Effect of Publishing Blog Posts Resembling Classified Advertisements

[Kingalan1]

Our site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) markets commercial real estate for lease in New York City.

Any potential negative impact in terms of ranking and traffic by using our blog post in an unconventional manner? I am considering publishing a weekly post describing the latest commercial listings for lease. The post would be formatted and resemble classified advertising appearing in such newspapers as The New York Times. The ads are concise and appealing.

Property listings drive a high click thru rate, so I believe blogs posts based on property listings and formatted like old newspaper ads might really improve visitor engagement. Each add could have a link to a corresponding listing page.

Would using the blog in this manner every week have a detrimental effect or could prove beneficial?

Thoughts???

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[MattRoney]

I'm not personally aware of anything that would make it inherently bad, but I do think you should take some time to consider why people visit your blog, and who you'd like the audience for your blog to be. If your blog is mainly for content that's reasonably "evergreen" and that will draw repeat visitors, then using it for this sort of promotional material might not be the best idea. If you're just looking to draw one-off visitors or fill your funnel, it might be fine.

For example, take the Moz blog—the vast majority of our posts aren't about Moz products at all, and when we do post about our own products and events, the posts are in addition to our regularly-scheduled, educational posts. Our blog has a large readership who are generally looking for information they can apply to their own marketing. If they saw posts that serve as little more than advertisements for our products, they'd have no reason to come back. Running the sort of content we run helps us keep our position as an industry thought leader, and keeps us front-of-mind when members of our community are in the market for tools like ours.

You note that property listings tend to draw a lot of clicks, but those clicks are coming from folks who are actively looking for property listings. Those types of visitors strike me as pretty likely to see the listing on your blog, consider whether they're interested, and then bounce along to the next search result. I don't see them sticking around to read and engage with your blog. If you're fine with that, go ahead. If you'd like your blog to be a knowledge source for your visitors, though, maybe leave the listings to the listings.