We've been in discussions this last week with a client who is in a major metro who wants to dominate this major metro and the main metro term. It turns out there is some significant competition in this metro so we have been looking at what strategies it takes to go after a major metro.

Almost every major city in the country has many sub cities. Many of these sub cities and neighborhoods are not defended very well by the incumbent agents or brokerages which are being found under those search terms. Often who ranks there is a Homes.com, Trulia or REALTOR.com site. This makes these sub-markets great places to start when looking to go after a major metro. By building individual sites for these sub-markets and positioning them to #1 on Google it provides you with a great source of leads and assuming you are good at converting these leads into closed transactions it also provides you the ammunition to continue to build out additional sub cities / communities while positioning these to ultimately go after the major metro. Even though Trulia is competitive in a lot of markets so far we have found that getting above Trulia is pretty straight forward with the right methodology. Trulia is competing with a long tail approach meaning that even though there are some incoming links to their local pages the majority of the link juice has been diluted from the core site itself. Considering all of the drill down to most neighborhoods to compete against Trulia is again pretty straight forward. They don't have time to defend every small city. They are happy with getting the rankings where they get them and continuing to work on their overall strategies which trickle down to the local markets.

Of course if you have deep pockets and/or you really enjoy the web side of the business (and willing to spend significant time on the development and promotion of multiple sites at once) you may be able to capture a major competitive metro... You'll really need to have a well rounded plan to go after a major metro. A little bit of work on a lot of sites is a great way to get very little traffic to any site which ultimately means very few leads and very few if any closings.

So the methods that we would suggest for a major metro is sub-city real estate sites which ultimately link up to the major metro with SEO campaigns for all of the above to capture the major metro. Make sense?

Labels: Business Development, SEO Strategies