Exactly How The Long Tail In Real Estate Blogging Will Bring The Ready-To-Act Home Buyer.

This article is a rewrite of an article I wrote a few years ago.  It  is an exercise to show you that you can never step in the same river twice, and finding relevant blog content to publish is as easy as looking in the rear-view mirror.

One of the first advice articles I wrote on the power of blogging was called “If You Write It They Will Come!” – The Long Tail In Real Estate.
Starting with the title… it’s not bad, but it could have been better. For the rewrite I’m going with:

Exactly How The Long Tail In Real Estate Blogging Will Bring The Ready-To-Act Home Buyer.

Now that we have all made purchases online, from inexhaustible sources of selection, the concept of the long tail surely must be easy to grasp.
In a one sentence example: iTunes success comes not from the total sales of a #1 Billboard hit, but rather from the cumulative sales of millions of less popular tracks.
This same formula can be applied to gaining desired traffic to your blog, from the search engines.  Instead of relying on high traffic counts from high-demand search terms, such as “San Diego real estate”, real estate bloggers should recognize that their success can come from seemingly unpopular terms and phrases.

First of all, real estate is a broad topic, and those that approach it broadly are generally not ready-to-act.
Visitors to your site that come in from high-demand terms like “San Diego real estate” are in the discovery phase of their real estate search.  This is not to say that they won’t pan out to be a quality relationship one day, but this article is about how to attract the ready-to-act home buyer.

The expectations we have as we approach the internet for answers, is that there is going to be one.  So when we are concerned about something, we are generally specific about our search.  For example, when traveling to Costa Rica (for example) you don’t search for Costa Rica Hotels.  You take into account your actual destination, accommodation preference, and price range, then you search from there.
The city of San Diego (staying with the above example) is broken up into dozens of smaller communities, and those communities are easily broken into several neighborhoods.  Online real estate inquiries about these narrowed neighborhoods are generally made by buyers that are further along in their decision process.
Blogging about topics that serve inquiries on a micro level will not gain the massive traffic you might experience for high-demand search terms, individually.  However, the cumulative traffic gained from dozens of these sorts of micro-topic articles will easily outweigh the gains from high-demand search terms. And, more importantly, this traffic will target and attract more read-to-act buyers.  Hence the value of the Long Tail.
I found this refreshing point from the original article:

The value of attracting niche and unique traffic to your site with ever-growing content is greater than just the visit.  By being a relevant result for such uncommon searches makes your site that much more appreciated.  This is an immediate trust builder and will improve the quality of your leads.  Generating hundreds of these niche visits to your site is so much more effective than being one of thousands vying for exposure with the most popular search terms.

The point that one should really take away from this observation is that real estate is a business of content.  You gain clients through your ability to communicate with them, to them and for them.  Once you apply this to your approach to blogging, you will see your efforts gaining you clients similarly.   Generalities don’t gain trust (“I am a San Diego Realtor”) – handling specific situations do (“This is the answer to your question, challenge, concern, worry, etc”).
Your job as a real estate blogger is to determine what keeps your home sellers and home buyers up at night and blog about that.