Written by Trevor Mauch The 3 Types of Blog Posts
- Niche Content
- Purpose: Generating organic traffic & leads (highest priority)
- Company News
- Purpose: Building credibility & trust
- Trends/Updates/Properties
- Purpose: Social shares & capturing trend-based searches
Blog Type #1: Niche Content
Primary purpose: Generating organic traffic & leads
Niche blogs will be the primary type of blog on a website. A “niche” blog is an article aimed at educating the website visitor on a specific topic within the niches you do business in.
Niche blogs should almost always be a part of a “topic cluster” to support a niche topic page (“pillar page”). You’ll want to stay away from randomly posting content just to post it.
The more competitive the market, the more important it is to have niche topic pages with supporting niche blog posts. In a less competitive market, you could get by with a strong pillar article on a niche topic (“selling a house in probate”) without supporting articles.
A topic cluster is made up of a longer niche topic page and 3-8 supporting topic articles. The main niche topic page links to each of the supporting topic articles… and each supporting topic article links to the pillar post.
How To Market Niche Content
Niche/topic clusters are primarily for evergreen topics.
Evergreen marketing content is information that is timeless and will continue to be relevant months and years down the road.
Think of creating evergreen content as planting seeds. You can plant these content “seeds” on your website, and the traffic to them will start to grow over time.
You can continue planting these seeds until all your niches and locations are built out. (You’ll have a whole evergreen forest on your website!)
Then track the keyword phrases for each niche topic page and supporting blog post in Carrot’s SEO Keyword Rank Tracking tool to see their progress.
Your niche topic pages and supporting blog posts could be posted on social media as a secondary way to get eyeballs in front of them. If you want to go advanced, you could drive Facebook retargeting ads back to these articles on unconverted leads.
Posting Frequency
Niche topic clusters only need to be built out until you’re done covering the niches you can help people in. If you primarily help people sell houses when sellers are going through 7 specific situations, build out your seven topic clusters, track their Google rankings, and work on getting them ranked higher. No more niche topic clusters need to be created after you’ve covered them, with 3-8 strong articles supporting the pillar.
Post Length
Your niche topic pages (pillar pages) ideally should be 1,500 – 2,000 words (depending on the competition for that search). Supporting blog post articles in the topic cluster shoot for 800-1.5k words (can be less, but don’t go below 500 words).
Blog Type #2: Company News (Credibility/Culture)
The second type of blog someone may want to publish is a company news type blog.
These are generally to add humanity to your business for website visitors already landing on your website. Topics can include:
- Amazing new hires or team changes you made to your team
- Celebrate the people who work for your company. Adds humanity and connection with a site visitor.
- Local/charitable work you and your team did in the community
- Take pictures of you and your team serving the community with a short VideoPost and/or blog post on how your company impacts the community.
- Cool awards your company received
- Best real estate agent in [city],
- The top home buyer in [city],
- 40 under 40, etc.
How To Market Company News Content
Share on social, and link up from your About Page where it makes sense to guide people to some of the good work you do in your community. Here’s an example. This content is evergreen and timeless, but it’s used for credibility for site visitors vs. generating traffic organically through Google.
Posting Frequency
As needed. Monthly would be a good cadence, even quarterly or a couple of times a year.
Post Length
Since these are less for ranking and more for credibility/trust, 300+ words can be great for these.
Blog Type #3: Trends/Updates/Properties
The third type of blogs someone may want to publish are trends, market updates, or properties for sale.
These are best for social shares and sometimes for organic search and can help you build your expertise and authority but aren’t traditionally evergreen. They tend to be interesting and fresh.
- Properties for sale that you want to market
- You would usually use our Property pages to create great-looking and effective pages to sell properties/contracts, but some clients go the extra mile creating blogs for the properties they want to market harder.
- Here’s an example →
- Seasonal content your local market may enjoy
- Show you’re local and that you’re real humans your prospects can work with.
- Here’s an example →
- Real estate market stats
- Give occasional stats on the local market, so you’re seen as that expert in Google’s and searcher’s eyes.
- Here’s an example →
- And another one →
How To Market Company News Content
This type of content would first be marketed on social media (FB and IG) to consistently stay in front of your audience to stay top of mind, but also optimize this content in Google for long-tail keywords people in your market may be searching. This content tends to be less evergreen and tied to a specific time frame.
Posting Frequency
As needed. Keep in mind that a regular cadence of monthly trends/updates can keep great content flowing that can be cross-posted on social media so that your audience always sees something fresh coming out and sees you’re an active solution in their market.
Post Length
Length on these can vary depending on the competition for those keywords, but in a general shoot for at least 500 – 800 words.
Avoiding Cannibalization
The key to a successful blog strategy is to ensure that you aren’t creating content that competes with the keywords of your primary keyword pages (usually location pages). Meaning you should not have any blog content targeting the same types of keywords as your location pages.
For a motivated seller site, the primary keywords on a home page or location page tend to focus on “sell my house fast/we buy houses/cash home buyers” type of keywords. Avoid creating blog posts going after these same/similar phrases so as not to confuse Google and cannibalize those pages in rankings.
Example
Context: This is an example of a motivated seller website where the home page and/or location pages are optimized for “sell my house fast in [location]” keywords.
Avoid blogs on:
🚫 “How to Sell Your House Faster in With These Crafty Tips”
🚫 “The Best Way to Sell Your House in the Market”
🚫 “5 Ways to sell your house quickly in this year”
NOTE: Blogs on the topics above will compete with a home page or location page optimized for “sell my house fast [location],” and it will likely reduce the ranking in Google for both pages. If a site has blogs competing with similar keywords a home or location page is optimized for, best practice is to remove/archive the blogs.
Good blogs:
✅ “How to Sell a House in When You Live in Another Part of the Country”
✅ “How to Sell Your House With Unpermitted Work in ”
✅ “How to sell your house without a real estate agent in ”
✅ “5 tips on selling a house in probate in ”
NOTE: The 4th blog above is on a niche within a market and great. The first three are a gray area where they talk about selling a house, but they modify the subject of the blog to a specific niche. i.e. – “when living in another part of the country” focuses on a niche of an absentee owner, “unpermitted work”, and “selling without an agent” focus on a specific niche/challenge. These are ok as blogs and can be great “pillars” to build content on.