Use case: How School Attendance Zones can capture organic search traffic

This is part 1 of 6 in a series on using School Attendance Zones to solve user engagement and conversion challenges.

If you're an Onboard client, you have undoubtedly heard many times about how to leverage our content platform to get them there, keep them there, and convert them (again and again). If you are at the beginning of the process of determining which part of the user journey to prioritize, it comes down to where in the conversion funnel you have the most trouble. I think I'd be hard-pressed to find a web/brand strategist who doesn't want a) more traffic b) more engaged traffic and c) more buy-ready leads. When implemented well, local content can tackle all of these challenges.

How many times this year have you heard that winning the search engine race is about having the right content strategy in place? We have studied long-tail referral traffic of over a dozen real estate sites and have found that those with a well-implemented geographic content strategy are capturing traffic that would've otherwise gone to a competing site. Let's assume you have a well-thought out geographic content strategy in play: what more can you do to get buyers as they move along the search process?

To me, if a searcher is looking at a particular school district, he or she is emitting stronger buyer signals than someone searching for some variation of "city or town homes for sale." Today, give any school district a browse on Google and chances are you'll find the district site, a link to GreatSchools, and district news. There is a huge opportunity right now for real estate sites to capture school-based home search traffic by providing rich landing pages about the cont they're searching for – without having to compete for tougher search terms that are already saturated.

There isn't one cookie cutter way to do this. Think about it: people want to know information about each school. People want to know information about each district. People want to relate that to home search, area info, and all of the other on-site best practices. Each one of these things represents a page that can answer a question that begins with a simple Google search.

Food for thought for your 2014 SEO strategy.

To view the original article, visit the Onboard Informatics blog.