Entegral Blog

While businesses of all shapes and sizes can benefit from social media - the real estate industry is uniquely suited to the community-driven platforms that make up this digital space. To ensure you kick off 2020 on the right footing online we take a look at three platforms that will help you gain more eyes on your business and more importantly your listings. Facebook Last year the National Association of Realtors released a study that revealed that a whopping 99% of millennials - and 90% of baby boomers - begin their home search online (as opposed to in-person referrals.) This statistic can be seen in action in the various community groups on Facebook where users regularly ask for referrals for estate agents active in their area or asking for rental properties that might suit their needs. Simply put, if you are not active on Facebook you are missing out on a large slice of the pie. Get a Facebook Business Page Instagram What makes this platform so great for real ...

Voice search is here to stay - because it is easier to speak to a digital assistant than typing - so we take a look at three ways you can gear your real estate website towards voice search. To prove that voice search is the way of the future, take a look at these statistics: Voice labs found that there were a total of 33 million voice-first devices in circulation. In a survey of SEO trends for 2017 and beyond , voice search stood at the third spot. In his keynote, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that one-fifth of the queries on Google are voice searches. REA Group's move into AI with Amazon's Alexa With the increase in the use of digital assistants, optimising for voice search is critical to your SEO success. We take a look at three SEO strategies to help you optimise your website - it is easier than you think! 1. Claim your Google My Business Listing Probably the easiest thing to do is to simply claim your Google My Business listing! The reason why this is im...

Finding worthy topics to write about can be a difficult task, especially if you are already managing a very busy day. But it doesn’t have to be - all it takes is a bit of planning! Before get to the actual blog writing part, we have to mention that for most people browsing social media from their phones, a responsive site is a must. If you are writing compelling articles, why wouldn’t you want to make it accessible to anyone no matter on what mobile device they are? You can find out more about our responsive packages by visiting www.entegral.net/flex and more about the importance of responsive design here: Mobile-First Indexing Plan ahead To ensure you have some copy ready for the year, plan ahead. Think seasonally and around holidays. Provide gardening tips, or winter home maintenance guide. Home safety around the holidays is another seasonal topic that is always welcomed. Write these articles now, that way you have them ready to publish when the time comes around. Weekl...

The digital landscape is fast moving and ever changing, and a stale digital marketing strategy won’t cut it anymore. We take a look at a few things you can do now to spruce up your strategy to ensure you don’t fall behind and miss out on valuable website traffic in 2018. Stop stuffing content with keywords This might have worked in the past, but search engines have changed dramatically and this won’t help you at all. You might even end up hurting your business as search engines might flag your page as spam. Keywords are still important but search engines (and humans) prefer long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are those three and four keyword phrases which are very, very specific to what you are selling. This means content with the phrase ‘Lonehill property for sale’ will fare better than simply ‘property for sale’ when you want to ensure you are getting better ranking in personalised search results. Step-up your social game Everyone is on some form of social media...

The holiday season is upon us and with that comes a well-deserved break, but don’t let your news section go stale in the time you’re away. Write your blogs ahead of time and schedule them to publish on your website. Scheduling your blog Before we cover a few topics to get through the holiday season, we take a look at how you can schedule your posts to be published on your website. It really is as easy as selecting a date and time from your OMS dashboard. Once you have written your post, select the date and time as shown below and hit the save button. That is all you have to do! Real estate blog topics for the holidays End of year recap and an overview of what to expect in the coming year Create a year-in-review broken down by neighbourhood, type of home or other criteria. If you want to get fancy, you might create an infographic or chart for easy sharing as well. You can use our suburb reports to find the data you are looking for! Local lights and events Inclu...

You’ll never generate more leads or attract more visitors to your website if it isn’t credible - but what determines the credibility of your website and what influences it? In our latest blog, we take a look at what influences your credibility and what you can do to build and maintain it. Visitors are skeptical from the get-go Scientists from Microsoft Research analyzed page-visit duration for 205,873 web pages (with more than 10,000 visits to each page). Using data from a popular web browser plugin, they were able to find the answer They found that 99 percent of web pages have a negative ageing effect*. When website visitors hit your landing page, they’re skeptical. They’re quickly scanning the page looking for a reason to abandon your site. Get your website visitors past the 30-second mark and they’ll spend a lot more time on your site. So how do you get them to stay longer? Credibility! They are looking for signals that show your organization is reliable, trustworthy, a...

A high-quality real estate blog is one of the most powerful marketing tools a real estate agent and agency can use right now. People want answers to their burning questions and turning to search engines to find them. Make sure your blog is used right by avoiding these four costly mistakes. Full steam ahead, all the time Somewhere along the line, it became commonplace to say that a blog or news section is only valuable if new posts are shared every day. This is not entirely true. The truth is consistent posting is important but the quality is much more so. There is no magic number for how often to post blogs, but ensuring that each blog is high quality and posts are consistent can do wonders for building a strong audience. Depending on your staff, your workload, and your audience’s needs, this might mean posting once a week, twice a week, or more often. Not sharing your hard work If you are writing quality blogs but not sharing them you are losing out on vital business. Shari...

By writing content that acts as a neighbourhood guide, real estate agents are making their websites - and by extension their brands - the number one source for community and property related information. Content marketing is a necessary investment for real estate agents that want to stand out online and attract clients, and nothing works better for real estate agents than local content marketing. How to develop highly effective location content  Most people head online to use search engines to find resources in their local vicinity and the clued-up real estate agent will use this as a way to drive traffic to their real estate website . Another benefit of local content is that it requires little upkeep and acts as evergreen content on your website . A win-win situation for both your brand and SEO. Here are some tips for developing high-returning neighbourhood and city guides. Quality over quantity Keyword stuffing will get you nowhere. Don’t use the name of the city ...

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) can seem like a daunting (and very technical) task but by avoiding a few common pitfalls you are already increasing your chances of ranking higher on Google’s search results page! Pushing the wrong keywords A few years back generic keywords would have done the trick, but times have changed and with it how keywords are used in SEO. If you want to rank in Google you have to make sure that you’re using the right keywords for every page. If you are a local real estate agency pushing “property for sale”, you’re aiming too high. You should consider something a more specific. It is estimated that up to 80% of searches are long-tail keywords. Long tail keywords are those three and four keyword phrases which are very, very specific to what you are selling. This means content with the phrase ‘Lonehill property for sale’ will fare better than simply ‘property for sale’ when you want to ensure you are getting better ranking in personalised search results. ...

We are going to say it again - content is king - and Google rewards high-quality content with better ranking positions. But just what makes content ‘high-quality’ according to Google? We take a look in our latest blog. The answer to what makes for high-quality content is not new, however, it is something that is not implemented on websites often enough. Google’s style guides reveal that high-quality pages — the kind that ranks well in search — are a combination of high-quality code, content and UX (user experience.) We here at Entegral have you covered in terms of high-quality code - with ongoing updates and tweaks to ensure your website runs at its very best . The content, however, is up to you, and with these tips from the style guide, you will be sporting some impressive content in no time. Here is a quick overview of Google’s Developer Documentation Style Guide tips for content creators: Use a friendly, conversational tone with a clear purpose — somewhere between the ...

Early in August, Facebook introduced a version of its Dynamic Ads product that enables real estate agents to retarget people who browse home and apartment listings on their sites with ads on Facebook and Instagram. Facebook’s Dynamic Ads for Real Estate can promote a home’s price, availability, and bedroom count to people who browsed your real estate website. Facebook’s Dynamic Ads for Real Estate are as straightforward as the name suggests. Much like its Dynamic Ads for Retail and for Travel, this variation takes an advertiser’s product catalog — in this case, a real estate agent’s listings — and converts those listings into ads that will appear in the Facebook and Instagram feeds of people who had checked out similar listings on the agent's website. According to Facebook’s documentation , each home listing that a real estate agents uploads include an image of the property, as well as its address, price, and availability. It can also include information like the number of ...

In a social media landscape that’s constantly changing, building a solid foundation of evergreen content that can be shared and shared again should be a key part of your social media strategy. While fresh content is always best, we don’t always have time to write new posts. Evergreen content is always a great solution for time-strapped real estate agents - and resharing your evergreen content is not a spammy tactic when it is done responsibly. We’ll get to how to do that in a minute. Resharing does two things for you - firstly it gets your content in front of the readers that need the info you are supplying, and secondly, it helps free-up your time to either follow-up on leads or answers those social interactions that you don’t always have time for. However, the most important part of resharing your content (when done right!) is that it is good for your SEO. Truth is that the more interactions you have on content from social media, the better your real estate website looks to...

Most of your marketing efforts are focused on external messages - but your real estate agency’s biggest brand builders are in fact the people inside of the business. We take a look at how you can turn your agents into brand ambassadors. Make the brand identity clear and simple A 2012 Gallup survey found that 41% of employees don’t know what their company stands for and don’t know what differentiates their own company from its competitors. How can people represent – or fully support – something they don’t understand? This is more than just having a mission and vision statement - agents need to feel a shared identity with their colleagues. To make employees brand ambassadors a brand should make them proud of the agency and what they do. Good news should be shared and the employees should be included, it should be easy to share content and professional visuals on social media will ensure that agents won’t feel embarrassed about sharing a post. Team members that feel valued wi...

The real estate game has always been about building lasting business relationships and in the digital age, this has become not only an in-person reality but also a digital actuality. Word-of-mouth marketing has (and still is) one of the most important tools a real estate agent has to gain new clients and in the digital landscape, word-of-mouth marketing presents itself as recommendations and testimonials. So how do you get your online reputation to match your offline reputation? We take a look at a few ways you build a formidable online reputation. Make it easy for people to give reviews Facebook remains one of the biggest social networks and also the easiest way for your clients to review and recommend your services. Therefore it is vital for you to have a Facebook business page for your agency and to display your social media icons on your website. Your Entegral responsive Flex website makes it easy for you to display your social media icons to ensure visitors can find...

We give you the ultimate guide on how to write compelling real estate listing descriptions by exploring the power of words, the language pitfalls to avoid and how to maintain the perfect professional balance. Redfin and online language writing-enhancement platform Grammarly, revealed in a 2014 study that nearly 45% of the 1 300 people surveyed would be much less inclined to tour a home if a listing description was riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. While photos remained much more important than text, 87% of the survey participants said that descriptions were ‘extremely important or very important.’ Understandably writing the perfect listing description is not at the top of the to-do list of busy agents, however, it is important to at least have concise and clear listing descriptions on your properties for various reasons. Proof and then proof again Before we get into the thick of it, the first rule of Grammar Club is proof once, proof twice. Making sure that...

Content marketing in the broader spectrum will ensure traffic to your website, however that doesn’t mean all the traffic to your website will be local - you might end up catching some international eyes as well, which is not a bad thing. But when you are trying to get local eyes on your website you need these local lead generation tips! If you really want to succeed in your efforts to generate local leads, you’re going to want to drive as much traffic as you can to the lead generation pages on your website - such as content pages or search result pages. Unfortunately, traffic doesn’t come easy and you’ll have to invest some time and money into your efforts. Let’s explore a couple ways you can start driving potential leads to your lead generation stations. Google Ads Content is a free way of generating traffic but if you want big gains, you are going to have to pay.One of the best ways to drive traffic is to invest in Google Ads. Google Ads (along with SEO) are great traff...

 With the huge surge in content and data available to us, knowledge has become more valuable than ever. Leading to the question: How can you harness information and data for your real estate agency and use it to achieve your growth goals? Brands, of all varieties, are embracing ‘knowledge economy’ as an opportunity to create content for their websites. The simple reason for this is that when done right, content is just another form of knowledge. And positioning yourself as an expert in your field using content marketing experience nearly 8 times the site traffic of those businesses that don’t. As a real estate agent you are in possession of a wealth of knowledge - from the property market in general to community knowledge - and in a modern era where consumers want information quickly, you can churn out knowledge driven content to market your website and yourself. Sharing knowledge through content There are many ways of sharing your knowledge—specifically if it’s packag...

When a working real estate agent decides to move and the area they serve changes, it is essential to reintroduce themselves into the market. We take a look at how you can build your reputation in a new area with these tips. Digital steps First off, if you have professional social media profiles such a business Facebook page and/or Twitter profiles it is best to announce your move long before the actual move. Update those with the new area you are operating in as soon as you have moved. Post an update saying that you have moved and that you are proud to be a member of your new community. Asking for recommendations for the best services in town from the locals on community pages will also make residents see that you are happy to be in the new area and that you are interested in the community.  This will stick with them when they are looking for the services of a real estate agent. If you have a Flex responsive real estate website , update your contact details and office loc...

We take a look at how you can write not just a blog post that is geared towards SEO but also is an awesome (and informative read) to visitors of your real estate website. For some, writing for SEO purposes and writing to attract and captivate your audience could seem two contradictory goals. But with these tips, you will be able to achieve both in the news section of your Entegral powered Flex responsive website . The basics Before you start writing your post, consider what type of post you are going to write - is this going to be a current market post or will it contribute towards your evergreen content ? Structure It Start your post with creating a clear structure. Every post should have: some sort of introduction (in which you introduce your topic); a body (in which the main message is written); a conclusion (which should summarize the most important ideas or deduce some new idea). Write down what you want to write in all these three sections. You now have a kind o...

By now, writing ‘Content is King’ feels like writing lines for punishment - everyone knows it to be true, but reading it over and over again is becoming a little unbearable. Mostly because, while you know it is an important part of your search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts, you simply don’t have the time to write fresh content daily. The answer is evergreen content What is Evergreen Content? Evergreen content is content that doesn't go out of date. The core topic of evergreen content will be relevant to readers no matter what's going on in the current news cycle, or which season it is. That doesn't mean you need to predict the future, all it means is that you will have to write about real estate topics that will always stay relevant to your clients. The features of evergreen content: Relevant, regardless of any external factors like news cycle or season How-tos, data-based posts, case studies, origins/history, lists, tips, complete guides Basic informat...