Any real estate agency can achieve a global reach through the Internet. Your website marketing can be based on specific products or services without regard to location.
But what if your business isn't global, and can never be? A local service business can only cover a limited geographic area doesn't need to advertise to the world. In fact, it only want to reach customers in a specific geographic area covers a limited number of towns, counties or municipalities.
In some ways, it's easier to target 'widgets' on a global scale than to optimize a web page for widgets in a dozen or so specific municipalities. A web page can only be optimized for a half-dozen or so keyword phrases. What if you are a regional company that covers three counties and twenty municipalities? How do you optimize your website for all those specific areas?
You split up your website.
What this means is to take your website and break it apart logically. If your services cover several counties, create county-specific pages listing all the municipalities you cover. If you cover several specific towns, create specific town pages.
Here's how we did it with a client of ours:
From the website home page, we listed the counties and major cities services. Those county and city pages were then directly linked to individual county and city pages that were.
We then created a separate County location page. It included a small map of the county, along with the county name in the and tags.
Serving X County New York's Real Estate needs.
Our real estate buyer and seller services include the following towns in X county.
This was followed by a short paragraph describing the services, along with a bulleted list of the towns and villages in the county that were served by the agency.
Our service area includes the following zip codes in X County:
Then a bulleted list of zip codes in the county was added. A lot of people search locally by zip code. If you don't have them listed on your website, how will you be found? (Realtors are notoriously bad at not listing their service areas!)
Finally ,we added a few testimonial blurbs from customers who lived in towns within the county and linked to a contact form on the bottom.
The effect:
These pages were designed and linked to in a way that vastly improved the results for any searches related to the company's location and service.
It worked so well for the counties that we ended up creating special pages for several of the major cities serviced. The concepts applied, except the content was written specifically for the city, along with links in the copy to the service pages.
