In multifamily marketing, visibility is everything, so how you develop your SEO strategy can make a big difference in the efficiency of your marketing plan. Multifamily sellers need to test, monitor and supplement their SEO tactics regularly to ensure they are consistently driving traffic to their website pages. The starting point of an SEO strategy is research: analyzing what your audience is looking for and using that to deliver exactly what potential tenants are looking for.
“The goal of SEO is to make your property website easier to find for online searches by targeting unpaid organic traffic, resulting in website traffic and leases more qualified,” explained Billy Wilkinson, CEO of Threshold Agency. Once you know what your potential tenants are looking for, use it to your advantage. In addition to neighborhood-specific searches, you should also consider modifiers that potential customers may use in their search. These include phrases like “cheap apartments” or “great apartments,” said Mike Whaling, founder and president of the digital marketing agency. 30 lines.
In the summer of 2021, Catalyst launched a digital marketing campaign for The Harper, a new community in Franklin, Tennessee. Specific SEO milestones for the campaign included 2,897 new users to the website through organic search, 86 contact form submissions and 66 phone calls. Image courtesy of Catalyst Marketing
High ranking in SERPs
The goal is to rank high on the search engine results pages (SERPs). From there, your site can receive quality traffic that will likely convert into a rental application. “If you’re not on the front page, you’re not going to get any attention,” said Tim McCormack, vice president of media and analytics at Bigeye Agency. “Most clicks go to the top three listings in the organic results.”
There are several ways to sort for a search. Text, image, video, and map results all help boost your rankings, as long as you optimize them. For example, your images should always include alt tags and your content should have a meta description, while you could include a city guide with relevant keywords on map pages.
In search results, individual properties compete with listing websites. One way to rank higher is by optimizing in areas where apartment listing websites don’t perform well, such as targeted queries for a specific apartment type. According to McCormack, “Studio near me” or “Two bedroom near me” are good examples of targeted inquiries from potential customers who are close to making a decision. “You have a better chance of breaking through because their search is more defined.”
The keyword roadmap
In the keyword world, short tail keywords are usually three words or less and have high search volume and traffic, but these queries are broad, which means that not all of your traffic will be of high quality Long-tail keywords, on the other hand, are more specific, so they gain more targeted traffic to your website. Although the volume of visitors will be lower, visitors will spend more time on your website, because you are providing results that are more relevant to their focused search.
Using Google Trends can help you identify the most searched keywords and phrases, but that’s not the only research you should be doing, because search engines regularly change the way they index sites web. According to the REACH by RentCafe ebook, SEO: 4 Reasons Why You Can’t Set It and Forget It“Good SEO means continuously monitoring your website to make sure it meets the ever-changing rules.”
Best Practices
Because SEO is an ongoing initiative, multifamily sellers must monitor and track search volume and trends regularly to ensure properties remain relevant. Catalyst uses a detailed dashboard to measure user behavior and changes in search rankings. Image courtesy of Catalyst
Not all content is created equal, and ultimately what is most applicable to your community should be highlighted. According to Christy McFerren, president of Catalyst Marketing, “go after words that have high relevance and less competition have a better chance of ranking,” McFerren said clients are often looking to establish a baseline of traffic and recommends creating new content around secondary keywords. “When optimizing for keywords, start with your home page, content headings, and top-level pages like floor plans,” he said.
While a wider selection of terms will cast a wide net, it’s helpful to identify which terms you should focus on for on-page SEO. An older community, for example, may have specific property name queries, but a new or renamed property will not, so your particular property needs will determine where you start.
A comprehensive SEO strategy can also help your community compete with nearby properties. Any distinctive aspects of your property, such as floor plans or unique amenities or programming, should be part of your strategy, noted Gretchen Walker, central agency manager at Reach by RentCafe. “If some of your apartments have fireplaces, but your competitors don’t, this is an opportunity to use that to optimize the website,” he said.
Page load time can also hurt your SEO performance. Especially in multi-family, most websites are designed with continuous images or videos of apartment interiors and community amenities. They are usually displayed prominently on the landing page and can slow down the page load. “You can still have those large images, but make sure they’re the right formats and load in a page-speed-friendly way,” McCormack said.
Keep it local
SEO metrics to track and analyze include organic sessions and organic leads, metrics that directly impact your cost per lead and click-through rates. Image courtesy of 30 Lines
It’s important to regularly monitor your page performance to see where you stand, according to RentCafe’s REACH e-book. On-page SEO increases visibility to improve your organic search rankings, but with local SEO, you can target based on consumer behavior. The language that describes neighborhoods can change and areas can become popular. “You have a chance to rank for that if your content is a good fit,” Whaling said.
McCormack recommends creating content around key parts of your neighborhood, which he said is great for search engines because they can provide more localized results. Marketers often update existing website content and add new pages to gain search volume for specific queries. “Every page on your website is an opportunity to be discovered,” Whaling said. The more pages that match users exactly, the more likely they are to show up for searches with specific topics or tastes. Blogs and deep dive pieces are a great way to create web content that is more searchable in certain markets.
You can also create dedicated pages for really specific queries. For example, The Collective apartments in Washington, DC have a page dedicated to “DC Apartments with Peloton”, which helps that property rank higher for this search. Companies are also mirroring the format of apartment listing websites and listing all their communities in a neighborhood or city on one page of their corporate website instead of another. “If you’re a company that has 10 properties in Denver, it really doesn’t make sense to try to make all 10 properties compete for ‘Denver apartments,'” Whaling said.
The important thing for marketers to keep in mind is that SEO is not a one-time process. “It may take up to two to three months to see the impact of the optimizations and changes we’ve made,” McCormack said. Depending on the type of community, you should make your adjustments before peak leasing seasons to maximize your visibility during those periods.
Read the October 2022 issue of MHN.
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