Michael Minard – How

How Thinking Like a Publisher Will Help You Attract and Engage Clients

Commentary by Michael Minard

Aleading real estate brokerage in Southwest Florida generates nearly 200 visitors from a single blog post. In New Hampshire, a monthly email that targets 22,000 individuals, showcasing new listings, price changes and a real estate article, generates 53% of its website traffic and 33% of their leads.

Major regional brokerages in North Carolina and Long Island, New York, deploy automated marketing tools to drive more website traffic, including Market Watch reports, new listing alerts, push notifications and customer-for-life drip marketing email campaigns. As much as 10% of their total traffic comes from these tools.

These brokerages are using marketing tactics that share one central element: the content is all hyperlocal.

That’s why real estate brokerages benefit when they think like news veterans to drive more targeted and quality traffic to their websites. News publishers understand that nothing connects better to their audience than local news and information that provides value.

Benefits of SEO Everything in real estate is searchbased. Customers search for the right neighborhood, the right home, the right lender and the right agent.

More than 90% of all real estate searches start online, and search engines, like Google, dominate where many customers begin.

Digital marketing experts estimate that people are exposed to 4,000 to 10,000 ads every day. Cutting through the clutter takes time and expertise. But the right SEO-based content system doesn’t need to be hard to deploy. Instead, it’s best when SEO support is turnkey.

Right time, right content Creating and maintaining an engaging real estate blog is challenging. Many brokerages don’t dedicate the resources needed for an effective SEO program because it can be too time-consuming.

But a robust, cost-efficient SEObased content strategy that leverages automation, drip marketing email campaigns and hyperlocal blog content can deliver the right content at the right time. This approach can make SEO one of the most profitable ways to market your brokerage website.

Agents benefit from a strategy like this, especially when they don’t have to lift a finger. They appreciate this type of marketing support that helps them grow their business.

The big takeaway Think like a publisher. About a third of all traffic to one of the country’s largest-circulation newspaper websites comes from search traffic, according to Alexa. They use SEO to build trust and gain insight from their readers. The result? Their engagement success is more than double their competitor’s average.

The right SEO-based content program can be a brokerage’s secret sauce for driving more traffic and building more leads. When a brokerage thinks like a publisher, they will drive more traffic to their website, generate more actionable leads and delight their agents.

To contact Delta Media with your SEO questions, email us at info@deltamediagroup.com. RE

Michael Minard is CEO and owner of Delta Media Group, a leading and trusted technology partner for many of real estate’s top brands and 100% family-owned and operated.