Though I haven't seen a lot of online discussion about it lately, there is an ongoing debate about how much of a real estate blog's content should be pure real estate versus community or other information. I have adopted the community blogging approach for several reasons:
- I live and work in a vacation resort market, thus a lot of tourism.
- Tourists who've visited for years tend to make up the bulk of vacation home buyers.
- I get a lot of content sent to me via email from local business and the town, so easy to post.
- The automation and plugins for fast posting have resulted in a site with more than 800 pages.
The question comes down to whether having a lot more non-real estate related content than taking the concentrated real estate approach is less effective for SEO, site visitor retention, and ultimately leads to deals. I did a short article here on statistics for site page views. The gist is that I do get a high percentage of single page site visitors (technically a bounce) when they come in on tourism related searches.
However, I have great position for competitive real estate key phrase searches, and these visitors made up 70%+ of page views in a check I made this week. I believe that I'm not hurting my real estate business by posting more about the community than posts with real estate key words. It's probable I would have a higher conversion ratio to leads if I stuck to real estate, but the ease of posting free original content sent to me by others makes my blog site valuable to a far wider audience.
Hi Jim,
I sent you a quick email with a press release to keep you updated on what’s rehava.com is doing when it comes to updating its blog. They are using BeliefNetworks, a leader in semantic intelligence and predictive analytics. BeliefNetworks provides rehava with online technology to generate high quality original content as well as real estate news and market trends from across the web, blogs and Twitter, this is all in addition to original posts by the broker and agents of rehava.