SEO for Apartment Communities
A single keyword, such as “3 bedroom apartment in Franklin, TN,” has very little competition yet represents over $20,000 in potential annual revenue. SEO can yield big dividends for apartment communities.
The average monthly rent for a high-end or luxury apartment in the United States is approximately $1,640, resulting in $19,680 in annual revenue. Strong SEO rankings can improve profitability and occupancy rates. Discover the competitive landscape and proven strategies for optimizing apartment community SEO.
Competitiveness of Apartment Rental SEO
Based on our hundreds of clients, apartments are in the upper-middle tier of competitiveness. Here’s what the data shows:
- The cost per click is a good indicator of overall competition. Cost per click for apartment communities ranges from $2-3, which is very affordable considering the potential revenue opportunity of $20,000+ for luxury apartments.
- In a larger market like Nashville, the keyword difficulty ranges from 50-60, which is on the higher end of competitiveness. This makes sense considering more people are searching in densely populated areas.
- When you drill into a suburb like Franklin, TN (15 minutes outside of Nashville) and search with longer-tail queries (e.g., “3 bedroom apartment in Franklin, TN”), the keyword difficulty scales down dramatically to 12, creating significant opportunities.
While you’re competing against national players like Rent.com, Apartments.com, and Apartment Finder, the right SEO strategy can help your local community outrank these big players.
National Competitors Make it Challenging
What makes SEO challenging is that your local apartment community is competing against national brands like Zillow and Rent.com, who have a much higher authority score on their site. We want to illustrate the landscape of SEO for apartments and how there is an opportunity for you to rank.
Competitive Query (City-Level Search)
For a competitive query, like, “Nashville Apartments,” Apartments.com, Zillow and Rent Cafe dominate the top positioning. Rather than showing actual apartment communities, Google highlights these directories. These are lists compiling different apartments in the city.
The good news is that the local-three pack, prominently displays local apartments with their star ratings.
Suburb Query
When you search for suburb-specific communities like Franklin, TN apartments, actual apartment websites get more visibility than major directories. This means that if you have an apartment in the suburb or a specific part of town, optimize for this.
Longer Tailed Queries
With advancements in AI search, people are searching for longer tailed queries, such as “What are the best apartments in Franklin, TN.” When they do, local apartments are populating.
As you can see from these three search examples, while apartments are upper middle tier for competitiveness, there are clear opportunities to rank.
Single Property vs. Multi-Location Portfolio [Website Structure]
In our experience dealing with apartment community clients, there are three different ways to structure your portfolio of properties. We recommend creating pages that match the searcher’s intent. Here’s how to structure a single-location website to accomplish this.
Option 1: Single Location
If you only have one location, you will only have one website. Here’s how to structure it:
- Your website should be structured similarly to the illustration below.
- Your homepage should be optimized for the primary market your apartment is in
- Create “Apartment Size” pages, capturing queries like “3 Bedroom Apartments in Franklin, TN.”
- On these pages, you should include floor plans for the 3-bedroom apartments.
- Create amenity pages, capturing queries like “Apartments in Franklin, TN with outdoor pool and gym.”
- These pages should have pictures and video of your pool while discussing the unique features.
Option 2: Multi-Location Sites
Some developers want each community to have its own brand and identity, so they create individual websites for each property.
In this instance, since you’ll have individual websites for each property, you follow the single-location structure but implement it across all your individual sites.
The benefits of taking this route include:
- Each community has its own identity
- If there is bad sentiment for another property, it doesn’t carry over to the new one
- You can strategically name the properties in a way that can improve your rank in the local pack and organically
- If you eventually sell your property, having this asset is beneficial to the potential buyer
The downside of this route:
- Each new site starts from scratch, and you have to build up the website’s authority
- You’re managing and having to build more websites
- If you have a strong brand presence, this synergy isn’t carrying over to your other properties
Example:
We’ve seen this approach work effectively with our clients. Here’s one example:
Grove City Summit was a property in Grove City, Ohio. It was one of many properties for a prominent developer before it was acquired. We strategically named the property, “Grove City Summit,” as this is a key ranking factor in the local pack and organically.
It took time to build up authority, but Google liked that we had Grove City in the naming convention, ultimately leading to us ranking well.
Option 3: Multi-Location, Single Site
Some developers want to keep the brand cohesive. An example of this is Lifestyle Communities. They have over 50 communities throughout the United States. They brand each property as, “LC RiverSouth,” “LC New Albany.” This ensures each property has its own name and identity but is also tied to the LC branding.
Each property has its own dedicated page on the primary site versus individual websites. The beauty of this is that as your website strengthens its authority, each new property can piggyback off the strong authority score, which can expedite SEO results.
If someone is familiar with your brand and moving from one side of town to another, due to brand cohesion, they’ll likely start their search with you to see what available sister properties you have.
The benefits of taking this route include:
- Brand cohesion
- Piggybacking off of strong website authority
- Less development work since one site maintains all properties
- One cohesive SEO strategy on one domain versus multiple SEO strategies
- Ability to track all keywords in one centralized project versus having to create many projects
- Ability to scale efforts when acquisitions are becoming the norm for your business
The downside of taking this route:
- Negative reviews or PR at one property will tie back more closely to the other properties
- If someone is interested in acquiring the brand, they must start from scratch with many of the digital marketing assets
Strategy with this approach:
- Build location pages for your primary markets (Columbus, Charlotte, Nashville, etc). You will list all properties on each primary market page, hoping to rank well for the primary city keyword.
- On each individual property page, you will try to rank for the primary keywords where your apartment is located, such as “Apartments in Mount Juliet” or “Apartments Near Middle Tennessee State University.”
- Similar to the single-location strategy, you can build hyper-local amenity pages to rank for more specific queries, like “Pet-friendly apartments in Germantown, Nashville.”
The beauty of this structure is that it becomes an internal linking nirvana. You create beautiful synergy amongst all of your pages, which Google loves. The graphic below illustrates the structure of a multi-location, single-site strategy.
Diving Into the Tactics
Google Business Profile:
Earlier, we alluded to Google’s local pack as prominent positioning for apartment communities where you don’t have to worry about the national competitors such as Apartments.com. How exactly do you go about ranking in the top 3 placements?
- Reviews
- Seeing what other tenants had to say about your apartment is extremely important. Google takes reviews and ratings into account as part of its ranking factors, so you must have a strategy in place to get proactive reviews
- Use technology that sends review requests to tenants, first prompting them to rate their experience on a scale of 1-10. If they answer 8 or above, it directs them to Google, whereas 7 or below allows you to reach out to the tenant to improve upon customer service. Our agency offers this review technology, if interested.
- Make sure someone on your team or the agency you use is responsible for sending out reviews and monitoring them. If there is a bad review, tending to this quickly and professionally is crucial.
- Photos
- High-quality images can boost conversion rate up to 94% [source]. Images create a positive first impression, and help potential renters visualize the property, leading to more views, tours, and ultimately, more leases signed [source].
- We recommend hiring a photographer for professional photos on your Google Business Profile. These can also be utilized across your website and social media channels.
- Location
- One of the most important ranking factors when it comes to your Google Business Profile is where your apartment is located. If your address is in Grove City, OH, your chances will improve exponentially of ranking in the local pack [learn more]. This is something that’s out of your control but is important to note.
- Primary Category
- Apartment Complex is the most specific and relevant primary category.
- There are other categories that can potentially work for secondary categories, such as property management company, but you want to stick with apartment complex.
- Primary category is another critical ranking factor yet often times gets overlooked.
- NAP Consistency
- You want to ensure the name, address, phone number and hours on your Google Business Profile is consistent with what’s on your website and other sources across the web. The more consistency you have, the more credible Google will view your Business Profile.
Other tactics for optimizing Google Business Profile are available, but they are industry agnostic and don’t apply just to apartments [view GBP Checklist].
Directory Exposure:
If you can’t beat them, join them. This is my mindset when it comes to behemoth directories like Apartments.com and Apartment Finder. Directories can generate solid referral traffic, resulting in new tenants.
Additionally, we’re seeing a trend where getting listed in industry directories directly correlates with more exposure in the AI search results on sites like Perplexity, Claude, ChatGPT, and AI overviews on Google [learn more].
Rather than spending $500-$1,000 per month on PPC, you can invest those funds into directories, which kill two birds with one stone: qualified referral traffic and a boost in AI search.
Below is a list of some of the top directories for apartments:
- Apartments.com
- Zillow
- Truiia
- Realtor.com
- RentCafe
- RedFin
Authority score is a metric that gauges the overall power of your site based on quality backlinks pointing back to your site. A higher authority score improves your chances of ranking well.
For apartment communities, when you have an authority score above 10, you can rank on the first page for suburb-specific queries like “Franklin, TN Apartments.” To rank for more competitive queries like “Nashville Apartments,” you likely need above a 30 authority score, which is often seen with multi-location developers with one centralized website.
Examples of Great Backlinks
- If your Franklin, TN, apartment community were to sponsor a local baseball team and that team had a website that linked back to yours, this would be a powerful local backlink.
- If there were a Chamber of Commerce site for the city of Franklin, TN, and your apartment was listed as one of the best places to live, this would be another strong local backlink.
- Looking for “Best of Lists,” which in this case would be the best places to live, and getting your apartment listed.
Check out our comprehensive guide for more specific tactics on acquiring high-quality backlinks.
Other Items to Take Into Consideration with Backlinks:
- Don’t fall for the tactic of paying $99 per month for low-quality backlinks. This can do more harm than good. The links you acquire should drive quality referral traffic to your site.
- Link building takes time, and improving your authority doesn’t happen overnight. If you acquire one quality backlink per month, you’ll outpace the competition in this sector and gradually improve your authority score.
- Think of linkbuilding like public relations. You need to be conducting outreach to acquire backlinks.
- You can also be blogging on localized topics, such as the best steakhouses in Fannklin, TN. While someone finding this blog likely won’t be looking for an apartment, if you get backlinks from this content, it will improve your authority score.
How Authority Score Comes Into Play
While it’s tough to outrank directories like Zillow for the more competitive queries, if you’re strategic, there’s a spot in the parking lot for both.
Below, you can see that Zillow has an authority score of 97, whereas two other local apartments in Franklin, TN, have an authority score of 11. You would think Vintage Franklin and The Everly wouldn’t have a chance of being on the same playing field as Zillow but that’s not the case.
In the Google search example below, you can see that while Zillow ranks due to its 97 authority score, Vintage Franklin, a local community with an 11 authority score, also ranks, meaning there’s room for both of them. Keep in mind, this isn’t a city-level search; it’s more niche, going after a suburb.
User-Friendly Website
If there’s one industry that must put its best foot forward with its website, it’s an apartment community. A website represents your community and is the first impression for a potential tenant. Below is a list of what should be included on your website:
- Professional photography and videography (interior and exterior)
- Experts write or advise on the content based on their knowledge of the community
- Blog content that showcases your expertise on the local community and neighborhood, serving as a resource for tenants and a link generator for your website.
- 3D rendering to showcase the layout of each community
- Showcasing the amenities of the property (dog park, pool, hot tubs, gym, clubhouse with WiFi)
- Mobile-friendly design
- Quick site load speed time for an ideal user experience
- Clear navigation making it easy for visitors to navigate to key areas of your site
- Application for interested tenants to submit payment and information
- Ability to pay rent online
Vintage Franklin does a great job with its site. It’s no coincidence that it ranks so well for “Franklin, TN Apartments.” Its website hits on many of the points referenced throughout this article.
In Closing
SEO for apartments presents unique challenges with national competitors dominating broad searches, but significant opportunities exist when you focus on local markets and leverage the local pack.
Your website structure is crucial to your SEO success. Whether you choose individual sites for each property or a unified multi-location approach, the tactics outlined in this guide will help you outrank competitors and attract more qualified tenants through strategic SEO.
To monitor success, track your keywords in software like SEMRush or Moz. This will allow you to compare your rankings to the competition and see whether your SEO changes are positively impacting rankings.
Page one rankings don’t happen overnight. By following the tactics mentioned, you should start seeing positive movement after a few months.
Success with SEO requires many moving pieces. An SEO calendar can help you map out all the action items you’ll be working on each month, which should align with your apartment business objectives.
If you need any support with SEO, our agency has extensive experience within the apartment industry. Hopefully, you find this guide helpful!