The AgentMapIt Blog

A “hyperlocal” blog is one that focuses on specific neighbourhood within a region. In a hyperlocal blog you publish material of specific interest to people in those neighbourhoods.

Why specific neighbourhoods or communities? Why hyper local? One reason for this is to gain search engine traction for those targeted communities. Keywords such as “Lakeshore Village Kingston” are much less competitive than “Kingston”.

But this is really a secondary reason for focusing on the smaller community. The truth is you will get very little search engine traffic from hyperlocal keywords, even if you dominate them in the search results.

The far more important reason to focus on hyperlocal communities is to become a resource for the people of the community – to become an online destination for people interested in reading about or seeing photos and videos featuring people and events in their community.

And, of course, in the process you build your own profile as someone active in the community.

What is a “community”?

In the case of real estate blogs a “community” within a city will usually be a subdivision or neighbourhood. If you are a real estate agent you know exactly what I’m talking about.

In a rural area like I live in, my township (Woolwich, Ontario) has a fairly strong identity, but most people in the township more closely identify with the specific village or town they live in. So the communities one would focus on with a “hyperlocal blog” about Woolwich township would be villages such as Conestogo, St. Jacobs, Breslau, Bloomingdale, Linwood, Elmira, etc.

What does a hyperlocal blog look like?

Some real estate agents active in hyperlocal blogging feel it is best to create a separate blog for each community or neighbourhood they service. For an example and discussion of this approach see the series by Matt McGee called Starting a Hyperlocal Blog: The Series.

Frankly, this seems like overkill to me. As long as you have clearly identified sections within your blog for each local community you service you will accomplish your goal.

In fact I would say it would be much easier to manage if you had just one blog dedicated to the city or area of the city you want to focus on, and then sections within that blog for each “community”.

In WordPress you can manage this by creating categories for each community, and/or a separate “page” for each community with links to the appropriate posts.

Content is what matters

Regardless of how you approach the organization of your hyperlocal blog it is absolutely essential to remember that this exercise is not about impressing the search engines. If that works, then fine. It is much much much more important to publish items that will interest the people in your communities.

Photographs are the easiest – Take a few hours and drive through your communities taking photographs of interesting buildings, schools, churches, playgrounds, community centers.

Take off your real estate agent hat for a few hours and think of yourself as a photographer or reporter. Shoot some pictures from interesting angles.

Then run some simple little contests – possibly one a week for each community – “Identify this building/person/tree/bird house/window/etc. and win a prize”. Get a local coffee shop or restaurant to donate some $5 gift certificates, or if they won’t donate them, buy them.

Be sure to run your contests on the level. Plan them carefully, make sure the winners are selected in a fair way, and be sure to award the prizes as you said you would. Ask the winners for a photo of themselves and publish them along with the names of the winners each week.

The whole point is to get people involved and show your face in the communities to a broader audience. You want to get people coming to your blog and participating.

This is just one idea among many that others have successfully used. If you have any suggestions, please leave a comment.