Most real estate agents really get it wrong when trying to rank their websites pages. They try to tackle the most competitive terms, the first terms that pop into their head when they think about how they would search for homes for sale.
The ubiquitous and incredibly hard to rank for terms are, “town state homes for sale” and “town state real estate”. The competition is fierce. You’re going up against huge brand name websites with big budgets and even bigger brand name recognition, which Google absolutely loves.
Can you rank for these? Sure, I’ve helped a couple agents rank for these terms but it took a lot of work, time, resources, and mostly money to develop an extensive linking campaign.
Marketing At The Community Level
You’re much better off picking the low hanging fruit. For starters, think smaller. Don’t go after the town and state name. Go after searches that are performed at the neighborhood or community level.
Except in the most competitive markets, you’ll fairly easily be able to rank for neighborhood pages with decent on page optimization and just a few good external links with specific anchor text.
Let’s use the town of Trumbull CT as an example. There are lots of different neighborhoods in Trumbull, with one of the more popular being Tashua.
Set Up Your New Page
Set up your new pages title tag to include the words Trumbull, CT, Tashua, real estate, and home for sale. Use these words through the page that describes the neighborhood, which should come naturally as you create your page. Use an image or two with proper alt text and your on page SEO should be done in under an hour.
Add A Dash Of Off Page Optimization
Get a few dozen quality links and you’re likely in business. You’ll probably start to see some consistent long tail traffic pretty quickly.
Create a page like this for each neighborhood in your town and you’ll start to get some nice exposure.
Ranking Your More Competitive Pages Higher
These pages will also help your rankings for your more broad town and state specific pages too if you link to each of them internally from your new neighborhood pages. By getting links to those neighborhood pages and linking internally to your town and state pages you’ll pass along a little link juice which will further help to rank those more competitive pages even higher.
The author of this article, Scott Jenkins runs a few small niche website related to home improvement. His favorite website to work on is about quartz countertops while his most recent page on the site is about quartz countertops prices.
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