Real estate firms that ignore the whip of the longtail will suffer from a waning wellspring of motivated clients in the coming years. Ask yourself which of the following clients would you consider more motivated and, thus, closer to a buying decision: One who walked into one of your brick and mortar offices and said "I want to look for Chicagoland real estate, maybe in Evanston or Rogers Park" versus a client who asked "I want to look for "2520 luxury development buying opportunities". Chances are you’d pick the latter. That’s a longtail client. The former is a "head" or "shoulders" client.

Google’s CEO argues that marketers should focus on the head and shoulder (but, of course, he would argue this because it’s hard to get great longtail positioning in the "free" organic side of Google where the most motivated buyers click and, thus, he wants you to buy advertising around those longtail results). Contrast Google CEO’s argument with this Hitwise study, which essentially states that the longtail is the future of search, with infinite combinations of complicated, and not so complicated, keyword phrases that will bring motivated buyers right to the front door of your most important branch office…your website (thanks for that analogy Arthur Sterbcow !)

Now for some baseline hypotheticals for this post: you’re tracking your inbound traffic (if not, that’ll be covered in a subsequent post), likely 40 to 50 percent of your traffic comes direct (i.e., someone typing your domain name directly) or from someone entering your brand name into Google, likely 50 percent of the remainder comes to your site from a geo-targeted search phrase that includes your brand ("abc realty chicago"), the rest of your traffic is some combination of happenstance and funky keyword phrases. In this scenario, you’re a head with some shoulders but lacking a tail.
And you look like this:

When you really want to look like this:

Now, you may be asking, so what? Why should I focus on the longtail when my head and shoulders are obviously doing so well? That’s a good argument. But let’s stop and think about geology. A geologist can look at the topography of a section of a desert and ascertain that this section of the desert contains gold. He/she looks at the surface, runs a few tests, predicts yield, mines the desert, and makes a profit, but only after extracting acceptable yields of ranges around 4 ounces of gold per 7 metric tons of dirt. That’s a lot of sifting, a lot of labor to attain an acceptable margin. Compare that to the 1849 gold rush prospectors picking nuggets out of the American river (at least the earliest prospectors did).

Looking at search, the geologist plays the short tail (lots of tire kickers, lots of digging for what the client really wants in Evanston or Rogers Park) and the early prospectors play the longtail (gold nuggets ripe for the picking because they’re glowing in the river and know what Lincoln park development they want).

So how do you start riding the longtail whip now before the gold nuggets disappear? You have to optimize, or use tools that are optimized, for leveraging the longtail. If you want to do this yourself, that generally means a site/database restructuring that accommodates a robust content strategy, which generally means a hefty investment in "robusticizing" (just love that made up word!) your technical infrastructure, while finding resources to daily, and sometimes more than daily, draft well-written, and well-optimized content. Not a palatable buffet in today’s environment. That’s why we created Propopoly®.

Propopoly® is an affordable and effective blogging platform that you can use as a tool to ride the longtail whip. Here are some real longtail search examples of members who’ve adopted Propopoly®:

These searches are the equivalent of the motivated Lincoln Park client above. These are the clients who are telling Google–the "Oracle"–what they want, and Google is telling these clients that these Propopoly® brokers are the de facto experts because they–through their blog–appear on Google page 1. Once these motivated clients click into a Propopoly® broker blog, not only do they read excellent posts by local experts, but there’s a clear broker and agent brand presence presented in a professional and compelling manner. Thus, the consumer has the confidence they’re dealing with trusted advisors. To learn more about Propopoly®, kindly email us at propopoly@leadingre.com.

Posted By: Eric Bryn