Generate more future leads with your neighborhood page

Did you know that the most powerful lead-generating pages on a real estate agent’s website can and should be the neighborhood or community pages?

Sadly, for too many agents, they aren’t. Although these pages provide important information to visitors, too many aren’t doing the heavy lifting of luring new visitors to the site. Why?

Inaccurate understanding of how to set these pages up for lead generation success.

For instance, one agent website provider offers up a blog post about features to include to create an “Unbelievable Real Estate Neighborhood Page.”

• Home prices
• Community description
• Neighborhood photos and videos
• Area statistics
• School rankings
• Local attractions

They then show examples of these features “in action.” Of the two agent websites shown, neither showed up within the first FIVE pages of Google results for their neighborhood pages.

I don’t know about you, but an “unbelievable” neighborhood page should generate leads.

So, how do you get yours to do that?

Optimize those neighborhood pages

Although the pages we viewed on the aforementioned websites are full of valuable information about the various communities, they will never rank unless and until they are SEO optimized.

Even then there is no guarantee you’ll show up on page one of Google, especially if you work in a major market, such as San Francisco, Chicago or New York.

Optimizing your pages may, on the other hand, yield huge results for smaller-market agents.

Start with the title

Your first impulse when creating a title for a neighborhood page is naturally going to be something along the lines of “Homes for Sale in [Name of Neighborhood].”

But, check this out: There’s an agent in New England who titles all of his neighborhood pages “Realtors Guide to [Name of Neighborhood].”

We don’t know what led him to make this decision but it might be that he felt the names of the neighborhoods were too competitive to rank well on their own.

His decision is brilliant, however. We ran a search for “Realtor [Name of Neighborhood] and he ranks on page one of Google for three out of four communities. For the fourth, he ranks in the number one spot on page two of Google results.

While the volume of searches for this term are most likely quite low, we imagine this agent gets the lion’s share of leads when it is used.

Tip: If you choose to go the traditional route, avoid using the term “real estate.” It’s not a term that consumers frequently use. In fact, Google ads research shows us that “homes for sale in” receives nearly 9.5 times more impressions than “real estate for sale in.”

Additionally, the former results in nearly 5 times more clicks than the latter.

Sprinkle longtail keyword phrases throughout

Longtail keywords typically include at least 4 words, but often more than that. Some to consider include hyper-local phrases such as:

• Homes for sale in las vegas with a view
• View homes for sale in las vegas
• Oceanfront homes for sale in Waikiki
• Homes for sale in Hopkins near the blake school

Work these into your neighborhood descriptions as naturally as possible. For instance:

“The best neighborhoods that offer ocean-front homes for sale in Waikiki include . . .”

Tip: If a neighborhood is known locally by a name that’s different than what appears on the map or the official name, don’t be afraid to use it in your long-tail keyword phrases.

Don’t stuff

While you want to avoid keyword stuffing, there are areas of a neighborhood page that will give your keywords the most bang for the buck.

These include:

• The title of the page
• The first sentence on the page
• The URL link
• Several subheadings
• Image alt text

If you don’t have neighborhood pages on your website, it’s time to fix that.

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