March 10, 2022
Why Home Builders and Developers Need Blogging and SEO Strategies
Every business can benefit from implementing strong blogging and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies – these elements are key strategies to driving more traffic to your website. Today, almost 4 billion people worldwide are online, which means there’s no better time to focus on enhancing your business's online presence.
Objectives for your business's digital presence should always prioritize becoming as visible, useful, credible and available as possible for your homebuyers. With these goals in mind, blogging and SEO are must-have digital marketing strategies.
Why are these tactics so essential for your business’ success? SEO and blogging are cost-effective, sustainable practices that increase website engagement, elevate online visibility, attract new homebuyers, actively promote your offerings and so much more.
Below, we’ll share what blogging and SEO strategies are, their benefits for businesses and our own successful results of implementing these vital digital marketing tactics.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
SEO refers to data-driven practices conducted to improve website visibility within organic search results. This component helps drive more traffic to developer and builder websites by placing pages at a higher ranking within Search Engine Page Results (SERPs). When search engines determine the ranking for your website, they assess several factors including keywords, image tags, content freshness, site speed, link structure, site design, site content, visitor behavior, etc.
Improving your SEO can be done by performing keyword research to determine relevant terms and using that information to optimize your website content. Another factor that increases your content ranking is earning inbound links when your content is referenced and linked to within a separate website page as this indicates your content holds relevance.
Why Home Builders and Developers Need It
Your website is often the first point of contact or discovery with homebuyers, and it’s a crucial tool for attracting new customers and generating leads. But it can only accomplish those functions if buyers are able to find it – and that’s made possible with SEO. The better your website’s SEO, the higher its ranking will be. A higher ranking results in endless benefits including stronger visibility, more traffic, more leads, more conversions and ultimately more sales.
Attracts Homebuyers Through Organic Discovery
The most common source of website traffic is organic search – which makes this channel a vital component of the sales funnel. Data shows that 94% of searches happen on Google sites and 77% of consumers research brands before engaging with them. Optimizing your website for SEO ensures that when homebuyers perform those vital searches to begin their buyer’s journey your brand website will appear among the results.
SEO enables your business to reach audiences at all stages of the sales funnel, as well as every segment of your target audience. With targeted keywords incorporated into your site content, you can connect with any members of your target audience by leveraging SEO to match their interests and search queries.
Provides Enhanced User Experience
A great advantage of SEO is that it enables your business to develop an ever-improving website user experience. By optimizing your site to gain greater visibility on SERPs, you are actively creating a more positive experience for your visitors. Improvements for SEO include optimizing your page load speed, developing a mobile-friendly site design, delivering easy navigation and offering relevant content, all of which contribute to both a higher ranking and an elevated customer experience. When buyers experience a fast, relevant and user-friendly interface while visiting your site, they’ll be more likely to browse longer, learn more about your business and become a new lead.
Gain High-Quality Leads
SEO enables quality leads to discover your business more easily. Utilizing SEO practices helps your website appear in relevant search results so that it can attract more high-quality, qualified traffic. Incorporating relevant keywords within your website content allows your business to rank higher and thus garner more homebuyers who are interested in learning more. Gaining more qualified traffic means more prospective buyers who are more likely to convert into high-quality leads.
Builds Brand Awareness
Any strategy that fosters brand awareness is worth the investment, and SEO is instrumental in achieving more widespread visibility. By increasing your SERP ranking, SEO enables homebuyers to organically come across your business and become familiar with your brand.
Fortunately more brand awareness also translates to stronger brand credibility. The higher your business ranks, the more users will trust your business as a well-recognized industry authority. Ranking on the first page of search engine results inherently instills more credibility in your business, as users trust Google to push irrelevant sources further down in results. SEO not only offers greater brand exposure but also cultivates stronger buyer confidence in your business.
Offers a Competitive Advantage
It’s always crucial to find ways to stay ahead of your competitors, and SEO allows you to do exactly that. Likely, your competitors are also investing in SEO, and that means you can’t afford to get left behind when homebuyers are searching for the right home builder or developer. To gain any kind of competitive advantage, it’s absolutely necessary to prioritize SEO strategies. By optimizing your site for SEO, search engines can rank your website based on its relevance to search queries. If your site contains more relevant content as well as user-friendly elements, it will most likely rank higher than competitor websites.
What is Blogging?
Blogging is a marketing tactic that entails writing article-style content for your business website. Content included within brand blogs can include anything and everything about your business from your homes and communities to company news, features on your team or vendors/partners, your homebuying process and more. Blogs are utilized to provide any content that will interest buyers, lead them to spend more time on your website to learn more about your brand and ultimately convert into leads.
SEO and blogging seamlessly work hand in hand. Blogging supports your SEO by providing fresh, relevant content that boosts your SERP ranking, while SEO practices support blogging efforts when content is optimized with keywords that help expand its reach.
Why Home Builders and Developers Need It
Every business looking for new leads needs website visitors, and that means you need to find ways to reel buyers in and keep them engaged. That’s where blogging comes in to help your business meet those goals. Incorporating blogging strategies is a great way to further your online visibility and support the growth of your business. Blogging affords your business numerous benefits that we’ll dive into below!
Drives Traffic
Attracting new traffic to your site is all about finding ways to increase your visibility within search engine results. And how can you improve your website ranking within these results? A great start is to indicate to search engines that your website is active with new page updates and fresh content – and that’s exactly what blogging provides.
Blogging is an opportunity for home builders and developers to create and publish new pages with new content, which translates to another indexed page on your website that increases your chances of boosting the site’s visibility with search engines. The more active your website appears to search engines, the more they systematically check in for continuous content and provide new opportunities to improve your ranking within search results. Studies show that companies with active blogs receive 55% more visitors each month.
Boosts Conversions
Ultimately, more traffic coming in through blogs means more opportunities to generate new leads. Research shows that companies that regularly share blogs produce 67% more leads per month than businesses without.
Within every blog post, there should be a call-to-action that offers every reader a chance to convert to a lead. Whether that’s a link to a contact form, email newsletter sign-up, community VIP list, etc., you should always offer a way for interested buyers to learn more about your business, homes, communities and incentives after reading through your blog. If they are interested in reading your business’ blog content, they’re likely invested enough to continue progressing along the sales funnel – don’t waste this vital opportunity!
Provides Social Media and Newsletter Content
After sharing a blog to your website, there’s no reason for the content to only be shared there. Every blog can also be distributed on your business's social media sites to further boost the reach of your content. Each time you share blog content on your social media platforms, this allows your audience to continue sharing the blog with others and create new opportunities for greater brand awareness.
Not only does this enhance your social media presence with new content, but it also provides another outlet to capture audience attention and drive traffic back to your website. The more relevant your content, the more likely this content is to expand your social media engagement, which leads to improved connections with your potential buyers.
Blogs also provide your company with strong content to share via monthly enewsletters and nurturing email campaigns to keep prospective clients and home buyers engaged with your brand.
Builds Trust with Buyers
Speaking of relationships with prospective buyers, producing blogs is an exceptional way to build trust with new leads. By blogging consistently and incorporating relevant, useful information, this practice establishes your business as a credible industry leader or authority. As your blogs prove your business to be a reliable resource, homebuyers will be able to place greater trust in your brand.
High-quality content not only builds confidence in your brand but also provides a way to become a familiar entity for customers that they can connect with. Through blogging, you can continuously share more about the people behind your brand, values and goals which leads to stronger customers relationships. Homebuyers want to trust the builders and developers they choose to buy from, and blogging offers a way to build valuable connections by responding to comments and feedback which leads to more sales.
Promotes Your Company News
When you have company news, where should it go? Well, we think blogs are a great place to start! It’s always beneficial to show your audience what the company is up to along with exciting updates. From events to new communities, model home openings, new team members and more, blogs offer a fantastic medium to share your company news and updates. Blogs with company news demonstrate to your audience that the company is staying active and that there’s more to the brand beyond sales.
Our Results
Don’t take our word for it, the numbers don’t lie! We have proven results from the Milesbrand website that speak to the power of blogging and implementing strong SEO strategies.
After several months of elevating our blogging strategies to deliver consistent new posts optimized for SEO, Milesbrand blog traffic was up year-over-year by an incredible 32,479%! Not only have the number of blog visitors increased, but the average time spent on Milesbrand blog pages also went up by 2,256%.
Our outstanding SEO strategies also paid off with fantastic results that enhanced our website traffic! Compared year-to-year, traffic to the Milesbrand website from organic searches has increased by 745.96%!
Take our word for it – SEO and blogging are necessary digital marketing components that can substantially grow and sustain your online visibility and credibility. Although your traffic compared on a month-to-month basis may not always be phenomenal after your business begins implementing these practices, there will likely be consistent growth occurring over time. After a year or two of consistently employing blogging and SEO strategies, you may look back to discover remarkable results and growth.
Leverage Your Blogging and SEO Strategies by Partnering with Milesbrand
Prioritizing SEO and blog content strategies leads to long-term successful growth and remarkable returns on investment. The digital landscape may always be changing but blogging and SEO strategies remain advantageous opportunities to enhance your brand’s online visibility and value. SEO offers your business a wealth of benefits from attracting new customers organically to generating more high-quality leads, staying ahead of competitors, building greater brand awareness, establishing credibility and much more.
Get started today by reaching out to our team for digital marketing expertise! We offer a full suite of integrated services, which includes SEO and digital optimization strategies to keep your brand ahead.