To have a strong digital marketing strategy in place, you must also have a strong content strategy in place. The two go hand-in-hand, and you just won’t see as much success in your overall marketing efforts if you don’t have a really solid content strategy to back it up.
For an agent trying to write content, it’s easy to slip into the path of thinking that it’s better to just post any content on their website, no matter what the topic, length, or quality, than to not post anything.
But the opposite is actually true: if your plan is to slap together a bunch of low-quality blog posts with minimal effort just for the sake of having them, you’re much better off not posting anything at all.
There’s no question about it. If you want to see success in your content strategy, you have to produce high-quality content that people actually want to read.
Low-quality (or worse, copy-and-pasted from somewhere else) content is damaging to your SEO strategy, your content strategy, and your marketing strategy as a whole. You’re much better off producing one solid, high-quality piece of content rather than several low-quality pieces of content. When it comes to content, more is not better if you’re lacking quality and substance.
So what is high-quality content?
- It’s well-written, well-constructed, well-planned out content that brings actual value to the person reading it.
- It’s content that’s interesting and informs the reader by answering whatever question brought them to your piece of content in the first place.
- It’s content that’s well-formatted and stylized so that it’s pleasurable to look at and read.
- It’s content that provides links to additional, related content that can provide more value to the reader.
★ Want to know more about writing high-quality content and content strategy in general? Have a look at these posts:
- Writing Successful Real Estate Content that Converts
- Optimizing Your Content for Humans (And Not Just for Search Engines)
- Does Using AI-Generated Content Negatively Affect Your SEO Strategy?
- How to Plan Content that Attracts and Engages
But to be successful, there’s a bit more you need to consider in addition to producing high-quality content. To get good results, in your content strategy and other parts of your marketing strategy, you also need to make sure that a substantial portion of the high-quality content you’re producing is also evergreen.
What is Evergreen Content? And Why is it Better?
Evergreen content is content that’s ideally optimized for search/SEO, and that’s built around topics that are always relevant to the readers, regardless of the current news cycle, season, or anything else. It’s content that, no matter when you read it, it’s still relevant and doesn’t become dated (or at least not as easily).
There are several reasons why evergreen content is better:
- It’s better for SEO: Your evergreen content is usually your best-performing, pillar content pieces; and, they’re worth putting more time and effort into ranking them because if they’re evergreen, they’re continually relevant and they’ll consistently bring in traffic in the background without you needing to do much afterward.
- It’s better for your marketing strategy: Since your evergreen content pieces are your best-performing SEO content pieces, they’re also most likely one of the first ways someone will learn about you, your brand, and your business, so they’re often your best chance to connect with your target audience and build trust.
- It’s better for your time: Writing high-quality content is a lot of work, so it’s much smarter for you to produce content that will last longer, rather than focusing on content that will be out of date in a few days or weeks.
There are lots of ways to come up with evergreen content, but one of the best ways is to determine what your target audience would be searching for online, time and time again, that doesn’t really have an expiry date on the topic.
For example, depending on who your target audience is, you could write evergreen posts about:
- Divorce, separation, and what to expect from a real estate perspective.
- How to successfully and easily buy a house when you have small children.
- How to sell your home with less stress after the death of a parent.
- And A LOT more. The options are really limitless.
While you don’t need to have an entirely evergreen content strategy, it’s a good idea to make sure a substantial portion of it is.
A good rule to keep in mind when you’re planning your evergreen content strategy is 90/10; with 90% of your content being evergreen and 10% being non-evergreen.
And while there’s nothing inherently wrong with having a higher percentage of non-evergreen content, you’re not going to get as much value (or longevity) out of it as you would if you were producing more evergreen content.
For example, while it may be easy to write a blog post about a property you have for sale, depending on what market you’re in, those types of posts can become out of date and irrelevant pretty quickly once the property has sold. Or if you write a real estate market update post, it’s usually going to have out-of-date information within a couple of weeks.
That’s why it’s important to identify the content, over time, that’s not bringing in traffic, ranking in search results, or providing much value, as part of a content audit.
★ Want to learn more about planning a content strategy? Have a look at these posts and resources:
- Planning a Successful Content Strategy for Your Real Estate Website
- How to Plan Content that Attracts and Engages
- Download Our: Content Strategy Guide for Real Estate Agents
When it comes to your overall marketing strategy, your content strategy is a key part of how your target audience finds you and how you begin to build trust with them; but by producing more high-quality, evergreen content, you’ll be creating more strategic, longer-term opportunities to connect with them that can work behind the scenes for you 24 hours a day.
Want to drive traffic, build your brand, and engage your target audience? Download our eBook: ‘The Ultimate Guide to Real Estate Marketing’. It’s a collection of some of our best marketing articles, tips, and tricks that we’ve collected over the years.
