Best Practices For Local SEO For A Nation Wide Property Company?
-
Hi There,
I've recently acquired a client that sells property all over the country (South Africa). It's in their best interests to rank well for localised keywords relating to the areas they have listed properties in. eg. Property for sale in example suburb/town/province.
The project has a number of challenges which I'd appreciate any suggestions for
- The site acts as an aggregator for numerous partner property agents and, as s such, has a lot of duplicate content on it
- The company only has offices in one city. It handles online bookings which it then passes to its partner agencies - this presents me with a problem of creating listings in the areas I need to rank for
- I cannot list the actual addresses of properties
Your thoughts and advice would be seriously appreciated.
-
Hi Matthew,
From your description, these appear to be your client's options:
-
Rank locally (in the local pack) for their single physical office via NAP, content and SEO work on the website + their Google+ Local listing and citations.
-
Rank organically for other cities in which they vend properties via content, on-site SEO and linkbuilding. PPC may be a necessary component, too, given how competitive this market typically is.
It shouldn't be a goal for the client to rank locally for anything but their city of location, and it's forbidden to list for-sale properties in Google's local product, so this isn't a way to get around the lack of location either. Basically, it's going to come down to the organic strength of the business to build a presence for the various cities in which they sell properties. You'll be cleaning up duplicate content and developing new, unique content for each of their major cities + wanting to earn links to this content. A blog could be a BIG asset here if the client has the resources to blog in a hyperlocal fashion about properties and local communities and on-topic subjects like buying/selling a home.
I think you're receiving some good advice on this thread. I hope my suggestions are helpful, too.
-
-
We are similar. Our clients, 1,000+ home builders, are all local. Anything you do to rank locally for properties, is short lived and probably perceived as gaming Google. That said, you can rank for "where to List Your Property" type terms. You can leverage any real address you have that is legitimate. Setting us executive office options for this is probably also not a long-term strategy. There is an alternative.
Have you considered providing local SEO services to your clients? This is not just new revenue, but an opportunity to get your clients to stick. Help them with local SEO and you will naturally promote them. They will link to you because it makes sense. You dominate your terms, they dominate in the 7-pack/map-pack.
-
We're actually looking at the same thing as well, except with a travel company in the US. I'll be honest and say that most of our research is showing that it will be difficult to do, especially without a physical location in those cities. Typically, you'll have a local page for every physical location with unique local content.
1. Aggregation and duplicate content will hurt, especially on pages that you are trying to funnel traffic to. Try to offset that with a lot of unique content on the page.
2. Depending on how the agency structured and the actual business relationship, there is a bit of grey area here. Meaning that often smaller companies will act as business partners for local companies. Typically, they will be subsidiaries. Now, I'm not up on the technicality with Google about it, but if they are legally tied together then it may be possible to use their physical location. But I'm willing to bet there will be big issues with business names and listings this way. Someone with more experience may be able to better answer this one, but this is bordering on a spammy tactic. It can be a hard balance at times, especially with service based companies in surrounding small cities.
I would probably recommend that this real estate firm get a physical location in the area in which they want to rank, even a small closet of a location. Here's where internet marketing and business development meet and I love it. If the potential revenue earned from selling those listings in those cities is worth it, then they should be able to find a physical location at a great price (they are real estate pros afterall). That will give you the tools you need to get them ranked in that city. Simple math will tell them if investment, overhead, revenue, and potential profit are worth it. For me, I use this and even sit down with my clients to crunch numbers. If they have their eyes set on "anything and everything" without thinking about it fully, this little tip can help manage the client expectations (I hate saying "lowering their expectations").
3. The address could help build out local content, but if you're aggregating the properties it wouldn't necessarily matter anyways. *I assume the aggregation is coming from some kind of MLS database or regional resource. If not, and again, there is a bit of legal and ethical issues, if you can manually enter all of those properties with unique content that would be best, but typically that is not the case with most real estate solutions.
Other than that I think you're best bet is to rank for the "domain.com/area-you-want" and try to outrank the competition organically. I'm interested if anyone has found a viable strategy to a problem like this. Latest search updates have given a lot of priority to localized results. My research has not shown much is overcoming it and that is primarily due to anti-spam measures and trying to better understand user intent. Hope this points both you and I in the right direction!
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should Medical Practices Build Citations For Each Practitioner?
I'm working with a medical practice that has 6 doctors in a single office location. We already have GMB pages for the practice as a whole as well as each practitioner. Should multi-practitioner businesses like medical practices build citations for each practitioner as well? For instance, should each doctor have a listing on YellowPages, Localeze, etc?
Local Listings | | formandfunctionagency1 -
Local Pack Ads v. Organic Business Listings
Hey everyone, So I'm noticing lately that Google is showing ads via AdWords for my locations in the local pack. I am fine with that, but unfortunately it is now driving me a little bit insane wondering how much Google really cares about NAP, distance from centroid and or user, links to domain, completed business profile and so on. They will pull an ad into the top of the local pack for my location, yet, my actual organic business listing in some cases will not even show up until I hit the second page of business results. I get that it's Adwords, it's pay-to-play, but from most accounts, the differences in ranking for traditional listings results compared to business results on both desktop and mobile are pretty different. For example, by doing my traditional SEO best practices, I can rank high in traditional listing results even when my business does not show in the local listings. I have done this time and time again. I am able to accept that since we have 100 locations in the US and our lists were an absolute mess before I got here, that some of our NAP across multiple directories and listing sites are not exactly up to snuff which I have been working on. So I guess the thing is, if my location in Google's eyes is not good enough to be shown organically for the user even at the bottom of page of one of business results, why is it good enough to show an ad for my business location for that query as the absolute first result? Again, I know its Ad Words which basically allows you to cut in line like that special pass you can buy at a roller coaster park, but still. Isn't their goal to provide the best possible experience for their user? If they feel something is worth holding back my organic listing from the user, why is it fine with them to show the user that same location with the top possible local pack spot in an ad? I guess this is more of a rant than anything but I wanted to know if anyone else is dealing with this or anyone has any info they have found that could help shed light on this? It kind of just kicked everything I thought about trust, authority, links in order to rank in the local pack organically out the window. Thanks! -Ben
Local Listings | | Davey_Tree0 -
How do you do Local SEO in a small town?
Good afternoon everyone! I wanted to start a discourse on a subject that I think might benefit a few select readers. What would be your best plan-of-action to successfully propose and execute a Local-SEO campaign for a small, local business in a rural town? The type of town that has next to zero local directories, the type of business that has hardly any (if any at all) "fresh mentions" on the internet, etc. I'm interested to see how other SEOs would handle tackling this kind of campaign. Can't wait to hear what people have to say!
Local Listings | | TaylorRHawkins
Thanks!
Taylor1 -
How valuable are citaitons/consistency (Moz Local) for a NON-local business?
Hi All! I'm doing some research for non-local SEO clients and finding that many of them have messy and extremely inconsistent listing profiles (via Moz Local checker). It seems to me that this would be a good thing to take care of, even for a non local site. Anyone have insights on whether or not this is something we should take care of? If so, any details on how or why it would or would not be a good idea? Thanks! Ricky
Local Listings | | SUCCESSagency0 -
How does dynamic call tracking affect local SEO?
I would like to begin tracking calls and offline conversions, but I am concerned that if I add a dynamic call tracking software that it will negatively affect SEO.
Local Listings | | FluidAdvertising1 -
One company - 2 websites
One of our clients decided to launch a 2nd website to market specific products and services that they provide. The trouble is, they have the same address, phone number and have a similar name. Whilst we have had some success and both websites are on page 1 for their primary keywords, I have a bad feeling that they may have hit a glass ceiling. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to perform local SEO?
Local Listings | | maxweb0 -
Local SEO: Creating a Second home-based business?
I'm in a bit of a pickle, here's the issue: I have a home-based business with a physical address. I plan on starting another home-based business at the same physical address. I only have one phone (cellphone). I plan on operating both businesses unless one completely eclipses the other. I can probably see your head spinning right now . . . how big of NAP issues are we looking at? I own my house, I could probably add a line to the new business address (like a suite # or something) I can afford a landline or secondary cellphone if necessary Any thoughts, ideas, criticisms, direction, hate-mail, or solutions?
Local Listings | | roachdesign0 -
Sponsored Listings Hurting Local SEO?
We use a service which sponsors listings on various popular directories. In turn, it changes our phone number so that I can qualify if the call is a lead or not and then charge us. Unfortunately, while this service helps exposure on those directories, the phone number as well as the website are different. How much of a problem is this for our local SEO? Other directories include Suerpages and Citysearch. -Brant
Local Listings | | BCB11210