Tag Archives: property journalism

The importance of estate agency blogs

This is a tough time to be an estate agent. High interest rates and dwindling disposable incomes are preventing the aspirational house moves that typically underpin the property market. Consumer confidence is at a low ebb, and we’re witnessing the unwelcome return of gazundering in some corners of the UK property market.

At the same time, the internet should make it easier than ever for estate agents to make their voices heard. Platforms like eXp provide centralised support for sole agents and startup boutiques alike, while the internet enables anyone in the world to view online listings and property particulars.

There’s just one problem. With so much competition out there, how do you drive traffic to your estate agency website or property portal?

Searching questions

The secret to ensuring your website performs well in Google and Bing search results is to optimise its content. Known as SEO, this process requires in-depth knowledge of the latest algorithms and competitor analysis platforms. As a result, most people choose to delegate SEO work to freelance specialists like G75 Media. We’ve been creating property blogs and brand-specific estate agency blogs for over 15 years, and we’ve become rather good at it.

Estate agency websites benefit from an ever-changing roster of online property listings, but search engines hate content that disappears. SEO rankings are boosted far more by regularly uploaded property blogs that remain permanently visible.

A high-quality estate agency blog will contain a blend of the following article types:

  1. Topical news stories and reactions to the latest house price data, often with a ghostwritten comment produced by the writer on behalf of the agency’s head or property manager.
  2. Local interest stories, anchoring the agency at the heart of the community it serves.
  3. Property-specific articles, such as resale home walk-through profiles, or interviews with celebrity vendors.
  4. Placeholder features, extolling the virtues of that location to incomers, investors and interested third parties.
  5. Listicles – numbered lists of key points or recommendations (a sample topic might be Ten Things to Do Before Marketing Your Home).

When G75 Media agrees to produce estate agency blogs for a new client, we suggest a list of future article topics. These property blogs can be augmented at any time with breaking news stories, but their primary aim is to allow that agency to focus on discussing important topics, or boosting SEO in specific areas. For instance, a local estate agency branching out into letting for the first time can commission a series of property blogs relating to rental properties, giving it an immediate and distinct ranking boost.

CASE STUDY: I normally refrain from discussing client work in G75 Media blogs or marketing literature, but a recent interaction with a boutique estate agency deserves mention here.

In an attempt to tackle weak SEO ranking results, an agency owner invited me to submit topics for future property blogs. We agreed on a roster of topics to be submitted on a fortnightly basis, yet after four submissions, the process was arbitrarily suspended. A month later, we were asked to resume content production, filing just two more property blogs before a halt was called again.

The result is a patchy estate agency blog with few articles, little opportunity to cultivate the internal webpage links that provide vital SEO benefits, and no reason for audiences (or search engine web crawlers) to keep coming back.

What does a successful estate agency blog need?

There are many attributes that underpin a property blog’s popularity, and its success in search engine results pages. These are some of the key elements:

  1. Regular updates. The boutique agency profiled above didn’t maintain a regular schedule of property blogs, which would have kept audiences coming back and gradually established a reputation for topicality and relevance among search engines. These are pivotal factors in SEO rankings.
  2. Original articles. It’s not worth paying to republish pre-written features from online directories of available content. Plagiarism is scorned by Google and Bing, and generic content (potentially written years ago) won’t be relevant to your brand, locality or market specialisms.
  3. Human-generated content. You could register an account with ChatGPT and ask it to produce property blogs for free. However, they’ll be dry, dull and (eventually) marked down by search engines as low-grade content. They’ll also have no relevance to your brand, business or local area.
  4. Internal links. Key SEO metrics include the number of pages each visitor views on your website, and how long they remain on your site before migrating away. Experienced copywriters know how to build webs of internal links which optimise both metrics, boosting the site’s ranking results.
  5. Images. A good copywriter might suggest adding a photo to each estate agency blog. A great writer will source copyright-free images and create image captions and meta descriptions incorporating chosen keywords. This will elevate the SEO value of each blog, as well as the wider site.
  6. Keyword-driven copy. We’ve used the phrase ‘estate agency blog’ several times in this article, to ensure it ranks highly whenever anyone searches for estate agency blogs. A central plank of any SEO strategy is to identify relevant keywords before deploying them with care – not with abandon.

Speak to a professional property blog writer

At G75 Media, we boast over twenty years of experience producing estate agency blogs and web content for property portals. Get in touch to obtain a personalised quote for property blog writing, website SEO work or other online content which will help to elevate your website above its competitors.

Ten tips for making your home sell quickly

Making your home sell quickly involves more than choosing the right agent. It also requires you to maximise its appeal

You don’t need to live in a large or luxurious house to make the most of its appeal. Over the last year, house prices have soared, and many properties have sold within days of being listed. From £100,000 city studios to £1 million country piles, it’s a seller’s market here in 2021 – yet there are still plenty of things motivated sellers can do to maximise the appeal of their homes.

Small changes around the house can assist with making your home sell quickly
Small changes around the house can assist with making your home sell quickly

The level of interest in your property often has more to do with presentation than anything other than the all-important location. It’s obvious from a glance whether a property has been loved and cared for, or neglected and overlooked. You can’t do much about your home’s location or the condition of neighbouring properties, but a quick sale can often be expedited with some easy tweaks and tips.

A little goes a long way

As a property journalist of almost twenty years’ standing, and having recently bought and sold myself, I’m continually surprised by how little effort people put into presenting homes which are for sale. You might consider it acceptable to leave the toilet seat up without scrubbing the pan, but buyers may not be so understanding. That teetering pile of paperwork on the home office desk isn’t just a nuisance for whoever has to photograph the room – it suggests a chronic lack of storage. And a weed-strewn front garden could stop people attending scheduled viewings, since subconscious decisions about a property are often made even before the front door has opened.

With that in mind, G75 Media has compiled a ten-point checklist for our estate agent and property marketing clients to hand out to their own customers. These ten simple tips on making your home sell quickly won’t just help us when we come to provide our award-winning freelance property journalism services. They’ll impress vendors and valuers, too. Crucially, they’ll increase the sense of pride in a home, which shines through when conducting viewings and persuading people to buy the property…

  1. Clean and clean again. Our first tip for making your home sell quickly is encapsulated in the photo above. Scrub and polish every unit, appliance, skirting board or window.
  2. Ensure every light works. Pools of light add brightness to your home, whereas dead bulbs infer neglect. The kitchen shot above sparkles with light, and looks better for it.
  3. Eradicate clutter. Don’t hide it in cupboards – bin it. Clutter suggests the home is too small to be practical, so ensure floors and exposed surfaces have lots of clear space.
  4. Optimise the approach to your home. Remove weeds, oil hinges, add plants and wash the windows. Maximise first-impression kerb appeal, or risk people walking away.
  5. Eliminate odours. Scrub the oven, wash fabrics, leave every window open for a day… Do everything in your power to minimise smells, which can be very off-putting.
  6. Do a DIY list. Walk round and note down every squeaky hinge, paint chip and loose handle. Repair them all, to make the property look well-maintained rather than tired.
  7. Clear the house of children and pets prior to viewings. Avoid unnecessary mess and impromptu embarrassment, and ensure visitors can wander round in peace and quiet.
  8. Practice a sales pitch. This is another useful step in making your home sell quickly. What’s included, and what’s great? Celebrate positives and downplay negatives.
  9. Start and end in the best room. Building on the last point, first impressions count, and the last thing viewers see will stay with them. Make both your home’s best room.
  10. Let people wander round themselves. After the tour, give viewers the opportunity to wander around again without you. This is often when buying decisions are made.

Easter break? Not for us!

While the rest of the UK enjoys a welcome (if rather chilly) Easter bank holiday weekend, work continues at the copywriting coalface for G75 Media. In our new role as copy editors of a national magazine, there are articles to be revised and proofread in preparation for next week. We have the usual turntable of weekly deadlines to be met – even if copy that our clients would normally upload on Monday won’t be seen til Tuesday! And there’s also the small matter of entering a national competition for freelancers, with our entry ready to be uploaded. If we’re nominated, you’ll hear about it here first…

Copywriting without borders

It’s almost a decade since G75 Media was founded, with the intention of creating written communications and copywriting for businesses across Scotland. The dream of providing a local service for local people inspired our name, our business plan and our website content. Yet the company hasn’t evolved in the way we originally imagined…

Although we have several regular clients in central Scotland, G75 Media’s content production services have been utilised by companies in locations as diverse as France, the West Indies and Ireland. In the early hours of this morning, we received a new commission from an occasional client in Australia. The brief is to write an opinion piece about effective office design, for a leading Asian Pacific recruitment company.

East Kilbride and Melbourne are over 10,000 miles apart, but effective copywriting knows no borders. We’ll write in Australian English and invoice in Australian dollars, putting ten years of international property journalism and technology writing to good use. This particular article is being produced on a white label basis, so Antipodean readers will have no idea it was written half a world away from the sun-baked banks of Albert Park Lake.

Being able to write in different dialects has become an unexpectedly important aspect of our business, with two clients in America requiring weekly technology content in American English. That involves liberal use of the letter ‘z’ instead of the letter ‘s’, and different terminology – sidewalk rather than pavement, turn signal rather than indicator, and so on. Despite being fairly useless at impersonating American accents, we’re becoming highly adept at writing in a recognisably (or recognizably) Stateside manner.

Whether you’re reading this article in New York, New Delhi or New Zealand, G75 Media can produce cost-effective copywriting and journalism that’ll sound like it was written by a native. Your audience will never know that their content was created under cloudy South Lanarkshire skies. Contact us to find out how we can help you, wherever you are in the world…