Implementing a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign that allows you to compete with the listing portals can be difficult. Portals continue to dominate search results and retain the mass amounts of traffic due to their national presence and unlimited budgets. That’s why your brokerage must find ways to capitalize on and nurture opportunities not deemed viable by the large portal websites. One way of doing this is through a hyper-local SEO strategy.
What is Hyper-Local SEO?
A hyper-local SEO strategy is an offshoot from local SEO strategy. Much like local SEO, hyper-local SEO focuses on the importance for certain businesses to optimize their web presence to run for locally specific searches. The difference is that hyper-local optimizes for smaller, more focused localities such as neighborhoods, towns, streets, and landmarks, rather than local SEO which gets as granular as cities, districts or regions.
Here are four ways to drive your hyper-local strategy:
- Community Strategies. A quick, simple tactic you can use is to create top-level landing pages for communities or neighborhoods. When you create these types of pages, you’re simplifying the process for a website visitor and providing a particular user experience. You can get granular with your approach and address on a hyper-local level, whether it be from a community/neighborhood basis or, more specifically, different home types within the community. This can position your brokerage as the leading expert in the space and drive more traffic to your website.
- Content Creation. Work out which neighborhoods your brokerage and agents should focus on. Write blog posts that offer information about the lifestyle, culture, and values of these areas and what amenities are desirable in each neighborhood. When your brokerage creates content that is extremely specific and hyper-focused, Google will see you as the authority on these neighborhoods.
- Website Suggestions and Integrations. Mobile searches have passed desktop and laptop searches and will continue to trend upward for several years. You must maximize your brokerage’s appearance in search, incorporate community landing pages for each of your neighborhoods. Leverage keywords that are related to a particular neighborhood, such as amenities, events, restaurants, house types, etc. From there, optimize your community landing pages with these keywords to draw in more traffic and communicate to Google and other popular search engines that you are a key influencer within that community.
4. Schema Markups. Using structured schema markup allows your brokerage to stand out in search engines by displaying unique attributes among your competitors, such as property images, list items, addresses, open house times and more. With your data marked up and structured correctly on critical pages of your website, it becomes easier for your brokerage to rank and appear for focused web searches.
What are you doing to create a hyper-local strategy? Are you using Zavvie or other services? Post your answers in the comment section.
