My Quest for Original Content

Google loves original content, and so our real estate firm finds itself on a never ending quest to create this original content so Google will rank us higher in its search engine algorithms.

The strategy has worked very well thus far. Our traffic has risen 100x, from an average of 20 unique visitors per day in the summer of 2007, to 2,400 unique visitors per day this past winter. This puts us within striking distance of the top 100,000 websites mark. We are currently at 135,007.

Our strategy has been working, as evidenced by the graph at right, and we have a new trick we're just now introducing. It's too early to know for sure that this will work, but I have high hopes for our new approach. Let me tell you about it:

We've found that it's generally very difficult to consistently create a high volume of good quality, written content. Usually the experts who are able to write the content are too busy getting deals done or otherwise adding value to the company. So we have, until recently, found ourselves in a conundrum. But, we just found the solution, which can be accomplished in a few easy steps:

Have people within your company do phone interviews with clients, vendors, or experts in the field. Doing a phone interview is much easier than writing original content. We use the third party provider Audio Acrobat to record our calls. We simply start the call with, say, a client, put them on hold, bring Audio Acrobat on the line, and then presto, we're recording.
Audio Acrobat automatically uploads and puts the file on the web with HTML code to easily paste into web pages.
We then use a transcription company to transcribe the content into written form. This allows us to provide both audio and written versions of the content. Google only cares about the written content. Here is an example of an interview with a lender, another lender, and a loan broker.

We'll keep you updated and let you know how this affects our Google rankings!