Optimizing Your Content for Humans (And Not Just for Search Engines)
Strategizing and writing compelling, interesting, and high-quality content is an integral part of both a successful general real estate marketing strategy and a results-driven inbound marketing strategy.
Without a strong blog content strategy in place, you’re missing a lot of opportunities to connect with your target audience, answer their questions, and cast a wide net with search engines to organically bring people in to discover you and your business (and hopefully to convert them into clients at some point).
★ Want to learn more about inbound marketing? Have a look at these posts and resources:
- The Philosophy of Inbound Marketing, and Why It Works for Agents
- Planning a Real Estate Lead Flow Through Inbound Marketing
- Building an Inbound Marketing Strategy to Get Higher Quality Leads
- Download our Inbound Marketing Guide for Real Estate Agents
But there’s much more to writing quality content than just quickly jotting down a few thoughts and hitting the ‘publish’ button; quality content needs to be meaningful and valuable for the people you want to attract, otherwise they just won’t.
Casting that wide, organic reach with content strategy is going to be based on your ongoing SEO strategy; specifically, you should be writing content that your target audience actually searches and is interested in, and then optimizing it with best SEO practices so it gets found in search results.
But when you’re writing content this way, it’s easy to focus too much on the SEO aspect and forget that you’re also writing for an actual human; and humans are much different than search engines.
A good formula to keep in mind when you’re writing content is the 50/50 approach: you should be writing 50% for search engines and 50% for humans.
The SEO side is purely to have your content to be found in search results, and your human side is to make someone actually want to click through, read it, and hopefully, even enjoy reading it.
★ Want to learn more about SEO? Have a look at these posts and resources:
- Building a Well-Rounded SEO Search Strategy for Your Real Estate Website
- How to Start Building a Solid Real Estate Local SEO Strategy
- How ‘Dwell Time’ and Quality Content Work Together to Improve SEO
- Download our SEO Strategy Building Guide for Real Estate Agents
A big reason for that is because when it comes to content: quality content always wins. Even Google says so.
Being good at, and understanding SEO, is a continual learning experience because things are always changing; but quality content never goes out of style. Google’s algorithms are continually changing, and as SEO techniques change and Google updates their algorithms, the importance of strong, strategic, high-quality content never goes away. Specifically, Google says this: “We suggest focusing on ensuring you’re offering the best content you can. That’s what our algorithms seek to reward.” You can learn more about that right here.
That means quality content has, was, and likely always will be worth pursuing.
★ Google rewards content that meets its standard of EATT. If you want to learn more about what that means, have a look at this post called: Why Building Trust is a Key Part of a Successful SEO Strategy.
So what can you do to ensure you’re writing high-quality content that humans love to read and engage with?
1. Take Your Time
The biggest barrier to real estate agents investing in their content strategy is probably time. Regardless of who you are or how good of a writer you are, writing high-quality content is going to take time to produce; it’s not something you can or should rush through creating. If you do, you’ll likely be sacrificing quality.
Not only does Google dislike that, but humans also dislike trying to read through content that’s poorly structured, grammatically incorrect, and plagued with spelling errors. It makes it difficult to read, if someone takes the time to read through it at all.
When it comes to writing content that’s structurally incorrect or doesn’t sound well-written, you’re better off writing nothing at all; when it comes to quality, some content is not better than no content.
If you aren’t able to produce high-quality content, but still want to invest in the growth of your content strategy, you should consider hiring a writer instead. Quality content and a quality writer will always pay off, especially when it comes to the growth and success of your overall marketing strategy.
★ Want to learn more about building a content strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- Writing Successful Real Estate Content that Converts
- Creating an Evergreen Real Estate Content Strategy
- What it Takes to Build a Solid Content Marketing Strategy
2. Write for Your Audience
When you’re writing content, it’s easy to write about what you’re interested in; a lot of times, it may even happen automatically; but one of main keys to content strategy success is to always: consider your audience.
You’re writing content for your target audience, not for you. In most cases, people are looking for content that answers questions, that provides entertainment, that shows value, and that gives them information to be more informed humans; they don’t want to read about all of your many recent successes and milestone achievements (especially if they’re going to be finding you organically).
Aside from family and close-friends, most people don’t care about that. People that are searching for and consuming content are primarily only concerned about their own needs at that moment.
The bottom line is, think of who you’re actually writing content for before you even begin writing it. Just because you’re interested in something, it doesn’t mean that your audience is as well.
3. Write for Humans
To see how agents forget about their human audience when writing content, look no further than the typical listing description. For the MLS, the description needs to be formatted a certain way, but if you have a listing on your website then you should be rewriting it to make it more entertaining, more descriptive, and above all, more readable.
Depending on what you’re writing, most of your content strategy is going to be about selling something to the reader, whether that’s an idea, your opinion, or even a property; your ability to explain the concept (or highlight the property’s best features), in a way that makes someone want to engage with it is key to selling your idea to them, and hopefully, even having them reach out to you because of the connection you’ve built through your content.
Remember the 50/50 Rule
If you’re planning on investing more time and energy into your content strategy, don’t forget the 50/50 rule. You’re not just writing for search engines; you’re writing for real people, with real values, and real wants. In most cases, you’re not your audience: your audience is your audience.
With up to date marketing trends relevant to today’s market, our report is a selection of curated content, information, and data that will give you an outline of what’s working right now in real estate marketing.
