Case Study: Real Estate Blog and The Search Engine Impact From Blogging. Double Your Income.

[This case study can also be found in a printable pdf format as well.]

One of the first clients that I attracted for Sachi was Carol Williams. Carol is a 20-year veteran of real estate. She serves the Wenatchee, Washington State real estate market. Wenatchee was ranked as the 2nd fastest growing real estate market in the U.S in a recent CNN Money Magazine survey.

Website: http://www.CarolsWenatchee.com

Background: Carol wanted a second real estate website that would compliment her existing template driven website (www.TopPropertiesWenatchee.com). She heard about the great benefits of having a real estate blog and how it could help with attracting new clients. She wanted our expertise in blog consulting, search engine optimization, and web design.

After listening to Carol’s goals, we offered the following services to Carol;

1. Web design,
2. SEO web copywriting,
3. SEO analysis and ongoing consulting,
4. Blog content development and consulting.

Through our consulting, we developed a strategy that would help the client be found from prospective home buyers who were using the internet to find their agent of choice for this designated real estate market.

Before devising an attack plan, I already knew quite a few things about the real estate blogging market that I could leverage to our advantage. First, the real estate industry is one of the biggest industries to have accepted blogging as a viable online marketing tool. Second, we are still in the early adopter stage of real estate agents using blogs as a form of online marketing. Hence, I knew that there were a lot of mistakes that many agents were making from their blogging initiative and we wanted Carol to avoid those mistakes. Third, many prospective home buyers flock to the Internet to find their local real estate agent. I knew that a well-developed blog could help the agent stand apart from the other cookie cutter real estate websites that they frequent.

Equipped with this knowledge, I knew that Carol could benefit greatly from our services.
The Result: Within a year of the initial design and consulting, the client doubled her yearly sales production because of the new site design and was on the way to earning triple digit income.

There have been numerous smaller homebuyers who found Carol on the web because of our design and SEO. We should also note that the design and optimization of her new site helped boost the search rankings of her older website which was previously was not even on the radar of major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. This also helped in gaining new clients.

Her biggest client was a real estate investment group that was looking to buy and invest into 3-7 homes on a monthly basis in the Wenatchee area. They had gone through numerous searches on the web for the right realtor. Because of the high rankings that she achieved for her keyword phrases, the REI group found Carol’s website and interviewed her as a candidate. Of all the agents they interviewed, they chose Carol. When Carol asked why they chose her out of all the other agents, the group responded by saying that they felt she portrayed a lot of credibility through her weekly blogging. She was able to show that she was continuously up-to-date on all the latest news surrounding the Wenatchee, Washington real estate market. I’m sure that there are many other agents who knew just as much as Carol, but Carol knew how to convey that competence through an online presence.

Carol is a 20 year veteran of real estate and has told us that of all the marketing strategies she has implemented in the past, our marketing services was one of the best she has used so far. Let’s also remember that Carol was solo for the most of this time. And for the first time, in twenty years, Carol had to hire two new real estate agents to assist her with the amount of business that have come in for her. I would not be surprised if Carol is now on track to early retirement.

How did we do it? We attribute our success to developing a methodology for this client. It can be summarized as follows;

1. Research and prioritize which real estate keywords we want to rank for. I have discovered some keyword phrases, which are not so obvious to the average real estate agent but are still profitable to focus on. We then optimized the site for keywords that are not as competitive but still lucrative.
2. Develop a website that is both easy to navigate and filled with great information for prospective real estate buyers.
3. Coach the realtor to develop a proper content strategy that would interests people who are looking for the most recent information on their local real estate market. Simultaneously, I knew this information was useless unless our site architecture was search engine friendly. Therefore, I developed a site for that was intended for two audiences;
   1. Search engines,
   2. Human readers.
4. Educate the client and make them realize that this is not an overnight solution. Patience and persistency is needed in a long-term online marketing campaign. The problem with most real estate agents is that they lack a long-term focus with real estate blogging. They think that you can make money within two months and this is simply not the case. I never made any guarantees to Carol that she would make a boatload of money. The best that I could do was to educate her on our methodologies and assure her that we did have a marketing plan. We were also adamant that this was a partnership. As much as we were willing to work with Carol, she had to be willing to work with us. She was one of the more coachable clients that I have had. I credit her own creativity and determination as much as credit my own skillsets to help her attain results. She is a natural writer and was willing to do what it takes to develop a success online presence. You can’t ask for more than that out of a client.
5. Rinse, wash, and repeat. I monitored the metrics on the backend of the website to see what type of content that readers had an interest in. I was also measuring the type of keywords that were being used to land on Carol’s site. I continuously kept the client up-to-date on the latest metrics. We measured and benchmarked our results and kept fine tuning the site.

And the rest as they say is history.

If you would like to know how my web design and online marketing consultancy help you attract new clients, get in touch via email or phone and we’ll chat.