Creating Targeted Relocation Pages that Rank and Rank Fast

In the early times of AR I used to post blogging and SEO tips quiet often. Since then, I've kept most my ideas to myself though none of them are/were ground breaking.

Today I've decided to share one tip that has really served me well and generated highly targeted real estate leads. Back in 2007, when redesigning our site into a WP blogsite, I had the epiphany to create landing pages for Boeing Relocation and Navy Relocation. Knowing that the barrier to entry wasn’t high, I took time and effort to get the pages to rank high for those terms. As a result, I've sold more homes to current and relocating Boeing employees and Navy Chiefs than I ever thought possible.

While people from across the Nation seek employment or received a transfer for orders it is only natural to search for homes in that area. The one detail which stands out through the years is: When relo-ing to a new area, people necessarily don’t know the surrounding cities and the variety housing opportunities. The results are search queries that combine employer name and the word relocation – pretty straight forward.

That is single reason why it is imperative to build relocation landing pages for large and/or unique area employers. Who doesn’t like to piggyback off the 800lb gorilla? It’s easier to take ride then do it all your self.

Taking my own advice, I’ve started building a landing page which targets the term hospitals in Everett. Why? The shear number of hospitals in Everett and employees can make moderate to high income – oh – and they have to be on call so location is a big deal. So what are the steps to building an effective landing page?

1. Keyword Research

I can be cheap, I’ll admit it yet I do like to use good tools and my favorite is Google Adwords tool. The tool is free and returns basic information needed to determine the highest priority term. It takes time to filter and review the results though it is very much worth the time. Originally, I was going to target a different term yet it would only deliver less than 1,000 queries – the rate of return would have been minimal.

For example: hospitals in Everett returns 14,800 search queries a month. If I only capture 20% market share for the query then it will translate into 2,960 highly targeted page views from people who may register for property alerts and want to set appointments to see homes.

2. Page Construction

None of my landing pages are even remotely close to being the holy grail of landing page architecture yet they do the intended job. Here are four items that I’ve focused on for page construction:

- Pictures: Pictures of Boeing are extremely hard to get and the Navy has big guns they point at you if you get to close. So with each precautions must be taken and some good vantage points can be captured. With the hospital page it will be much easier as there aren’t top secret building plants or equipped with 50 caliber machine guns. Not having to deal with either makes for a stress free work environment. Today is so sunny so it is picture time in about 30 minutes.
- Intro Text: Writing descriptive text for what people are search for with the goal of solving their problem, finding a home near work. While writing the text I keep in mind that people who are on call need to be in close proximity for late night calls. After reviewing the current verbiage I definitely can do a better job in this department.
- Header Tags: In WP, header tags are created using < h1 >, < h2 >, and < h3 > ‘s (extra spaces have been added to make the code appear). This builds natural hierarchy on pages in which search engines can easily navigate and organize information. As my own in-house SEO this part is painful as it means a lot of data mining and content organizing. Dirty work.
- Creating a usable list complete with the various medical centers, their addresses (helps with natural keyword density), and website links. Even though I’m sending out a lot of one way links to the hospital’s websites, the value for the consumer is there. More dirty work.

3. Off-Site SEO

As you probably have noticed there are links in this post to the page in which I’m trying to rank – currently sitting at the top of page 2 after three days of work. To generate links to the page, I’ve been blogging about the page around the interwebs on blogs I either own or am apart of. In addition to blog posts, I’ll be creating static links on other networks/sites for to increase the rankings – I get good results doing this. One of the pit falls of link building I see is: doing so much link building that the page’s link graph looks highly unnatural. Outsourcing link building can lead to an unnatural link graph and cause harmful results which then all previous attempts at good on-site SEO has been for not. Take your time and be patient as link building isn’t a one time activity yet a reoccurring action that should be thought out.

- It’s also crossed my mind for some PPC advertising on the page to get it some quick results but I’m going to noodle over that for a bit.

Relocation pages should be a resource as they are a real estate lead capture page. I get a better result when it appears I’m a human being more so than a sale man. Take a look at your site and see if there are gaps in the SEO, a market that is not currently being served, and where tweaks can be made to improve rankings. It is competitive market place online and every wants to be a player. It’s harder to stay at the once there because everyone is gunning for you. Believe me I know first hand.