Best Practices For Local SEO For A Nation Wide Property Company?

[KJDMedia]

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

1. The site acts as an aggregator for numerous partner property agents and, as s such, has a lot of duplicate content on it
2. 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
3. I cannot list the actual addresses of properties

Your thoughts and advice would be seriously appreciated.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Matthew,

From your description, these appear to be your client's options:

1. 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.

2. 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.

[BlairKuhnen]

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.

[AaronHenry]

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!