How to write a blog article

An estate agency blog can bring your business many benefits, from SEO to an increase in traffic. A blog will also improve your credibility within your industry and allow you to prove to your audience that you are an industry expert.

When you give your audience valuable information and advice which is relevant to their needs, you are not only increasing traffic to your website but boosting brand loyalty and awareness as well.

How to write a blog article:

You should write articles informing your customers about relevant and interesting information about your business, local area and industry. 

The articles should be a few paragraphs long (at least 300 words), with your keywords placed within them (e.g. Estate Agents in ‘your area’). You should try to write as many articles as you can (we’d recommend at least one a week). You need to post articles as regularly as possible because it gives Google a reason to come back to crawl and index your website again and again.

How to write these articles for SEO benefit

Write about things your audience wants to read

Your articles need to be written with your audience in mind. Only write about things that will be of interest to your audience, this could be anything from industry news to local news.

Choosing your keywords wisely

Keywords are the terms that draw your users towards your website via search engines and these articles will help to expand your reach with longtail keywords.

Think about what your audience wants to read and what phrases they might search for in Google. Use these phrases throughout the article and within the title.

Keyword usage

This is something you really don't want to think about too much. Article writing should come naturally and be written for your audience only (not the search engine).

If you force too many keywords into your article making it read unnaturally then Google will see it as you trying to manipulate the algorithm and you will be penalised.

This may seem quite difficult at first but after writing a few articles it will start to come naturally.

Internal Linking

Article writing is one of the best ways to encourage external links and for you to create internal optimised links, which help a lot towards your SEO.

 

This is when you include a keyword within the content of the article and link them back to one of your pages on your website that relates to that keyword (for example - Resource Techniques could say we are writing this how-to guide so Google will pick up on us trying to help Estate Agents with their Search Engine Optimisation). Search Engine Optimisation being our keyword so we have linked the word back to our SEO for Estate Agents page.

You could do this wherever you mention an area within an article, and link it to the relevant area profile page and if you use the phrase “letting agents in (your area)” link it to your company profile page, the sale page or the lettings page (whichever is most relevant to the content you are writing). This helps Google's crawlers to manoeuvre around the website a lot easier. Directing them exactly to the places on the website you want them to go.

Avoid making errors

Spelling and grammatical errors looks very poor and Google knows this. As Google wants you to be producing the best content for your audience you may get penalised if you continually make the content errors.

You can easily avoid making these errors by using software with a spell checker built in such as Microsoft Word.

What to write about

Only write content that is informative and/or educational and that your audience will actually want to read.  Writing articles for the sake of it won’t add any value to your website and people won’t read it which means it won’t bring any SEO value to your website.

Your blog is for your audience so ensure each article will be something that they will want to read and don’t just use it as a sales channel.

Things you can write about:

• Local events – fairs, entertainment, etc
• Local news
• Local property information/news
• Important property industry news that is relevant to everyone
• Entertaining property news

If you are struggling to find things to write about, you can always use other blogs for inspiration. However this doesn’t mean you can copy the articles, they have to be in your own words and have your own thoughts within them.

Summary

What you need to focus on when writing an article:

• Write articles more frequently, we would recommend at least one a week.
• They need to be unique and written in your own words.
• Your articles need to be informative or educational.
• Your articles need to be at least 300 words long.
• Write naturally, don’t force keywords into articles.
• Add links within the text (as stated above).
• Include keywords within the articles (e.g. estate agents in ‘your area’).
• Include imagery within every article.

Happy blogging!