Local SEO + Searcher Intent Targeting for Home Builder

[stldanni]

Good Morning, All!

I work for a home builder - www.HibbsHomes.com. Their site has hundreds of pages and blogs and I'm looking at consolidating many of them as they're older and use an older SEO strategy.

Can you take a look at their portfolio? http://hibbshomes.com/custom-home-builders-st-louis/st-louis-custom-homes-portfolio/

I'm wondering if I should consolidate the various projects into their own pages by house type and city - rather than having all on one page? Both for SEO and for easier searchability.

How would you organize this for these?

The benefit to setting up city pages is the local SEO rank (St Louis has so many suburbs).

The benefit to setting up pages by home style or size would be for user experience. How do I improve this for both?

And... how do I optimize for conversions better?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi D E!

Thanks for the opportunity of looking at your client's site. A foundational concept to understand is that the company's local pack rankings will depend on their physical address, not on the addresses of the homes they build in various communities. So, as the home builder is in Saint Louis, their local pack rankings will be most achievable for searches containing the words 'st. louis' or stemming from Saint Louis-based devices. They are unlikely to rank in the local packs for any city other than St. Louis because of Google's documented bias towards physical locale of the business.

So, where we move beyond this kind of understanding of how local packs work is when we are going after additional organic rankings, instead of local ones. For this purpose, building out content that showcases the homebuilder's work in specific neighborhoods or in neighboring cities supports goals of ranking organically for searches that use these geographic terms. For a good example of how to build landing pages that serve users making these types of searches, please read: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages

In that post, you'll see an example of how a house painter could create a landing page showcasing his projects in a specific community, so that seems quite similar to what you're hoping to do.

That being said, I can't predict whether city landing page or style-of-home landing pages will convert better for your particular client. Are you tracking how people currently interact with the website? When a potential customer contacts the business, are the asking what styles of housing are available, or are they inquiring about neighborhoods? Answering questions like these will necessitate some serious research.

Without knowing all of the details, I'd be inclined to think that you could have both a set of landing pages based on the neighborhoods of St. Louis, and then a separate gallery depicting popular home designs, regardless of what part of the city the homes are in. You'd have the best of both worlds that way, but if there's a reason why you have to choose one or the other, only real research into the preferences and needs of the client's customers can provide a data-based answer.