In early November Google unveiled a new update that was reported to impact about 35% of search queries so here is a brief rundown on what this means to you and how to make the most of the update. It appears that bloggers may have the biggest opportunity to take advantage of trending topics in that Google seems to be taking a clue from RSS feeds to gather the latest, most relevant news and include these RSS feeds as options in the SERP’s for Google queries.
Now how you can use this is your blog posts is to keep abreast of trending topics in real estate and play off of those topics for your content. This doesn’t mean that you’ll get a flood of new real estate business but it certainly can help to develop the authority of your blog site and if your blog is connected as a subdirectory or a sub domain of your real estate website, the additional traffic can help boost your site’s overall authority for keywords for which you want to rank. You could think about this concept as ‘the rising tide raises all ships’.
How to keep up on trending topics is as simple as setting up a Google Alert for real estate topics that you’re interested in or setting up an RSS feed from your favorite real estate news outlet. For this example, I’m going to reference Inman News – obviously a highly respectable new source for the real estate business. You’ll have to make your own judgment call on articles that you feel the general public may be interested in or may search on.
An excellent topic to play off of is anything about the foreclosure market as this impacts all kinds of people for all sorts of reasons. A recent article on December 2nd titled, ‘Record Number of Foreclosures’ provides a wealth of information and statistics on the foreclosure market that a savvy blogoteur could reference in a creative rewrite or analysis, (referencing the source of course). Using a title along the lines of ‘Record Number of Foreclosures’ could get you in the same stream as the original article and perhaps allow you to go fishing for some search engine traffic or if you’re angle is provocative and interesting, you might garner some real attention.
The Freshness Update may impact some website pages as well. I’m not suggesting that everyone should go and make dramatic changes if what you have is working. If you’re happy with your web traffic then you might consider just giving it a little revamp. Review any information on your site to make sure you’re not referencing information or statistics from 2009 unless you’re certain that it’s still relevant.
Some spring cleaning may help in the SERP’s and it definitely could impact how a potential client looks at you as a real estate professional. Changing a few sentences will probably not do anything-as concerns the Freshness Update-but an entire new page may. For example if you know of a new master planned community being developed, allocate a new web page to it and then write a blog post about it with a link to that page on your site. If you have no content on your web pages – wake up and smell the Panda! It makes your web pages with no content stink and Google’s taking you off its crawl list. No wonder no one is calling you!
That is a great picture that depicts the new updates perfectly. Google made a lot of changes in 2011 but I suppose it is all for a better web.