Buckle up, this one is going to be a bit longer than normal.
The leaves on the trees around our home fall off every fall. They're gorgeous when the colors change, but soon they're on the ground, and brown, and soon broken into bits and returning to the soil.
Many blog posts are the same way. They shine for a short time, serve their purpose, but lose their ability to attract consumers quickly. Once the parade is over, the fireworks gone, the grand opening in the rear view mirror, there's not much reason for that post to be on the end of a consumer search.
So how do you make sure your blog and website stay leaved out year long, year after year, aka EVERGREEN?
It starts with topic selection. What information will your potential clients seek year after year?
For us, we know that buyers will continue to look for low maintenance housing this year, and the next, and the next, and long after we've decided to stop being real estate agents. There are always people that need to downsize, need a home with fewer stairs, want to live on a golf course, spend less time in the yard, etc. Anything I write the fills those needs has a good start on being at the end of a web search.
Part of that topic evaluation includes understanding the competition for the same topics. If you go after the exact same audience as MSN, Yahoo, Zillow, R.com, etc. their mega-budgets are going to kick your rear. They dominate the search terms that are considered short tail, e.g. the most common search terms that aren't too specific (e.g. homes for sale in Cincinnati is pretty broad and high competition).
If you move away from short tail and further away from the main search terms and get more specific, you're in long tail search country, and that's where the bread and butter are for the typical agent. E.g. Patio homes for sale in Mason Ohio gives me two splits from the short tail search. Patio homes is a specific type of home and Mason Ohio is a bedroom community of Cincinnati. If I want to move even further into long tail, adding another keyword phrase (with full basements, with 2 car garage, new construction). take me further into the long tail territory and even further away from the 800 pound gorillas of real estate marketing.
So now I know topics that give me potential long tail search terms, but just because something is long tail doesn't make it good to write. For example, short sales might be long tail, but the short and the long of it is I personally hate working them and never want to work them again, so why write about them? I'm also not a fan of rentals or the lowest priced homes in our market. I've only got so many hours to give clients, and I want those hours to give me a decent return on my time.
So once you identify long tail topics that suit your business, what's next?
Writing your post with content that doesn't become out of date is a critical part of evergreen posts.
If I am writing about new construction, sooner or later that community will finish building. Links to builder floor plans will be broken. If you mentioned pricing, buyers will be calling you 10 years later and disappointed that they can no longer buy a new construction patio home for $250,000...and their budget can't manage the $500,000 price that it takes today.
When I write about a subdivision, I'll include as much factual information as I can, since most facts will never change. The builder, the home styles, square footage, age, lot sizes, etc. Those are fixed data. I can add in what is appealing about the community: close to X, amenities, etc.
Other information I may include, but is subject to change. E.g. our favorite area restaurant may go out of business or change its name. The HOA management company may change. The monthly charges may change (I can mitigate that somewhat with "approximately" $300/month).
To stay evergreen, any links you use would be best used going to the home page vs. further into a website. E.g. a school district's home page will stay the same, but they may change the remaining structure of their site.
Any pictures you use should be stored where they won't go away, or have the URL link change. No one likes a white box where a picture is supposed to be.
For us, our best use of evergreen is an IDX search page. A blog post is static (it never changes). Home listings are dynamic (they change regularly). Combine a blog post with an IDX search and you get the best of both worlds, evergreen static content and dynamic home search results.
Our best IDX search page has over 44,000 views and 8 closings (to date). That page (and other similar pages) on our Wordpress site keeps working for us year after year.
Do the work ONCE.
Update as needed (which shouldn't be too often, if at all, unless your MLS changes and fouls up your IDX search pages...been there, done that!).
Repeat.
Follow up when contacted.
It's pure pull marketing. You keep doing the other things that bring you business and take up more of your time, while the evergreen posts are out there ready to go the next time the right long tail search term goes into Google.
Until next Tuesday, just Ask An Ambassador if you need help!
Bill & Liz aka BLiz
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