Neighborhood Profile Pages for More Real Estate Buyer Leads

What can you do to get more real estate buyer leads? Listings are wonderful, but the more business the better, so buyer leads are important as well.

Take a trip through your website to see if you're providing the assets that buyers, and particularly first-time buyers, want. With younger buyers re-entering the homebuying market due to better job prospects in a growing economy, providing them the information they want when they want it will lead to more buyer leads.

Understand Demographic Changes

There isn't some huge overnight change in the people buying homes, why they buy them, and when. However, there are some more subtle trends that have been building over the past years that are going to influence who is buying and where. Gone for most younger workers are the days of getting a job with a company and staying there for many years, maybe until retirement. Today's younger workers, college graduates or not, do not have the loyalty to their employer of past generations, and for good reason. Employers aren't in the mode of hiring for life either.

People are moving more often, and at times upward mobility or career development requires relocation to another city or even another state. These will be homebuyers who are not familiar with the area, and they'll want to do some research on the Internet to learn more.

Give Them What They (and Google) Want

The good news is that everything you do here is going to benefit you both in more visitor traffic and leads, but also in SEO, Search Engine Optimization. Instead of breaking the bank time- and money-wise in competing for the major real estate keywords in your market area, capture visitors with searches on specific neighborhood names.

Build an entire segment of your website dedicated to detailed neighborhood profiles. Your out-of-area buyers will want to know a great many things about neighborhoods in which they may want to live:

• schools
• crime
• culture, museums, etc.
• entertainment
• restaurants and fast food
• shopping
• employers nearby

Build a format or outline plan so that every page is similar in how it's laid out and where specific information is on the page. Make it a template of sorts that you can fill in with the information easily. Take a LOT of photos. This may mean even going into restaurants and entertainment venues to show what they look like. Place Google Maps, if you can, into each page showing the location of the neighborhood.

Think Home Search

The vast majority of real estate searchers will arrive wanting to search for homes for sale. In doing so, they'll be seeing the listings in the MLS, and one thing common to all MLS displays is an "AREA" field. It may or, more often, may not be the specific neighborhood, often larger geographically and containing several neighborhoods.

Create Pages by MLS Area

You're not going to shortchange the neighborhoods profile pages, so you'll want to have one for each significant neighborhood. However, when the MLS has an area that encompasses one or more neighborhoods under a different name, create a page for that one as well. Do the same profiling of the MLS area that you do for each neighborhood. Then list the neighborhoods in that area and link their names to their neighborhood page. This helps the searchers immensely, as they aren't aware of what is where and which neighborhoods are in the MLS areas unless they're named the same.

Make Maximum Use of Video

Video is going to be the most valuable item in each neighborhood and MLS area profile. Go to each area and neighborhood and create video, walking, driving or just from a single point. You want to allow the site visitor to see the neighborhood as if they're already there. They may be hundreds or even thousands of miles away, but you want them to be able to get a pretty good idea of what these areas look like.

Put the videos up on YouTube or Vimeo and then embed them into the site on the area pages. This greatly increases your exposure, as they're also searching these video sites with neighborhood names to see videos and get a feel for areas.

Take these tips to heart and create these pages, and you'll see that these can become the most visited pages on your site after the IDX.

To view the original article, visit the WebsiteBox blog.