COMMENT OF THE DAY: APARTMENT COMPLEX SEO “It’s not just for marketing. Some naming is also for search engine optimization. If someone is searching for an apartment in a specific area, apartments are naming themselves to come up in as many area searches as possible. So Alexan Heights becomes Midtown Heights so a web search will pick it up when someone types in “Midtown†or “Heights†and “apartments†in Houston.” [Heights Weirdo, commenting on Top City Development Officer: What Makes the Heights So Special?]
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So that’s why my apartment complex just changed it’s name to “The Boobs at Bayou Bend.”
@John – funny.
If they’re doing this for SEO, they need to get some new SEO advice (“Midtown Heights” doesn’t actually come up in a Google search for “Midtown apartments.”) While the name of apartment complex has some SEO relevance, it’s vastly outweighed by other factors, like incoming links to your site. While Google doesn’t give away their ever-changing algorithms for this stuff, reputation (determined by links, social mentions, etc.) is a lot more important than words (& that’s why keyword stuffing doesn’t actually work and can actually get you dinged in search).
If you’re an apartment complex, the best bet is understand how Google’s local search functions work – and those are strictly tied to real street addreses.
There is a building on The Katy near Durham that self-identifies as Midtown. Since long before the invention of the internets, businesses everywhere called themselves River Oaks Something. People have crazy notions of what they think is classy and will bring them business.
This stuff drives me NUTS on Craigslist. If you search for an apartment on CL and put “Montrose” into the serach, you’ll get 90% of your hits from locator services, and apartments in Katy that put “Montrose” (and other words) at the bottom of the ad to target searchers.
Do people google to find apartment complexes? I’ve kept my properties 100% full from CL alone.
I’m pretty sure that the office building on the Katy Freeway that uses Midtown in its name was named that before Midtown got its name.
FYI, Alexan Heights changed its name to Midtown Heights when Trammell Crow Residential sold the property to PASSCO, CBRE Investors and a group of TIC’s. Alexan is TCR’s trademark, so they’re unable to keep it.