......Write a blog post using Brad's suggestions for a neighborhood in your city.

We ran a real estate brokerage prior to starting ActiveRain. This is where Matt Heaton and Jon Washburn, ActiveRain Co-Founders, sharpened their search engine optimization (SEO) skills. One of the things that we found was that the more specific a person was when they searched online, the closer they were to actually making a purchase.

Say what?

We generated lots of leads. At some points we were generating over 100 per day in the state of Washington. Our site ranked well for lots of general city level searches. Searches like:

• homes for sale in blaine, wa
• Redmond Wa real estate
• Longview Washington houses

But we also ranked very well for more long tail searches, especially neighborhood level searches. Searches like:

• Semiahmoo Blaine homes for sale
  
• English Cove Redmond real estate
  
• Bankers Corner Longview houses

Semiahmoo, English Cove and Bankers Corner are all neighborhoods within their respective city. Now back to one of the things we found. The more specific a person's search, the closer they were to actually making a purchase. Depending on what study you want to look at, the average internet consumer starts researching real estate online about 8 months prior to buying their home. People that landed on our site, who eventually bought a home with a Brio agent, that used a neighborhood term in the search, took an average of 121 days to buy a home. That's four months, half the time of the average person searching for real estate.

So what?

So start writing more blogs targeted to the neighborhoods in your market. These are the blog posts that allow you to reach the top of the search engines. The competition for these hyper-local terms is much less crowded.

Briorealty.com still ranks #1 for the search term: 'English Cove Redmond' (and English Cove Redmond real estate) and we ha

ven't touched that website in four years. If an ActiveRain member had written a post about that neighborhood using Brad's suggestions I have no question they would rank #1. There are only 3640 competing results for this term. Now remember, way fewer people will do a specific search of this nature compared to 'Redmond Wa Real Estate' but don't you want them to find you when they do......since they are going to be closer to buying something?

Here are some great examples of posts focused to a neighborhood level. Some of these posts actually focus to a specific sub division of homes within a city:

• Gunston Cove - New Developments Just Minutes to Lorton and Fort Belvoir (ranks 2nd on Google for: Gunston Cove Lorton)
• Seattle, Washington Water Front Homes: Eastlake Floating Homes (ranks 1st on Google for: Eastlake Seattle Floating Homes)
• Condo For Sale In Newbury Village Cranston, RI (ranks 2nd on Google for: Newbury Village Condos for sale)

A few Caveats for receiving 1000 points

The post must be written AFTER my post. Meaning you can't just dig up an old post.

The post must be a minimum of 300 words. I'm not going to count but consumers want good information and you need to be able to explain the essence of the community.....it should be somewhere close to that length.

You need to READ BRAD's POST. You need to study the post. You need to implement his suggestions. He gives some SUPER HELPFUL pointers that I would like you to adopt in your post. The purpose of this is not to get 1000 points. The purpose is to write a blog post that ranks well in the search engines and focuses on a specific neighborhood in your market. Use this exercise to incorporate the things Brad discusses and get busy dominating hyper local search results in your town.

Since you read all the way to the end, a bonus........you can do one post a day for the next week. And I'll give you 1000 for each post. (that's 7000 points total) Don't half-ass it. This isn't for the points. This is for you to get better at writing neighborhood level posts that target consumers. Every time you write a post, I need you to come back and leave a link to the post. That way I can award your points. So in seven days this post should have TONS of links to quality neighborhood level posts. The link should be the title of your blog post linking back to the post. That way, if your title is no good, we can help you fix it. Of course, YOU ARE GOING TO READ BRAD'S POST so your titles will be great.

It's late in the day today. You have until tomorrow night July 23rd at 11:59pm (CST) to get your first link up. Then every 24 hours after that you can put an

other link up for the next six days. 7 days in total ending on July 29th. If you do one tonight, then don't do one tomorrow.....since the 22nd and the 23rd are counting as one day.

Ready, Set, GO!!!!

(EDITED: If you are not a real estate agent. Hang tight. I am working with a few people for a series of similar challenges specific to the other professionals on the site. I think I have a pretty good idea for Stagers and Mortgage people and even inspectors. Appraisers I'm a little stumped on what to do for you guys. Any ideas?)

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