Help local searchers find you!

For any local estate agents, the success of the business falls completely on attracting local customers to your doors (and website). Well it may be great to see your website bringing in people from all over the country, if your business is aimed at specific area those visitors are practically pointless and this will just waste your time and resources on visitors that won’t benefit you.

So how can you ensure you are doing everything you can to optimise for those local customers?

1. Optimise your website for Local area keywords
   For a local estate agent this is a must. Optimising for keywords like “Estate Agents in (your area)” and “Properties for Sale in (your area)” is key to driving the right kind of traffic to your website. To do this you will need to make sure that the Page Title, H1 tag and page content on all of your web pages includes geographical keyword phrases.
   Remember if you have multiple estate agency offices for different towns, your web pages need to be unique so that the search engines won’t tag them as duplicate content.
2. Blog/News feed
   Using a blog correctly is a great way to bring in the local community. You can write about what local services you provide, local events going on or general local community information. Showing you know about the community brings people in and you can be seen as a trusted authority for the area.
   Remember to include your geographical key phrases in your article titles and to promote your blog through social networking channels such as twitter.
3. Engage with the local online community
   Sharing your knowledge and expertise with local bloggers and local people through social networks, this helps you become an established source and expert in your community. It doesn’t just help your reputation it also gets your company brand out there.
4. Sign up to Google Places and other local accounts
   Search is becoming more and more local these days, as more and more people prefer to search online for local businesses.

Knowing this, you have to know sign yourself up to local accounts (such as Google Places). These accounts provide the option for your business to be rated and reviewed for the services they have provided by customers.

Your ranking on Google Places is based on Google’s ranking algorithm that awards well-optimised pages and reputable inbound links to your website.

By Luke Stanley
SEO Consultant