How to Format Content on Your Website for Maximum Leads

Last week I talked the famous 1,000 words a day formula I personally implement each and every day to help grow my online presence. I stressed that writing like this will allow you to gain momentum in the search engines by providing targeted content to the local community.

What it boils down to is just writing every single day. Before for you know it, you will have hundreds of pieces of content online targeted to your niche market of real estate, and those pieces of content should be bringing some form of traffic over to your website.

Today we will dig into something that may be even more important than writing the content. Many of the so-called SEO gurus will tell you that if you get this next part wrong, then you risk producing content that will never be seen by anyone.

What I’m getting at is that the structure and format of your content needs to be done in a manner that it satisfy the reader and the search engines. How do we do this? First, before getting into how we do it, you must understand why we do it and the effects of it.

How to Correctly Format Content on Your Website

The Title

The title of the piece of content you’re trying to get noticed online must include the keyword you’re trying to rank for somewhere. You can’t be like these other real estate websites that say something like “We Buy Houses Fast.”

Ok, you buy houses where? New York, Chicago or even Atlanta, GA. If your title doesn’t specifically say what, when and where, then you risk ending up on page 135, no matter how great your content is. I can’t tell you the hundreds of real estate websites and other industry websites that don’t have keyword-rich titles.

So for this reason the search engines have no clue what market you’re in and end up ranking you at the bottom with all the rest of the bad content online. Ninety-five percent of the real estate websites I come across are like this — only created with the user in mind.

People get these so-called web designers to build them a cheap real estate website that’s essentially worthless when it comes to the online world of getting leads. The site foundation is not set up correctly, so basically you’re fighting a battle against yourself to gain leads. The potential leads online that are searching to sell or buy property in your local market can’t find you.

They can’t find you because your website foundation is not setup correctly because unfortunately most of you took the cheap way out. By doing that you end up frustrated at the process wondering why you’re not getting any online leads. Well, take a look at your title first and see if it’s optimized for your local city.

Finally, when I come across someone’s site like this, I stress to them not to worry about it until they build their online presence first. The we can come back to that down the road once we have a good presence online. Building that online presence first gives you a way to dominate the search engine fast versus starting with the website rankings out of the gate.

The Body Content

The final thing we have to do is think about the content from the points of view of the reader and the search engine. First let’s start with the reader in mind — you want to remember to write for the reader, not the search engines. If your content is good enough to be noticed by readers, then over time the search engines will catch up and rank it accordantly.

This is proven by facts from the research and case studies I’ve done recently. One thing we will get into a little later is SEO, but for now just know that I found out for a fact that the engagement of the content you write — from traffic to shares on social media — has a lot to do with how websites rank. More on that later.

Next, you want to use your targeted keyword in every other paragraph when writing your content. Those paragraphs should be not more then 3 to 5 sentence long so that the content doesn’t run together. People will get discouraged with content that is too long and runs together in one big paragraph, so make the effort to break them up into short but sweet paragraphs for better reading.

Finally, when it comes to the targeted keywords, people still ask if there is such a thing as over-using them in the body of your content. Well, to be honest there is no proven fact that using a keyword 10x in your content is bad for rankings, but some research suggests that the search engines will see your articles as spam if you “overstuff” it with keywords. I wouldn’t go over 5 mentions — in the pattern of about one keyword per 200 words or so — no matter how long the content is to always play on the safe side of the fence.

Meta Tags

Now, I can write about meta tags all day, but today I’m going to keep it short and to the point. These are tags/keywords you can attach to your content to notify the search engines what that content is about. These were something that Google used a lot of back in the early 2000’s to rank websites.

Using this method back in the day, we could build a website and be ranked in abut two weeks for highly targeted keywords. Something like this back then was very effective in the real estate industry if you knew how to do it. Sadly, that was abused by many people, even myself, back then. We dominated the search engines so much that Google started to overlook them and started major updates to filter out junk websites that were ranking but had low quality content.

So, to sum it up, do you need to use meta tags to help rank your content? The simple answer is… Yes and No. The reason being that the factors of ranking content are so diverse these days that while meta tags won’t hurt, it likely doesn’t matter if you use them or not.

Categories

One element of rankings that I’ve researched and found is pulling a lot of weight in how content is ranked in at least Google search engines is the use of categories.

For Example: If you have a real estate website, you want to have targeted keywords for your categories. Meaning, your categories should be something like…

Shreveport Homes For Sale
Shreveport House for Rent
Shreveport Real Estate
Shreveport Foreclosures
Shreveport Current Events

All you want to do is write the appropriate content underneath each category. Just place your content underneath the right category and over time, that category will start to outrank everything. Why? This is because you will be pushing so much targeted content under the same related category that the search engine will assume the page/category has a lot of authority and rank it highly in the search engine. The good thing about this is that it can happen naturally without you having to do anything. How powerful is that?

Now you know how to format that load of content you will be writing, so get down to working those fingers on your keyboard and start producing highly quality local content today!

Next week I will dive a little more into having an SEO-friendly website, page and post so that everything you write will be for the purpose of getting targeted traffic. Just this alone can help your real estate business gain thousands of leads every single year, all on auto pilot.

Comment Time: What are your best formatting tips for getting traffic to your site? Will you be implementing my tips?

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Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.