Apartment Marketing; It Starts with a Google Search

A Guest Post by Brian Owen; Executive Director of Marketing for Laramar Group in Denver CO. Brains post illustrate exactly what we teach folks in our Move the Google Needle sessions, most recently at Optimization Summit in Dallas. Here are the slides should you have interest.

Enjoy Brian’s post, and let us know your thoughts and comments,

Google Killed the Adjective

Quite frankly, Google doesn’t care what serene, beautifully landscaped, sparkling surroundings your apartment community is nestled in nor do the prospects using Google, per se.  Not initially at least.  This makes marketing apartments a little less creative from a writing standpoint, but a little more fun and challenging from an analytics and strategy standpoint.

If you currently have Google Analytics on your website, run a report to see if anyone found you by typing in adjectives other than those related to proximity or cost (close, near, cheap, affordable).  Trust me, they didn’t.  So why do many of us continue to use those “romance” paragraphs on our website and in our ILS advertising?  The only answer I have is that some of us are still stuck in a print mindset, and between you, me and Dupree, using romance paragraphs in your print ads is a waste of creative energy as well (that’s a whole other discussion).

I’m not going to tell you what keywords you should be using on your landing pages of your websites, but I will say that if you are close to the campus of University of Michigan, you sure as hell better mention that because Google will find that a lot more relevant than a sparkling pool.  Highlighting your city name, neighborhood name, landmarks, points of interest, major roads and freeways, public transportation, shopping and entertainment in the area is the way to define your community and for many of our communities are the true amenities prospects seek.  It’s not sexy, but those of us who are creative and savvy will find a way to make it work and boost our search engine results.