The Perfect Storm
My blog got an unusual amount of traffic yesterday. I guess from a bloggers point of view I can call it the perfect storm. The combination of link love because of some posts I recently wrote and home buyers looking for a Realtor generated an extra 600 visits.
When my traffic spikes I always take a peak and see where the traffic is coming from. I found a bunch of links from Google and found that someone had used the search string “homes prices in St. Paul MN”.
Google Really Loves Me
I looked at the search and found that my blog comes up one and two on Google’s first page for that search. The number two is an indent in the index because Google won’t let me have the entire first page. A silly rule but I can’t change it.
Beneath me were links to some big real estate web sites. I point this out because the internet is the great equalizer. Google doesn’t care if there is a huge community of bloggers on a site or just one.
Unique Content Rules
The posts that were getting all the attention could have been published on a free blog on any number of real estate web sites but I don’t post the unique local content that drives my business on real estate web sites.
It doesn’t hurt to have buyers and sellers come directly to me instead of coming in through a third party. If I published the same type of content on the real estate web sites Google might find those sites instead of my site, but maybe not. I guess that would be OK but again what is wrong with having them come directly to me? What is the downside? The concentrated content I have has given me concentrated traffic.
Web Sites with POWER
There are real estate bloggers who believe that some of the real estate web sites and social networks where they have blogs have “power”. I am not sure what kind of power they are talking about. In fact one of those powerful sites with a ton of bloggers on it didn’t even show up in the Google search that brought my visitor. I only went to page five but I think that is far enough.
It isn’t just that single search that brings in the business, there are many others, which is a good thing because people use all sorts of searches. The bloggers who write on the big sites have each other. They can comment on each others posts and talk about the “power” of the web site. I don’t have that kind of interaction with other Realtors on my blog. I may have to join a support group of something.
