Planning A Hyperlocal Blog Strategy
by Matt on Aug 25, 2008 in Blogging
This is Part One of a series on Starting a Hyperlocal Blog.
There are countless reasons why people blog. When my wife, Cari, and I recently launched four new hyperlocal blogs, our reason was simple: to help Cari’s real estate career by positioning her as an expert on our local area. Our goals are business-oriented, and that colors all the decisions we’ve made in planning and executing on a hyperlocal blogging strategy. If you’re starting a hyperlocal blog for other reasons, read on to learn about our experiences, but realize that your goals are different, and your decisions may need to be different, too, as you get started.
Background
My wife has been blogging about Tri-Cities real estate since December, 2006. By most metrics, the blog is struggling: Traffic isn’t great, subscribers are few, inbound links are hard to come by, and so forth.
But — and this is what matters most — blogging has led directly to at least three clients and closings that we know of, and indirectly to several others. Those commissions mean the blog is a success in the only metric that counts: Revenue created.
On the other hand, a few closings from 18 months of blogging doesn’t seem all that great. We want to do better. I can SEO the daylights out of her main Web site, but unless I’m ready to start going gray/black, it won’t matter much in the real estate industry. So, we came up with a different plan.
Local Blog: Our Plan “A”
I’m a big believer that blogs are about as powerful an SEO tool as you’ll find right now, so our plan began with a blog. We would both write posts on this blog:
- Cari would write real estate and housing-related material. She’d cover industry stuff.
- I would write Tri-Cities-related material. I’d cover local stuff.
In doing so, we figured we’d cover both bases: the local (Tri-Cities) and the vertical (real estate). Cari would be able to write for both local house hunters and for the linkerati in the real estate industry. I’d be able to write for local residents, and maybe come up with some locally-flavored articles to attract readers, comments, links, and the like. But we quickly ran into several problems.
The Challenges
We live in an area called the Tri-Cities. But you won’t find “Tri-Cities” on a map of Washington. You’ll find the cities of Kennewick, Richland, and Pasco on the map. And you’ll also find the suburbs, like West Richland, Finley, Burbank, and Benton City.
SEO would be easier if, as has been proposed and rejected on a couple occasions, the Tri-Cities combined to form a single city. We’d have far fewer keywords to target! As it stands now, though, house hunters are searching for [richland real estate], [kennewick real estate], [pasco real estate], and [west richland real estate], not to mention [richland homes], [kennewick homes], etc., etc. West Richland is the biggest and fastest-growing of the suburbs. Oh, and when a home buyer isn’t too particular about which city s/he is moving to, s/he’ll also search for [tri-cities real estate]. As you can see, we have to target several geographic terms.
Plan “B”: Multiple Local Blogs
I decided it would be unrealistic to create one blog and expect it to serve such a diverse audience while targeting multiple cities, keyword sets, and so forth. Trying to build a “Tri-Cities real estate blog” would be like someone on the other side of the state starting a “Puget Sound real estate blog”, or someone in California starting a “Bay Area real estate blog.”
That wouldn’t work. SEO, and local search in particular, begins with specific keyword targeting. So, we had to put that into practice in Plan B:
- Cari would use her existing blog to focus on “Tri-Cities” keywords and the real estate market as a whole.
- We’d create four new quality local blogs, one to cover each of the primary cities in the Tri-Cities, plus West Richland.
I put the word “quality” in italics there because it’s easy to brush this off as more real estate spam: Here’s another real estate agent making multiple spammy sites that are just going to interlink and clog up the SERPs. Nope. As you’ll see soon in our discussion of tactics, creating quality is at the core of the whole effort. We’re not hosting the three domains on separate IP ranges to avoid the appearance of spam. Our assumption is that the blogs will be so good we don’t have to worry about looking spammy.
Plan B essentially quadruples our work load, with four new blogs to write instead of one. But facts are facts: There are no shortcuts when it comes to SEO success. Commitment and patience are foundational elements of longterm online success, and we’d have to slog through the tough work like everyone else.
Coming in Part Two: Putting the plan into action.
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Matt – You’re off to a great start already. This is going to be so educational to read.
A request: Any chance you might share with us what tools you used to determine which keywords were most appropriate for Cari’s real estate blogs. Something I’ve blogged about in the past is the challenge of finding accurate local keyword data…this is apparently due to results being tied to certain data centers (not necessarily your own) and this is something I would love to learn more about.
I am so looking forward to the rest of this series.
Miriam
Planning A Hyperlocal Blog Strategy…
When my wife, Cari, and I recently launched four new hyperlocal blogs, our reason was simple: to help Cari’s real estate career by positioning her as an expert on our local area. Our goals are business-oriented, and that colors all the decisions we…
Thanks for the kind words, Miriam. We’ve been running PPC ads for Cari’s site for about 2-3 years now. I’m no PPC expert, but from looking at all that data, picking out keywords wasn’t difficult. Most people (in this area, at least) search for “cityname real estate.” In some cases, they have to add the state modifier because there are several towns named Richland, for example. But when it came to picking domains, “cityname real estate” was the obvious winner.
Cari’s been so busy she hasn’t been able to do much real estate blogging, so the domains and blog names are somewhat of a misnomer, at least for now. That’s something to be mentioned in part five.
[...] I mentioned in Planning a Hyperlocal Blog Strategy, there was never any thought given to hosting these blogs under different accounts or at different [...]
Matt,
Interesting way of going about choosing your target keywords. I have a client who is in real estate, and one question he asked me was:
Do more people search for [keyword real estate] or [keyword real estate agent]? By targeting just the shorter of the two, are you hoping to rank for both?
I personally didn’t know the answer. Do more people search for the property, or do more people search for an agent, who will then show them properties?
Based on our PPC data, very few people search for “agent” terms, at least in this area. They’re looking for homes, MLS listings, etc. Also, many people already know an agent, or know someone who knows an agent. Personal referrals are really important in real estate.
[...] Planning A Hyperlocal Blog Strategy [...]
Hey.
I just recently went to the blog world expo and they had a seminar on hyperlocal blogging. One of the key ways that they said to get an audience is through traditional marketing. I’m going to the west coast of Canada and I’m starting up a hyperlocal blog, so maybe this is the beginning of a good friendship.
Cheers brother,
Nick
[...] 2.) Planning A Hyperlocal Blog Strategy [...]
[...] keywords. Hyperlocal blogger Matt McGee has some great recommendations on this issue in the post Planning a Hyperlocal Blog Strategy. 14) Add multimedia content which targets your keywords (videos, podcasts, pictures, photographs, [...]
Thanks for such an informatiove discussion of your journey in blogging. Is this a world that a beginning blogger can benefit from? I’m a pretty good writer, but swamped a lot in Real Estate. Could a new blog every week or two have any impact for my real estate business?
Hi Gigi — great question, how often do you have to blog? Hmmm. I think I said in another article from this series that I believe in writing as much as possible out of the gate. Frequent writing will help you get noticed by search engines and users. After you settle in, it’s okay to slow down … but I’d think at least once a week would be a must. It really depends, though. Different things work for different people.
Thanks for the series of Hyper local blogging. I am currently creating a Hyper local blog for a Law Firm. The plan is to use the hyper local blog to gain user generated content, by allowing readers to post the news that is going on in their area. The town the firm is located in is very small (only 6,000 people live in the city limits) and the county is broken up into sections.
Have you gained any user generated content from your Hyper local blogs?
Hi Matt, I’m interested in seeing where this ended up. After almost two years you should have drawn some conclusions.
I’m not so sure about the “4 blogs for 4 different keyword sets” thing. One of the strengths of blogs is that they can cover a wide range of keywords because of categories and tags. The most valuable searches find individual posts with specific keywords in the titles, tags, etc. and for those it doesn’t matter what blog they are found in.
In fact one would think a larger blog with more content, focused on a region, would do better. From the get go it has a larger pool of potential readers, therefore potentially more traffic, and ultimately more “authority”. This would be shared with all the posts, if I am correct.
In other words, a blog focusing on a specific city could include “hyper” sections for neighbourhoods and kill many birds with one stone.
Hey Rick – I’ve written a couple minor updates on this along the way. Fact is that we haven’t fully executed on the plan as well as I’d hoped, so it’s all but impossible to draw any real conclusions. We’ve seen some positives, but who knows how much more we could/would accomplish if we had followed through as we planned.
On your question about one blog versus four — if this were a single city with multiple neighborhoods, we’d probably have done it that way. But this is four separate cities and the cities here are very unique, very distinct, separated by rivers, etc. People in City A aren’t all that interested in the daily routine of stuff happening in City B. Certainly you’re right that managing one blog is easier than four, but in our case we felt it made sense to do this differently, and the results we have been able to measure (despite the failings mentioned above) tell me that we made the right decision. One blog for each city.
Makes sense Matt. I suppose every region is different. If I was to do this for our region here (three major cities and a number of smaller towns) I would probably start with a regional focus because there is a fairly strong regional identity (Waterloo Region – home of old order Mennonites, German sausages and RIM) and do sub-categories for the towns and cities.
Although I guess that wouldn’t be adequate for “hyper” blogging, real estate style, since, as I understand it a hyperblog should probably focus on smaller neighborhoods each having its own hyper-identity.
I readily admit this is all just theoretical for me. I think you’d have to be pretty motivated to do serious hyperblogging. I try to imagine my “clients” (two sons and a son in law) in the real estate business doing the leg work involved in serious hyperblogging – covering local school graduations and community fireworks displays, taking photos of local places and things, etc., etc. – and I just can’t see it happening. The payback is much too long term and much too indefinite. As you have said, other priorities come along and you end up not posting for a few weeks.
I’m still a believer, but it is probably unrealistic to think that people with little interest or experience in media, writing, photography, etc. would be good hyperbloggers – or bloggers of any kind, for that matter. Which of course leaves an opening for the professional hyperblogger. But is your typical real estate agent prepared to pay the price? I don’t know.
I just realized I ran “hyperlocal blogging” into “hyperblogging”. My bad.
[...] Planning a Hyperlocal Blog Strategy [...]
Interesting article Matt,
Providing people with valuable information has always been part of a good online marketing strategy. Some holds true for local businesses as well.
-Keith
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