If you are real estate agents whose market area covers a large number of neighborhoods, small towns, and suburbs, it can be difficult to ensure the your website encompasses all these areas, and also so the potential homebuyers and home sellers know the you work in those particular neighborhoods and can help them either find what they’re looking for, or sell with they are looking to sell.
Which neighborhoods do you market in?
First, make a list of all the neighborhoods in areas you market to, and rank them from most important to least important. Now you want to focus on the ones you consider most important first, as these are the ones that you either are most active in or bring the most commission in for.
Discover what is awesome about each neighborhood
Second, you want to find unique things about those neighborhoods. Don’t just consider the public schools, investigate private schools, charter schools and even the sought after preschools. Look at the activities that are popular in each area. Are there museums, great parks, touristy attractions, great shopping districts, great hikes or bike paths? Water parks for kids? Great local farmer’s markets to buy organic produce? Are some neighborhoods better suited to growing families, or eco-friendly types? Which is pet friendly? Ideally, you want to gather up all the information potential home buyer looking at the various neighborhoods would want to know, and things that you can tempt them with that can sway them to one particular neighborhood over another one that you might not sell as much in.
Show off your knowledge
Any real estate agent can tell you the population per capita, the median house value, the average annual income for family – for the most part that stuff is pretty boring and if someone needs it, they can find it very easily. Instead you want to show off that you know these neighborhoods, the are active in them, that you are very familiar with what each neighborhood has to offer. Spouting off per capita figures is not going to show that, but talking about the great lakeside walking path or the historical museum does show off the you know what neighborhood intimately.
Tell potential homebuyers about why each neighborhood is unique and interesting
Now, you want to create webpages for each of these neighborhoods. Go out on a sunny day and take some pictures. Write up all the interesting things about each neighborhood, and this means either you or someone you trust in your office writes it up, as you need to have all original content for each of these neighborhoods. If you just “borrow” content from another websites, it will rank in Google, and you could find yourself being sued for stealing the content – something you definitely don’t want have associated with your real estate site. And make sure that these pages do have a lot of details. A short four line paragraph won’t get the job done, but having four or more paragraphs will.
Link them up!
Don’t forget to include links to some of the interesting places include, like museums or parks or annual events. Remember your website is in a vacuum, you want to give your visitors the tools to find more information easily, so that they know they can then go off later to click through some of these links, rather than feeling they have to stop everything and Google that great museums you mention right away. Not giving them a way to leave won’t make it less likely that they they will leave your website.
Bringing all your neighborhood pages together
You also want to create a great landing page for all these neighborhoods, where you will then link out to each of your neighborhood pages. So your landing page could include things like a map so a person can see easily where the different neighborhoods are located in, small photo or two of each of the neighborhoods so that homebuyers can get a sense of the type of neighborhood each is, such as some are known for Victorian-style houses, whereas others might be known for their more modern approach to buildings. You want to include a short blurb about each neighborhood, short little snippet that also gives people an idea about each neighborhood, with the link to the in-depth neighborhood page created.
Show off your neighborhood pages on your homepage
Now, you will want to link to this landing page from the home page of your real estate site. You can choose one of your pictures from one of the neighborhoods and feature that on the homepage along with the blurb about “Can’t decide which Seattle neighborhood is best for you? We can tell you the best features about each!”
Keep them updated
Don’t forget to go back and ads any new details, or update on things like new parks that have opened, summer fairs – basically anything that’s happening in each of those neighborhoods that is interesting, that is new and that people are excited about. It is always a good idea to go back to update and refresh these neighborhood pages every few months. You might have mentioned that great local coffeehouse on the corner that is since closed its doors, or have some other information that becomes dated, and that is not the impression you want to give potential clients. And this could include going back and taking the photos every few months, and don’t forget you can then pin them to Pinterest!
Promote them!
Don’t shy about promoting these pages. If someone says they’re not sure what neighborhood they should be considering, or they’re trying to decide between two, recommend these pages so they can look at things more in depth. And there’s lots of opportunity on Facebook and Twitter as well if you see discussion about what neighborhood to live in.
Many real estate agents make the mistake of only looking at the larger market area, such as Seattle instead of Kirkland or the Queen Anne neighborhood, not to mention “Seattle real estate” is going have some pretty hefty competition, whereas “Queen Anne real estate” is not nearly as competitive, and you can set yourself apart that way with these great neighborhood pages.
