Centralized Leasing by Neighborhood: SEO’s Best Friend

by Jun 29, 2020Blog, Innovation, RentPress, Search, SEO

Apartment shoppers complete online searches for apartments in cities 32 times more than searches for apartments by brand. If your marketing efforts aren’t built to meet these needs, then your website is being left behind in search engines, especially when it comes to competing with an Internet Listing Service (ILS)

To prove this point, we tried it out.  We searched for “apartments in Columbus” on Google. The first organic result shows an ILS.

As you can see, these ILS results rank incredibly well on Google. This is because they build their websites with a focus on location-based searches by featuring maps and properties listed by cities. 

The marketplace on these listing services is also crowded with your competition. So when a prospect is shopping for an apartment and they click on the first website on the search results page, they’ll see your properties listed right next to your competitors.

How can your company compete with other websites and content-creating machines like an ILS when it comes to search results rankings?

Neighborhood Leasing

Whether you have a corporate/portfolio website or single property website, marketing with Neighborhood Leasing lets you rank higher in online search results while also providing an informative experience for your prospects.

 

What is Neighborhood Leasing?

 

Neighborhood Leasing is building marketing efforts around the shopping habits of people looking for an apartment. 

All of these Neighborhood Leasing marketing efforts ladder back to your website, your online leasing office. Organic search traffic becomes one of the largest beneficiaries of this strategy, enabling you to rank among the big guys.

Think about it. Apartment shoppers already know where they want to live, but likely don’t know the names of the apartment communities in those areas. The shopper’s first stop is a search engine like Google. Here they make a search for “apartments near me” or “apartments in [city name].”

To cater to this style of shopping your website should have hundreds of pages full of content, each with the intent to provide the best answer to any given search query. And for apartment websites, these location-based pages are a must.

 

How To Rank in Google Using Neighborhood Leasing

 

In order to effectively implement a Neighborhood Leasing strategy on your website, you need to understand how search engines select websites to display for their users.

The largest search engine in the world, Google, automatically narrows searchers to their general area. Shoppers who don’t put a city as part of their search query will receive results based on the location set in their profile. 

Google selects these websites for display by a variety of methods. Google’s main approach is to crawl websites for information or keywords that relate directly to the searcher’s query. 

Learn more about each of these methods in our blog How Does SEO Actually Work?” 

When your website is crawled by Google, it indexes information found on your site. If Google deems your website to have a relevant answer from what it indexed, it will place the site on the Search Engine Results Page

We mentioned earlier that a major part of Neighborhood Leasing is to create content and pages so that your website becomes the best answer for a location-based search. If you aren’t a website developer or content writer then this simple answer might seem like an enormous hurdle. It doesn’t have to be though. 

Building marketing and SEO strategies around this idea is nothing new to 30 Lines and that’s why Neighborhood Leasing is built into the backbone of our services. 

The RentPress plugin lets you use Neighborhood Leasing strategies to get your website seen in search results and even compete with ILSs. And with the latest update, you can create pages based on the cities your properties are in automatically

Yep, automatically

Designed by our User Experience team, these Cities Pages give shoppers exactly what they want to know. Your properties in this city will be listed in a grid and can also be displayed with a map. Add a description of the location and a list of local favorites (attractions, restaurants, and more) so shoppers can learn about the area and what makes it special. 

To create these pages, RentPress connects directly with your property management software. New properties that you add to your system are automatically added to the Cities pages. This means that whenever your property feed updates, your website updates. 

Google loves content and website updates. The next time they crawl your website they’ll see the new pages that directly answer shoppers’ questions. Which means your website will rank higher.

The best part is that setting up RentPress takes minutes.

Neighborhood Leasing and Beyond

 

Neighborhood Leasing starts with SEO but can extend beyond just your website. You can create PPC Ads based on neighborhood and city keywords. Your multifamily chatbot can let users select which area they want to learn more about. And your email drip campaign should absolutely feature an email about your property’s neighborhood. With search-focused landing pages, you now have options. All of these marketing efforts can link back to the Cities pages RentPress created on your website.

Have questions about Neighborhood Leasing? Drop us a line. We’re here to help.