How do you let your website visitors know that your city and neighborhoods are a fabulous place to live and buy property in? Just listings are not enough, even with all the captivating descriptions and beautiful photography you might include. You need to be more convincing and make your visitors marvel at your properties and actually contact you after seeing them. Here’s one amazingly simple way to do this – just write a neighborhood page.
Do you already have these pages on your website? They are nothing less but vital for your real estate agency. We decided to break down the whole process into 5 easy steps to help you create engaging neighborhood pages quickly. But first of all, here’s a quick recap of why you need them in the first place.
What is so great about having a neighborhood page?
A neighborhood landing page is a powerful lead generation tool. These pages are a long-time content, or cornerstone content, for your real estate website. You’ll need of course to update them periodically, but basic the information stays the same.
The major benefit of having neighborhood pages on your website is that it’s extremely effective for your local SEO. And local SEO for real estate agents is everything if you are ever to compete with nationwide property portals or established businesses.
Here’s a fresh post dedicated to ultimately mastering local real estate SEO that you might find useful too.
These pages naturally cover hyperlocal keywords that you’d want to rank high for organically. They are all about the area you sell your properties in, for example, Soi 88 in Hua Hin. Because your SEO goal is to create huge exposure for your properties, neighborhood landing pages are the linchpin of all your next efforts.
Alongside local SEO, neighborhood pages will serve you so many other useful functions:
- they are great for showcasing local markets and the best they have to offer;
- unique neighborhood pages help you totally stand out from the competition;
- they will educate your visitors on everything they need to know about the neighborhood;
- they are one of the best ways to help you build your trust and knowledge as a real estate expert.
Writing a neighborhood landing page in 5 simple steps
1) Create a list of neighborhoods
The best way to start with neighborhood pages is to compile a list of all areas you sell properties in. For example, if you work in the city of Hua Hin, you might want to include the fishing village, beach area, Artist Village, Petchkasem Road, Soi 88, Soi 94, Grand Market, etc. to your list.
A few good things to remember when coming up with a list of neighborhoods:
- focus on your most important one(s) first;
- of these most important neighborhoods, focus on the ones that enjoy the biggest buzz around them;
- make sure to cover all of your neighborhoods, gradually proceeding from the most to least important ones;
- take a look at your competitors’ websites and make some notes of what they did (but don’t copy!).
Keep in mind that your competitors will be focusing on the same neighborhoods which is why you’d want to try and come up with something different. There is no right and wrong here – just write whatever you think will be most engaging and appealing to your audience, in simple and illustrative formats.
2) Write compelling copy to make your visitors smile (and call you)
At first sight, writing the content for your neighborhood page seems to be the toughest part of the process. However, here’s one good reason why it won’t be daunting at all: you already know this area better than anyone else! Once you start writing, you’ll find a way to serve the best facts in just the right format and exactly as your visitors like. Simply start with what you already know, do some research online and add the most impressive facts to your copy.
While you’re busy crafting your perfect landing page, the most important thing to remember is the purpose of this page. You not only want to provide people with accurate, interesting info about your area. You want to highlight the local lifestyle: what makes it so different from living anywhere else, what unique benefits the person will find and why buying property here should be their next investment.
For this reason, insights into local lifestyle and general information about living here are the cornerstone of your neighborhood page. With that in mind, here are a few good things to remember when writing your content:
- make sure to write a good introduction to get people curious about what’s next;
- make this page informative – include overall info, schools, local attractions, tourist spots, big companies working here, some area stats, home prices, transportation, amenities, luxury spots, sports & outdoor, etc.;
- make sure to sparkle your story with a few interesting historical facts. Don’t stuff it with things like “1911 was the year when the railway first came to Hua Hin” but surely drop in that the King of Thailand has his primary summer residence here;
- always offer your visitors unique content. Of course, the basic information about the area is the same for everyone but the difference lies in the format you’re wrapping it up in. If it has its own voice, people will see it instantly;
- remember about your calls-to-action – you need to provide your visitors with an easy opportunity to contact you, download your latest market update or homebuyer’s guide, sign up for your newsletter or property alerts, etc.
Always include a brief section on real estate in your copy. Try and make it bright and informative. You can come up with a chart showcasing how affordable home prices are for this neighborhood, provide a general market overview and include a link to additional details. Just as the rest of your copy, try and make it warmer and easier to read: even market data can be engaging.
3) Optimize the neighborhood page for SEO
While powerful copy aims at engaging people, SEO work is done with search engines in mind. It allows them to crawl your website and see that it provides valuable information on local topics that people are interested in. As you can imagine, search engine optimization is crucial to your website’s high organic rankings.
A few good things to remember when optimizing your neighborhood page for SEO:
- pick 2-3 keywords to focus on;
- make sure you have both high-volume and popular short keywords and long-tail, hyperlocal ones on your list (the latter are very specific, 4+ words long queries). Short keywords will drive you traffic, while long-tail will bring you motivated leads.
For example, if you’re selling condos in Hua Hin, make sure you target not only queries like “buy condo in Hua Hin”, but also “buy a 3-bedroom oceanfront condo in Hua Hin” (or any other one you need as this one is just an example);
- remember about internal linking. Link to your neighborhood page from your blog posts, other neighborhood pages, your home page, etc. and make sure to place your target keywords as the anchor text. For example, why not mention “Hua Hin condos for sale” (anchor text) on any page of your site and link to the appropriate neighborhood page;
- avoid overoptimizing – one thing Google discourages strongly is keyword stuffing. Just make sure to include your target keyword in the most important places: page title, meta description, page URL, H2 text, and a few times in the copy;
- optimize your images – write your target keyword in the “alt” tag for your most important image on the page, for example, a featured image;
- make sure your visitors can easily find these pages regardless of where they are on your website. You can include them into your navigation bars so they are easily findable.
4) Make it filled with gorgeous images
Sometimes one picture speaks more than a thousand words. Stunning photography makes your content look even more convincing and your neighborhood an even nicer place to live in.
Beautiful images on the neighborhood page just nail it. Not much advice here – make sure the photography is high-resolution and highlights all the awesome spots from your neighborhood as well as your properties.
If you can come up with a quick video, showcasing a walk across the area or people sharing their experiences of living here, it’d add a nice personal touch and would make your agency look even more trustworthy in the eyes of your visitors.
5) Include extra content
Now that all really important information is laid out, beautifully written and formatted, you can allow yourself to include some extra details that you want your visitors to know about too:
- your featured listings in this neighborhood;
- links to your blog posts around this area;
- your FAQs page;
- links to school and medical information;
- links to Facebook groups dedicated to this area, etc.
If you don’t have the above pages created yet, don’t worry. You can always add them once they’re ready. Just remember that this section serves a very important function: it helps you impress your visitors with what other great things you have to offer, and engage them.
What’s next?
That’s it! Turns out it’s not that difficult, right? Now you not only know why it’s so important to have a neighborhood page on your website, but you have a handy guide on how to create a remarkably good one. With so many benefits – from offering your visitors a better idea of the area you serve to actually converting them into the homebuyers – neighborhood pages certainly deserve your time of day.
