How to Create Landing Pages Using WordPress Taxonomy Pages

by Jul 23, 2020Blog, Apartment Marketing, PPC, RentPress, Search, SEO, Website, Website Design, WordPress

WordPress is one of the largest content management systems in the world. The flexibility and simplicity make it an easy choice for many to build their marketing websites. WordPress also lets you put all of your content (including all of your property data) into categories of your choosing called Taxonomies. Think about taxonomies as a special kind of categorization on two levels. Imagine departments at a grocery store:  dairy, produce, frozen. But each of those departments contain more specific sections like yogurt/cheese/milk, fruit/vegetables/salad, vegetables/pizza/desserts, and then each of those sections have a variety of products. In the WordPress world, “Frozen” is the taxonomy, “Pizza” is the term, and “Four Cheese” would be your specific post.

This unsung hero does more than help you organize your content. When used to its fullest potential, taxonomy pages can pull double duty on your website by also functioning as landing pages for visitors. In addition to boosting your site’s SEO performance,  you can use them in other marketing channels like email campaigns or paid advertising.

In a previous blog post, we covered the concept of Neighborhood Leasing. This strategy lets you capture the power of shopper behavior in all aspects of your marketing funnel. Using targeted landing pages is an important part of Neighborhood leasing. We will look at what landing pages do for your site,  why you need landing pages, and finally how to create a landing page (the easy way).

 

 

Your Website and Its Search Presence

Once you’ve spent the time and money to have your website’s homepage looking great, you then face the question: what comes next? Your website needs more pages. A lot more. This ensures your website has a greater chance of showing up in search results. And while your homepage is likely the first page many visitors see on your website, it doesn’t always prove useful to searchers. 

Apartment shoppers complete online searches for apartments in cities 32 times more than searches for apartments by brand. In order to show up for these searches, your website needs to have a page that provides an answer to that question.

Learn more about SEO and what makes your website show up on search engines in our blog post, “How Does SEO Actually Work?”

By creating pages around what people search for, your site will now also show up in those search results. Shoppers landing on these pages have a greater chance of interacting with your website content when immediately presented with relevant content. Think about it from a shopper’s perspective. If a shopper searches for “apartments in St. Louis” and lands on a homepage full of links to a dozen different options, they may get confused on what to click to find the answers they want. 

Now imagine that same search query but with targeted results. The shopper is taken to a page displaying only apartments in St. Louis and other content directly related to apartments in the area. This not only lowers the chance for drop-offs (bounces) but increases engagement and conversion rates.

 

 

How To Create A Landing Page (The Easy Way)

RentPress stems from a deep foundation of multifamily industry knowledge and comes backed by an award-winning marketing agency. We’ve taken bits and pieces of what we’ve learned from multifamily marketing and built powerful tools and features inside RentPress to make sure you’re set up for success out of the box. We’ve identified three areas key to multifamily marketing that can leverage WordPress’s taxonomy functionality and automatically create landing pages.

These areas are:

  • Location
  • Amenities
  • Pet Policy

 

Let’s dive into the details, focusing on Location.

The first time you sync your properties to your website, RentPress will – in the background – automatically scan your properties, take note of every city from each property’s address, create a page for “apartments in each city,” and then assign each property to that page. 

If you have four properties in St. Louis, by the time RentPress completes syncing data to your website, you’ll have a page on your website named “Apartments in St. Louis” that directs shoppers to choose from the four properties. And when you have properties in multiple cities, those pages will also create themselves. 

RentPress will even take the next steps of adding an image and some placeholder text. Even if you do nothing else, you’ll start seeing a lift in traffic to your site from shoppers searching based on location. As a bonus, you’ll also see the same for each of the amenities across all of your properties. You can also do this for Cat-Friendly and for Dog-Friendly properties too.

That’s right: you now automatically created dozens or even hundreds of relevant landing pages on your website in less time than it takes to make a cup of coffee. If you’ve ever managed SEO on a website before, we forgive you for drooling a bit after reading that. 

But if you spend just a little bit more time on these pages, you can turn them into powerful landing pages to direct shoppers into your properties or even getting excited about the area where they plan to move.

Each of these pages lets you add custom images, a paragraph of text, and even a slot specifically built to add in a WordPress shortcode (think a photo gallery, map, contact form; you have nearly-endless possibilities here). For city pages, you’ll find all that plus space to add in more information about the city including extended romance copy and a list of local favorites. 

The short description entered on these pages will also display in the Neighborhood section on each property’s page, where they will link back to your city page:

 

Add a photo here to make it the hero image banner and thumbnail representing the city across your site:

 

You can put any WordPress shortcode in the shortcode field, though we think it works best with a photo gallery or map:

 

Finally, to really provide extra value on your landing page, add in some extended copy about your city and local favorites nearby:

 

Here’s our final result:

 

 

Or take a look at our demo website: https://demo.rentpress.io/cities/st-louis/

 

Done! We now have our landing page beefed up with content both useful and relevant to search engines and shoppers alike. This page can now integrate into your SEO strategy passively by just letting the search engines crawl it for information. Or you can take a more active approach by adding the link into the site’s main navigation, footer, or even homepage.

But don’t forget to think outside of the site, too. Location plays a large part in online searches, the same holds true for paid advertising campaigns. By using this page in your ads – instead of your homepage – shoppers who click on the ad will see content more relevant to their search (pro tip: this also makes your ads perform better). With relevant results, shoppers will more likely convert and proceed through the marketing funnel to fill out a guest card.

 

This page also works great for email campaigns. In most email campaigns, you want to send readers back to your site. Having these pages ready to go not only gives you a leg up on assembling your campaign, but your readers will see relevant content here too. Win, win!

Whether you want to share what makes a city compelling or propose other nearby options to shoppers, you’ll find that landing pages serve a critical purpose in your marketing strategy.

Have questions about how RentPress can help your marketing efforts? Drop us a line. We’re here to help.