Real estate SEO (search engine optimization) isn’t easy; I don’t care which expert you hire. In most cities, it’s hard to rank for the biggest keywords. This isn’t meant to discourage you. The growing trend with most Web searchers is to target the specific geographic neighborhood, district or area where they want to live.
This is a huge opportunity for real estate agents. You can specialize in particular neighborhoods and quickly rank highly on Google for the uncompetitive searches related to those neighborhoods. Think about it: Homebuyers and sellers are more informed than ever before. This means they are more demanding when it comes to selecting their real estate agent. They want to do business with the expert in that particular part of town.
This is how consumers are now programmed. Who do you trust more to make your coffee: Starbucks or the local diner? Probably Starbucks, because it’s the coffee specialist, and the diner is more of a generalist.
Potential Web-searching clients want to do business with the real estate agent who appears to be the specialist in their specific location. And the good news is that it is still relatively easy to rank high on Google for neighborhoods and districts in most cities.
Here’s a quick video showing you the ins and outs of using this tactic:
But how does this scale?
Sure, you can easily get on the first page for “homes with horse farms 26 miles from Dallas,” but that doesn’t easily get you a lot of leads. The neat thing about this strategy is that you can easily repeat this for as many neighborhoods and niches as you want. You can have one website that specializes in land sales in a particular area, and you can have another website that specializes in getting buyer leads for a wealthy neighborhood.
You want to be as specific as possible when picking your niche. People pay the most attention to that which was meant exactly for them.
If Jim walks down the street and sees a billboard with his name on it, he is much more likely to pay attention to it. The same goes with websites. You want to make these pages and sites as specific as possible. Sure, you can have one main website that serves as the “mothership.” But these other sites and pages should be as personable as possible to the target audience.
Is one website better than many sites?
I think you should have many small websites that feed into your main website. You can use a different design and logo for the small sites to enhance the sense of specialization. It gives the Internet browser a more personalized feel. You can also use a neighborhood-specific domain name for this website.
When you send out fliers and postcards, include the neighborhood-specific URL. You also can use that URL on yard signs. This will get you traffic from local neighbors.
Set up a buyers waiting list.
I recommend setting up a tab on your neighborhood websites that says, “Join my buyers waiting list.” This will help you get more sellers for that particular neighborhood. You can easily tie this button to a free MailChimp account and send the occasional email to anyone who joins the list. This feature will help you close more seller presentations in that neighborhood.
Generate content for the site.
Finally, these neighborhood-specific or niche-specific websites are the most potent when they have content on them. You’ll want to fill them up with a minimum of 10 articles, and be sure to add at least one per month. In addition to great SEO results, this content will help build your site into the community. People love to read and watch information about where they live (or where they want to live). You can create video tours of local attractions and events, or simply create content like a local business journal would.
You’ll really want to focus on the lead capture and calls to action of these websites once you make them. This is a topic for another post, but it does you no good if these websites aren’t capturing leads.
Let me know in the comments below if you have any trouble starting websites like this. The formula I show you in the video and tips here should help you start getting leads from Google.
Tyler Zey is the digital marketing director and contributing editor for the Real Estate Digital Marketing blog on easyagentpro.com.