasn’t a problem with our attention span.
Adam Small: No, no.
Douglas Karr: There was a problem with the pages that we kept bringing up.
Adam Small: It wasn’t what we wanted.
Douglas Karr: Exactly.
Adam Small: Right, right, right.
Visuals
Douglas Karr: Visuals, I talked about those a little bit, but the thing is, you don’t have to come up with these yourself either. Now, I’m not telling people to go out and take copyrighted images and throw copyrighted images into your stuff. You can get into a lot of trouble for that.
Adam Small: Don’t do that. Don’t steal other people’s images.
Douglas Karr: What I’m talking about is … Here’s a perfect example. A couple times I’ve written articles about a certain website. I’ve gotten my camera out and taken a picture of the website on my monitor, just to give a cool picture.
Adam Small: Right, right.
Douglas Karr: It’s my picture. I can share it and I didn’t have any copyrighted material in that are anything like that. If you’re talking about, maybe it’s a house renovation, go take a picture of a house.
Adam Small: That’s being redone, right? Renovated, right?
Douglas Karr: Yeah, exactly. And, it’s your picture taken of public property and everything else.
Adam Small: Right, right.
Douglas Karr: The other one that’s funny that I don’t see a lot of people do but I do it a lot is I steal some traffic sometimes. I find a great video on YouTube and I share it. Let’s say it’s a video about staging your home. You might sit there and go, “Well, I got to go spend a couple thousand dollars to get a videographer and we’ll do a video about staging.” Okay, there’s probably a thousand videos on YouTube about staging your home. If you can embed that video, it’s okay.
Adam Small: Right, because that sharing, that posting to YouTube, that whole process is designed for that specifically.
Douglas Karr: Exactly. So, put that video and say, “Hey, this video from Karen in Phoenix, Arizona does a perfect job.” Link to her site. Tell people who she is and everything else, but watch this 10-minute video on staging ypur home.
Adam Small: Right, you could even write a summary of the video and you’ll get Real Estate SEO traffic even though the video’s not yours.
Douglas Karr: Absolutely.
Adam Small: Now, the thing you don’t want to do is download that video, edit it, and then re-upload it. That’s not cool. Let’s not do that.
Douglas Karr: Yeah, don’t do that.
Adam Small: But, commentary is perfectly fine.
Linking
Douglas Karr: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. The links, I just talked about that, that if you share something of somebody’s, give them credit back with a link. There used to be this old thing with SEO that people use to just say, “Don’t outbound link. Don’t outbound link. Don’t outbound … ” It would be like-
Adam Small: ‘Cause it was taking juice away from your site and drop your Real Estate SEO, right?
Douglas Karr: Yeah. Here’s the problem is, you’re thinking like a scientist and not thinking like a user. If I go to your website and you have just what you said, an overview of a video let’s say, and you wrote a paragraph about it. But, I want more information. If you have a link there that says, “Hey, here’s a great article on LinkedIn about this,” you’re feeding your audience and you’re providing value to your audience.
Adam Small: By doing that, guess what? They are becoming your audience.
Douglas Karr: Exactly.
Adam Small: They’re coming back.
Douglas Karr: Exactly. They’re going to appreciate the fact that you’re providing value there. Nonsense to the SEO consultants that say don’t outbound and all that stuff. For people that might say, “Well, Doug, what do you do?” I take care of a number of client’s sites and I have some big sites of my own. I outbound the crap out of all of them.
Adam Small: And, it doesn’t hurt yours at all.
Douglas Karr: Nope.
Adam Small: I think it actually helps because what ends up happening, if you’ve got your stuff set up right, you’ll actually see where links are coming in to your site and a lot of times when people see that link coming in, they go back and they’ll either share your article or they’ll link back to you because you wrote great article about them.
Real Estate SEO Categories and Tags
Douglas Karr: Yep, exactly. Categories are important for Real Estate SEO. Most content management systems have two things, they have one, categories, which is just like you would think.
Adam Small: Right, it’s just a way of categorizing your content.
Douglas Karr: Yeah, so maybe one category is mortgages, the next one-
Adam Small: Buyers, sellers, home loans.
Douglas Karr: Yeah.
Adam Small: Yeah, exactly.
Douglas Karr: The thing is to pre-think those ahead of time and really think about your audience and what they’re interested in.
Adam Small: So, categories is where you want to be really structured for Real Estate SEO, right?
Douglas Karr: Yes.
Adam Small: That’s where you want to structure your website content in such a way that it organizes it so that it’s easy to find relevant content.
Douglas Karr: Just like I said, if I wanted to read about mortgages, I would click on the mortgage category and I could read 20 articles on mortgages.
Douglas Karr: Here’s what I see all the time. I see the category called uncategorized.
Adam Small: Right, everything should go into uncategorized, right?
Douglas Karr: It’s because people set up with the default, never added a category, never changed it, and all of their stuff is in … Now, there’s two reasons why that’s bad. One is from an SEO standpoint you just told Google that uncategorized is a keyword that you’re-
Adam Small: Searching for. You’re looking to rank on uncategorized.
Douglas Karr: … hoping to get good Real Estate SEO on that. Yeah.
Adam Small: Yeah.
Douglas Karr: The second is, you’re not helping your readers by organizing your content.
Adam Small: Right, right.
Douglas Karr: Think about 12 different categories and stay disciplined. One of the things that I use my categories to is I look, what was my last post in that category? I haven’t written about that in three months. Let me write an article.
Adam Small: Right, so in this case, it might be I haven’t written a buyer’s article in three months. It’s time for me to write a buyer’s article. It’s time for me to write a seller’s article of whatever it may be, right?
Douglas Karr: Yep. So, categories are really important to Real Estate SEO from that standpoint. The next one is tags. Tagging, a lot of people don’t do this, but here’s where it makes a big difference is when you’re writing your article, if there’s things that people are … Maybe you were talking about buyer, so maybe it’s buyer and it’s bank financing. What other terms?
Adam Small: Well, it could be any sort of thing. You could actually do by neighborhood too.
Douglas Karr: Neighborhoods, yeah.
Adam Small: It could be Irvington buyers, Greenwood buyers.
Douglas Karr: Great example.
Adam Small: That sort of thing as well.
Douglas Karr: What tags do is two things. I don’t see a lot of interaction with used actually clicking on tags on my site, but where it really helps that people don’t understand is internal searches. If I, Just like you said, I wanted to buy a house in Irvington, I would search your real estate site for Irvington homes for sale. Well, if you had all these homes for sale and you didn’t tag them with Irvington, they might not pop up. Internal search, tagging is really, really important. I think over time, your site really becomes a lot richer and a lot easier to use when you tag well.
Adam Small: Well, then the other part of tagging is that it’s a more freeform style of categorization. Like with our blog posts, we do an interview with an accountant. Now, do I really want to create an accountants category? No, but I might tag them with accountant so that I can still see the fact that I interviewed an accountant and somebody could come and say, “Hey, search real estate accountant,” right?
Douglas Karr: Exactly, yeah.
Adam Small: And, it might pop up.
Douglas Karr: It will if you tagged it.
Adam Small: If I did it right, it will.
Douglas Karr: Now, we’re not saying that it won’t if you don’t tag it, but it definitely will if you do.
Adam Small: You’re just ensuring that it will.
Douglas Karr: So, it’s a really good practice.
Adam Small: Exactly.
Meta Descriptions
Douglas Karr: The next one is meta descriptions. A lot of people don’t understand how valuable this is, but when you do a search on a search engine, you’re going to come up and it’s going to have the title of the page, it’s going to have the URL of the page, and then there’s going to be this little couple lines of text-
Adam Small: The excerpt.
Douglas Karr: I think it’s about a hundred characters or something like that.
Adam Small: Something along those lines, yeah.
Douglas Karr: Maybe it’s more now. Maybe it’s 160 or something. Anyways, when you think about you looking at that search engine result page, you typically clicked on the one where the title and the description matches exactly what you were looking for. What I see a lot of people do is they don’t change their meta description and it’s typically a field within the site, sometimes, like you said, it’s called excerpt or sometimes it’s a totally separate field called meta description. The opportunity there is to sell it, right?
Adam Small: Right. Because what happens if you don’t is a lot of the content management systems will just take the first couple of lines of your article, which that could be just you gearing up and absolutely nothing relevant to what it’s really about.
Douglas Karr: Nothing interesting, yeah.
Adam Small: Right. You take and you sell it, right?
Douglas Karr: Yeah, so let’s say Irvington. We got on that. Let’s say I wrote about a house in Irvington. My house, the listing and all the information, might be there on what the neighborhood is and how good it is and everything else, but in that meta description, I can sell it in two sentences. I could say, “Newly renovated, under-valued home just went on the market.”
Adam Small: Right, right.
Douglas Karr: I can really pronounce …
Adam Small: You can talk about the good parts about it without having to sort through all the filter.
Douglas Karr: Exactly. Now, remember people aren’t seeing your site, they’re just seeing the title, URL, and meta description on the search engine page.
Adam Small: So, to take it back to an email analogy or actually, kind of an entrepreneur analogy would be better, it’s that elevator pitch, that 60-seconds, you’re in front of them, and now you need to convince them to click that link through. That’s essentially what this is is that elevator pitch. You condense it. You make it interesting and the whole point of it is just enough to get them to go, “Okay, show me more.”
Douglas Karr: That’s exactly it. Yeah. Please, again, don’t clickbait them. Don’t lie. Tell them what they’re going to get.
Adam Small: Right, right.
Douglas Karr: Then, the last one, and everybody might laugh at this for people that know me, is …
Adam Small: I laughed.
Grammer and Spelling
Douglas Karr: Yeah, is grammar and spelling.
Adam Small: I laughed not because his grammar, but because his spelling is-
Douglas Karr: Horrendous.
Adam Small: … atrocious, yes.
Douglas Karr: It’s because I’m a stream-of-consciousness write. So, I see my spelling errors an hour later.
Adam Small: Right, but you don’t see them when you’re writing it.
Douglas Karr: I don’t see them when I’m writing.
Adam Small: It’s like me with text messages. I sent one to my son the other day and I was telling him at the library cops were going to come get him. It was actually the library chips were going to come get him. I said, “That’s what the California Highway Patrol’s called.”
Douglas Karr: Nice. Nice recovery, dad. Yeah, yeah. But, grammar and spelling is absolutely one of those things that I’m not turned off by them. I’m not ’cause I make mistakes all the time, but there’s a certain percentage of the audience that you lose credibility-
Adam Small: Tune out immediately.
Douglas Karr: … instantaneously. They think you’re dumb or they think this. So, my thing is I use a tool called Grammarly.
Adam Small: Right. Nice little plugin, built right in.
Douglas Karr: Nice little plugin and it basically tells me, “You’re a dummy. You wrote T-O-O instead of to, instead of T-O.”
Adam Small: It’s got the grammar as well as the spelling.
Douglas Karr: Yeah, yeah. It even has now it was tone and all kinds of good stuff.
Adam Small: I’ve seen some of their recent video commercials on YouTube and stuff, it’s really come a long way.
Douglas Karr: Yeah, I forget what it is, $60 a year or something like that.
Adam Small: I don’t know. It’s well worth it.
Douglas Karr: It’s worth not being embarrassed. That’s the thing. There’s nothing worse and it always happens to me that I’ll be in my car driving somewhere and someone will text me or whatever and say, “You’ve got a really embarrassing spelling error in your second paragraph.”
Adam Small: It’s usually me.
Douglas Karr: Yeah, and I’m like, “Come on!”
Adam Small: I wait until you get into the car to do it.
Douglas Karr: Thanks, I appreciate that. I’ll walk you guys through again, title, featured image, hierarchy, the post slug, visuals, links, categories, tags, meta descriptions, grammar and spelling. Then, now you got it ready, and I talked about sharing before, now it’s when I publish the post-
Adam Small: Right, what do you do?
Promote and Repurpose
Douglas Karr: … I got to go promote it.
Adam Small: Yeah.
Douglas Karr: I need to put it on LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter and have sharing buttons on it for other people to share it and everything else. I’m surprised at the amount of people that don’t share what they write.
Adam Small: Do anything with it. Exactly, exactly.
Douglas Karr: Yeah. Nobody’s going to magically come and discover your stuff for you. You’ve got to work at.
Adam Small: That’s what Google’s for.
Douglas Karr: Yeah.
Adam Small: But, you can actually drive a lot more traffic if you share it and then other people will share it and that sort of thing. Another thing that you do actually is you send an email with the article in it a well.
Douglas Karr: I do too. Yeah, I do that and then on what’s known as evergreen content … Evergreen content is timeless content, so this post, for example, is one that it’s evergreen, right?
Adam Small: Right.
Douglas Karr: I can continue to update it and keep it up-to-date over the years. Well, this is one that I published and I promote probably on a quarterly basis through social media. People don’t remember that I promoted it three months ago.
Adam Small: It’s one you push out on a regular basis.
Douglas Karr: Yeah.
Adam Small: Like you said, quarterly because it is, in fact, evergreen, you can constantly push this out. From a real estate perspective, that’s actually a huge opportunity to make sure that you’re content stays relevant and up-to-date in people’s eyes is you can … Buyers and sellers stuff is constantly being searched for and looked for, so if you’re putting something out there pretty regularly about that, then your likelihood of driving more traffic is going to increase.
Douglas Karr: Well, the other great thing is you don’t have to come up with a new blog post.
Updating Old Posts to Improve/Correct their Real Estate SEO
Adam Small: Just update it.
Douglas Karr: Just update your current ones. So, take five minutes, go put a new video in it, go find a new graphic to put in it, optimize it a little bit, tweak it for the time or day or whatever, and get it out there.
Adam Small: Well, and the nice thing about that tweaking like that too is in something that Doug demonstrated to me the other day, a couple weeks ago actually I should say. We took an article from our blog post that was eight or nine years old and it was ranking on the second page of Google. Doug and I walked through it and with some of these recommendations that he did, now we’re in the number four position for that particular term instead of being on second.
Douglas Karr: The reason why for everybody listening is, it just got stale. It was still a good article, but the dates on it were old. So, what was happening was if people saw that this was published eight years ago, they weren’t going to click on it.
Adam Small: Right, ’cause it’s irrelevant at this point from their perspective.
Douglas Karr: They think it’s irrelevant.
Adam Small: Right, from their perspective it’s irrelevant but it really wasn’t.
Douglas Karr: By taking it, we added some images to it. We updated the featured image, I think, on it, made it a little bit more compelling. What we did was basically present a new article. Now, the URL never changed. All of that search engine authority that you had before-
Adam Small: Stayed.
Douglas Karr: … stayed and then when people shared it and people clicked on it and everything else, then it just popped right up because it was already great.
Adam Small: Right, right. The thing is, even most of the content didn’t change. It was small changes and some additions.
Douglas Karr: Exactly.
Adam Small: But, most of it didn’t change. From my perspective, going from the second page to the first page, that’s an enormous Real Estate SEO jump.
Douglas Karr: Huge, huge.
Adam Small: Actually, I think it’s number four position on the first page. Wow!
Douglas Karr: That’s the thing I tell people. Work smarter, not harder.
Adam Small: Right.
Douglas Karr: You can sit there and try to think of blog posts to write every single day, but when you have one sitting out there that’s on page four and … We use a tool SEMrush, S-E-M rush, to test that. All we had to do was go, “Wow, that’s ranking on page four and it’s eight-years-old. Is there something we can do to fix that?” Yep.
Adam Small: Just a little tweak here and-
Douglas Karr: And, done.
Adam Small: It’s huge, right?
Douglas Karr: If you have 200 articles out on your site, chances are there’s-
Adam Small: You got some that are ranking well enough, but they’re getting a little stale. If you just tweak them, your Real Estate SEO is going to jump.
Douglas Karr: Exactly.
Adam Small: All right, great. Before we close up, Doug, any other thoughts? Any final thoughts?
Douglas Karr: That’s it. Like I said, nowadays, SEO used to be about quantity and speed. It’s not anymore. And, I mean speed of publishing. How often you published and frequency of publishing. Nowadays, it’s really write a great article. I used to write a blog post … I actually used to write two a day. For a spell that worked, but it doesn’t work anymore. Now, it’s really if I can spend three days working on a really great article that’s in-depth, my return on investment is huge for that.
Adam Small: Yeah, yeah.
Douglas Karr: That’s the thing that we want to get across is take the time and go through these steps and optimize your article. Let’s say I took two hours to write an article and I took these 15 minutes, maybe 20 minutes-
Adam Small: Yeah, it wasn’t long at all.
Douglas Karr: … to optimize it. The fact that I can get a 73% increase in traffic is worth that 20 minutes.
Adam Small: Absolutely. Cool. All right, well, thanks so much for joining us today, Doug. It’s been great. That was a great article on your post martech.zone, and a great discussion on Real Estate SEO and Real Estate Blogging. If you guys like what you’re listening to, don’t forget to like and/or subscribe to our channel. Thanks so much. Have a great day.
