Mistakes in Estate Agency Marketing No.22
Falling Short on Google
In terms of search-based publicity for your estate agency, the portals viciously dominate a Google search for anything property-related. So your chances of promoting your listings there are close to zero. So why try? Let the portals do their job – promoting your properties, and you do your job – promoting your agency!
This might sound anti-consumer, but in terms of success in estate agency, it is more important to promote your agency than any of the properties you are instructed to market. Properties come and properties go, but your agency is here to stay, and, if you promote it well enough, to thrive. How you handle those instructions once you have them is all about the customer experience of course, but if you don’t attract them in the first place, you don’t even have a business.
One important spin-off of great content writing is not just its Tweetability, Likeability and Shareability, but your Search Engine Optimisation. If you publish every article you write to your website, because those articles are relevant, interesting, meaningful and related to home-ownership/moving, then Google will very kindly elevate you up the rankings when people search for phrases that appear within your content.
For example, because I do marketing for estate agents as well as training for estate agents, the very fact that I have just included these two phrases in this article, and this article appears on my website, I can expect to feature higher on Google when people search for “estate agency marketing” or “estate agency training” (oh – there I go again). I have noticed a direct correlation between my website’s position on Google (always first page) with the release of a new advisory piece on my website.
Taking this further, that correlation is enhanced when I release an article to my RAT (Rawlings Agency Tips) subscriber database of about 17,000 agents. It works best when I include just the first paragraph and the reader needs to click the link to “read more here…” taking them directly to my website. In this way you have many people deliberately visiting one or more of your webpages, thereby telling Google that you’re popular. Clearly you should ensure that your introductory paragraph is compelling and enticing enough to justify “reading more”, but this is a good discipline an any event.
An additional benefit of encouraging people to “click to read more…” is that you can analyse who has engaged with your content, so you can then gauge their interest, enabling you to make your content even more relevant for them in the future. If you know who has read your article three times then the timing might be right to call them (subject to GDPR etc). Those who choose to read more of your material might also be well-suited to accepting your social media connect requests and other marketing initiatives from you such as a well-written flyer or a posted letter (see TheLeadHub.co.uk to find out how to identify actual addresses and automate your mailings).
In terms of your content topic itself, while lifestyle articles relating to eg football, cookery, films, travel, fashion, etc might be engaging and even occasionally add followers on social media, they can only diminish the relevance of the agency-related messages on your website, thereby potentially damaging your Google ranking. And if they are syndicated (ie in wide use across many websites), then this can do more harm than good. Best to restrict their use to padding out any lifestyle magazine you may choose to publish.
On the flipside, I see a lot of agents whose sole contribution to their “news” page or blog is self-congratulatory awards, charity runs, company events, new employees, etc. Although motivating internally, who really cares externally? Where’s the generosity? Where’s the value? Where are the SEO hooks? And how up to date are they? I frequently see agents' website newspages and blogs with material blatantly dated over a year ago (or even empty pages!) What does that say to your public?
Also, do ensure any images you include in your content actually have a searchable name, as Google considers the relevance of this as well. For example, the image I have included at the top of this article is called <estate_agency_content.jpg> It's also important that any such images are no more than 30kb-100kb. Any larger not only slows down your page loads, but Google will penalise you too!
There is far more to SEO than content, but that’s beyond the scope of this article. Google itself gives give some good pointers at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en but this is a dark art, so it’s also worthwhile speaking to one of the experts at eg Growthtrack for that.
In the meantime, if you need a hand with the critical element of the actual words to say, and what topics to include in your content, please do get in touch as I’m currently running a spring offer with up to two year's supply of free articles - exclusive to your agency (subject to availability). You can check availability, see samples and request the latest proposal here.
