When talking about the best practices to increase your visibility online, Google rules all. But at the same time that you are creating content using best practices to boost your search engine optimization, it’s important to remember the core reason you are writing those pieces: your readers. The Moz Blog recently posted a video about creating content that is desirable for both robots and humans, with the core idea rooted in shareability and specifically title tags. Let’s a dive a little deeper into crafting copy that touches all bases to increase your online traffic.
Website Versus Social Media
What is the most important platform for your content? Most likely, it’s for your website. However, it’s important not to underestimate the power of social media. Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin are valuable resources for real estate agents, and your content should be well-suited for both. Jen Lopez at Moz Blog said in her most recent Whiteboard Friday video:
“You’re making your content that you’ve worked really hard at, you’ve put time and effort into this, you’re making sure that it’s easily consumable by the people who want to share it and re-share it hopefully and make it viral because you want that virality here. But you also want it to be stable, and you want the robots to see it and you want the spiders to be able to get to it and all of that.” – Jen Lopez at Moz Blog
So in order to make this a happy marriage between humans and robots, your content should feature tags, photos and and excerpt that will attract the eyes of social media goers so that people want to read and share it.
Readability
Creating a compelling post must look easily digestible for the reader to even begin to scan through it. One of the most important elements of this is to write in little “bite sized” pieces. We live in an age where people are running around, scanning the internet on their smartphones and can only find time to read on the train into work. So remember, this is your audience!
Paragraphs should be short, sentences concise, and don’t forget about subheads. Sectioning content into mapped out portions lets the reader know exactly what they are getting themselves into. If all they want to read about is the housing market update in their community within a story about the overall real estate market trends seen in the nation, they can jump right ahead.
Target the Masses
Jonah Peretti, founder and CEO of BuzzFeed says that the key to crafting successful content is to write about what people love. While BuzzFeed may not be the most honorable journalism, its success comes from the fact that people want to look at photos of cute puppies and kittens no matter the time or day.
Real estate agents shouldn’t fill their websites with cute photos of animals, but they can still utilize this core principle. Think about what your audience cares about the most. That may be community events, local market trends, local news or charitable causes. Also, since these topics are interesting to everyone in your community, they are sharable.
