“Location, location, location” applies to more than just where a home is situated on the planet. If you think about it, the age-old mantra describes and rules your business.
You sling real estate in a specific location. When a consumer needs an agent, they search for one in their location. As well, when they want to look at homes online, they further define their location by neighborhood or community.
Which is why we harp so much on making it very clear to your website visitors where you work, on creating the perception that you are the local authority and on increasing local SEO on your blogs and other website content.
The most valuable real estate on your website for helping you increase organic traffic are your real estate community pages. The content in this section is so valuable that by tweaking it, you may increase your traffic by 40 percent, according to Neal Patel.
By “tweaking,” we mean breathing new life into old content. So today, let’s look at some ways you can refresh these real estate community pages, starting with…
Look for zombie content
- Go through the real estate community pages section of your site, looking for the pages that receive the most traffic. We like Google Search Console for this task.
- Once there, click on “Search Traffic” and then “Search Analytics.
- This brings up the content that gets the most eyes. Now click on “CTR” (this is located above the list).
Believe it or not, there’s actually a formula that you can use to help figure out which of these posts will give you the highest return on your time invested.
David Schneider, at thehoth.com, offers a walkthrough, but here’s the gist: Look for content with:
- A click-through rate (CTR) of less than 1%
- A position between 1 and 30
- A high impression rate
Schedule a demo with us today to learn more
Take a tour
Now that you know which real estate community pages to resurrect, go to your site and take a critical look at each of these pages.
When you land on them, are they appealing to the eye? Do they contain:
- A logical search term in the page’s title?
- Lots of clear, compelling photos?
- Lots of white space?
- Short paragraphs (no more than five sentences each?)
- Subheadings?
- Bulleted lists?
- Punctuation and grammar errors?
Then, test all of the links on the page to ensure that none are broken. Are there internal links on the page? If not, make a note to add some.
Head over to the backend of your site
Pull up the first of your most popular neighborhood pages.
- Start with the copy. Fix any problems we described in the previous section. Ensure that your keywords and phrases are sufficient. Remove anything in the copy that isn’t evergreen, such as outdated average home prices in the community. Add alt images to your photos if they lack them. You’ll find instructions at yoast.com.
- Add additional copy. If there have been changes to the area, let folks know. New eateries or parks in close proximity? Anything you can add to lengthen the community’s description will help boost your SEO.
- How is that CTA? Is it compelling? Easy to see?
- Fix broken links and change the text that surrounds these links. This helps search engine spiders to understand that the page has new “juice,” according to Cyrus Shepard at moz.com.
- Don’t forget to add internal links if the copy lacks them. You’ll find an example of incorporating an internal link in the third paragraph of this post. The text “where you work” links to a previous Easy Agent Pro blog post on the topic.
Repeat the process for your most popular real estate community pages. Once published, don’t forget to share the URLs on social media.
Need ideas on how to beef up your content? Check out the Arigna Team in Silicon Valley (scroll down past the “Featured Listings). Although the content is brilliant, it’s a pity there aren’t photos.
Instead of a narrative description of Kathleen, GA, Anita Clark sticks to lists of facts and figures, and does it quite well. Unlike the previous site, she includes photos, but they’re the wrong ones.
Visitors to your website’s neighborhood pages want to see photos of the neighborhood. It’s worth it to take some time to drive around and snap some.
Alas, we couldn’t find a “perfect” neighborhood page. Most of the ones we viewed in our research seem like throwaways. Such a pity.
Homebuyers want local information and when your real estate community pages are of value to them they will be to you, too.