![bonita springs RE search 9-20-09]( "bonita springs RE search 9-20-09")
Effective content marketing online drives LifeinBonitaSprings.com to number four on search rankings.
You might think that Realtor.com, Yahoo real estate, the Yellow Pages, either of the two local newspapers or all of the big area real estate companies would trample an individual realtor on Google. But, you’d be wrong.
In fact, when you search for "Bonita Springs real estate" in Google, you pull up a total of 557,000 results. But, standing at an impressive #4 is LifeinBonitaSprings.com. That’s the blog powered website of Chris Griffith, a realtor with Downing Frye real estate. It’s worth noting that, although Downing Frye is a successful, well-established local realtor, their company website doesn’t show up until page 3 of the listings.
Although Chris gets a terrific ranking, does that translate into business for her? You bet it does.
Chris says that she currently gets more than 90% of all of her real estate business directly from the Internet. Just five years ago only half of her business came from the Web.
As she tells it, a typical first-time phone caller will refer directly to houses they have seen via her website or to information that she has conveyed. It’s also worth noting that Chris does absolutely no traditional advertising to generate business.
By integrating both blog and website functionality, Chris has the best of both online tools. She shares her insights, her knowledge of, and her love of Bonita Springs within the blog component. Simultaneously, she enables her visitors to search comprehensive real estate listings within the website component. In this way, she meets the needs of those visitors who just want to learn more about Bonita Springs as well as those who are ready to think seriously about making a real estate investment.
In case you think that only a high-powered realtor with a giant team and a huge budget can replicate Chris’s success, you should know that she built her website by herself for zero dollars using WordPress.
Chris’s success is an object lesson to what’s both possible and essential based on three key content marketing realities:
- In just the past five years buyer behavior has changed dramatically. The vast majority of serious buyers for real estate and other major purchases are using the Internet as their primary information and research source prior to selecting what to buy and who to buy from.
- Because buyer behavior has changed so much, traditional marketing and advertising is significantly less effective than it was before we all began to rely on Google and other search engines to find what we need before we make a buying decision. This reality is reflected in the catastrophic drop in advertising revenues throughout the print publishing world.
- Technology empowers even non-technical people like Chris to create a professional blog powered website that has all of the core functionality that you would have seen from even a local newspaper 10 years ago. For example, if you look at the image of the 1999 Naples daily news, you can see that Chris’s blog powered website replicates pretty much everything they were doing.
What a difference a decade makes: An individual in 2009 can outshine $1 billion corporation from 1999 at a fraction of the cost
Hundreds of thousands of dollars invested by media powerhouse, Scripps, delivered this website just a decade ago –The Naples Daily News: October 1999
An individual real estate agent today can deliver the kind of polish, power, panache that a publishing powerhouse achieved online circa 1999 –Chris Griffith’s 21st-century blog-powered website, LifeinBonitaSprings.com: 2009
Summing up: If you are still waffling about the need to create your own blog-powered website, you can take comfort in the success Chris has generated in the past five years. She shows us that by substituting knowledge, passion, enthusiasm, and technology for big bucks, you can generate great results on Google search and on your bottom line. You won’t achieve these results overnight. But you will achieve them over time with a consistent, compelling content marketing strategy.
The post Location, Location, Location on Google: A Great Real Estate Blog-powered Website Rises to the Top appeared first on Content Marketing Today.
