Broad or Narrow focus on your website?

[lasvegasrealestate]

Quite a few of you out there have made some significant changes to your website. Adding new features, changing hosting companies, etc. Are you finding that you are narrowing the scope of your site or expanding it? I've always tried to have the most comprehensive site online for Las Vegas. Sadly, its almost impossible to stay up with all of the new construction out here, so I've decided to stick to the really big developments and expand my content from there. A good example would be the master planned community of Summerlin or Mountain's Edge. They both are made up of smaller neighborhoods inside, each targeting a specific demographic. I have pages up for most of these developments already. I'm beginning to wonder if I'm wasting my time and should focus instead on individual communities instead. I have about 2 dozen condo developments up and another dozen or so high rise communities as well.

[saboy1]

I found focusing on one community to be very effective, even to the extent of building an entire website on one community (if there is enough volume there). When a customer browses the internet and they have an interest in a specific community, they want to talk to the agent most knowledgable about that community.

Since you will most likely have the only site dedicated to the community, you will be by default the expert. You have to do a lot of research to build the website, and you will learn more about the community by doing so anyway.

The quality of the leads coming off the community site is far superior to general website leads in my experience. The reason being that you are offering exactly what they are looking for, and they specifically searched for what you have to offer.

It is an incredible amount of work, but if you have three good communities (especially if one is a resort community), I think you will do great. I target three communities totalling about 9,000 homes which is more than enough.

[Jim Messenger]

Charles,

I believe that you are correct in what you have done by creating an exhaustive resource for all things related to Las Vegas.

As you are already aware of by now, the interior pages that are found by users searching using the "long tail" provide the highest quality of leads.

The vanity terms are nice, but we (Andrea & I) have found that we make our money from the long tail.

Jim

[lasvegasrealestate]

I agree, which is why I've stopped worrying about my major term rankings so much. Granted, I did get a lot of email, but most of it was horrible for conversion. I'm re-thinking my strategy and think I'll be in a much better position market wise by concentrating more on providing more information in a broader focus instead of concentrating on a smaller scale.

[naplesrealestate]

Charles - I think both of us have tried to be everything to everyone with our sites or better yet, trying to achieve an authority status for our sites in our market places.

As Jim points out the long tail searches are the ones that bring the highly focused and best potential prospects into the fold.

That is exactly why my new FA site is only geared to condos. I might actually limit the focus to only condos in the most western parts of the area.

We will have to see how things work out for it.

[kensmith]

I think that there are benefits to doing both. Large sites are easier to rank in the long run IMO. At the same time there are only so many hours in the day.

Your idea of taking the large developments and having good content about them might be the best way to go. More important might be to find ways to automate some of this. Can you get the associations to give you some content? Maybe a local Chamber? Local businesses?

One idea I had was to try and get a local high school student to do some writing for me. They would be very cheap and be able to create a nice portfolio for their college application. One the same line you could get one to take photos also. Our High School has a work program that the student can get credit hours so this shouldn't be to hard to get someone interested.

On the topic of small sites, I think that they can be used to help target niche markets. Charles you could do a site for only high rise condos. That type of buyer might want to see someone who specializes in that market. Same goes for golf course homes, gated communities, high end homes, and so forth. Heck even a site just for one community like Summerlin (it's huge for those that don't know Vegas) would be enough to be worth the ROI.

There are a lot of ways to use small and large sites to your advantage. As surfers get more experienced they will start looking for more targeted searches plus look for experts and niche sites are a great way to be the expert.

[naplesrealestate]

By having a niche market web site you might be able to pull more long tail searches that produce a prospect with a higher desireable characteristics for what you are marketing.