Four months isn't long for SEO. It's enough to fix what's broken and start publishing. The gains that build on each other come later, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. So the SEO half here laid the groundwork, and it was mostly cleanup.
The SEO half, and why it was mostly cleanup
The site had the same meta description on several pages. A meta description is the short summary Google may show under a page's title in search results.
How duplicates get there
A template fills the field. Or a plugin drops one default into every page on the site. It's common on property management sites, where listing and service pages get made in bulk.
Why they matter
It isn't a disaster on its own. Google will rewrite a description it doesn't find useful. But copies across a set of pages hint that the pages themselves may be near-identical. On a site where a lot of URLs already look alike to a crawler, you don't want to add to that. We rewrote them so each page described itself.
Blogs and backlinks
We published blogs and built backlinks (links to the site from other sites) over the four months. Both build up over time. Four months of blogging is the start of a body of work, not the result of one.
The social half is where four months could really show up as something. It's also the part worth writing about, because it meant a choice most property management companies never make.
Owners, residents and vendors are not one audience
Almost every property management social feed we've seen talks as if one person is reading. But there are at least three readers, and they want completely unrelated things.
The owner
They're deciding who manages what is usually the largest asset they own. It's a slow, high-stakes choice that's hard to undo. They're not browsing. Usually they're already unhappy with someone. Or they've just inherited a house, or moved out of state and realized that self-managing from Phoenix is a bad idea. They want to know how fast you fill a vacancy and how you handle a tenant who stops paying. They want to know what happens when a water heater fails on a Sunday. And they want a statement they can hand to their accountant. This reader reads slowly and with doubt, and looks at a company for weeks before they call.
The resident
A completely different animal. Some are looking for somewhere to live. They want to see units and prices and find out if they qualify, in the next twenty minutes. Others already live in one of the units, and something is wrong. The second group is larger and matters more than most managers admit. A resident with a broken dishwasher isn't a marketing audience in the usual sense. But every owner and every future resident who scrolls past sees how a company answers that person in public. Maintenance response is reputation, and it's visible.
The vendor
Plumbers, roofers, landscapers, turnover cleaners, carpet people. They want to know how to get on the approved list and what the scope and payment terms look like. And they want to know if the company pays on time. Almost nobody markets to them. That's strange, because a property manager needs reliable trades who pick up the phone. Filling vacancies fast and keeping owners happy depends on them. A good bench of vendors is an asset to the business. It's also cheap to build that audience. The competition for a plumber's attention on social is close to zero.
Put all three in one feed with one voice and you get the thing you see everywhere: a post about "5 tips for being a great landlord". An owner finds it patronizing, a resident finds it beside the point, and a vendor scrolls straight past. Nothing in it is wrong. It just isn't addressed to anybody in particular.
Three-level targeting
For Red Roof we split the targeting three ways. We built content and audience definitions separately for owners, residents and vendors. It's the same approach behind our property management marketing work in general.
Original design
Not pulled from a stock library, which matters more than you'd think. In property management, every competitor uses the same four photos of a smiling couple holding house keys. Standing out in a Tacoma feed comes easily once someone is really designing for you.
The awkward part is volume
You now make roughly three times the content for the same number of followers. And the vendor audience is the smallest of the three by a wide margin. It's worth doing anyway, because the other way blends everything into content that converts nobody. But it's real work, and anyone planning this should know that going in.
Put all three in one feed with one voice and you get the thing you see everywhere.
AppFolio sets the floor
Red Roof runs AppFolio. So do most property management accounts we work with. It shapes what's possible on the marketing side before you get anywhere near strategy.
Good software, limited marketing surface
AppFolio is good software for running a portfolio and limited as a marketing surface. Its website product makes a small number of pages with a listing feed bolted on. The listing format itself is rigid about styling. That small site is what the platform tends to produce if you accept its defaults.
What we've built against it
The AppFolio Listings Pro plugin shows AppFolio's listings as the site's own markup, so buttons, styles and CSS can be changed. We also built a chat leasing tool on the AppFolio API. It shows real, active listings with neighborhoods, pricing and full detail. None of it was built for Red Roof in particular. But knowing the platform's edges changes what you recommend. And knowing where a property manager's day-to-day data really lives changes what you can do with their content later.
What the four months moved
Over the four months we ran it, traffic doubled and leads came in at roughly double the previous rate.
What's above is the work. Four months of SEO cleanup, with blogs and links on top of it. And a social program that treats owners, residents and vendors as three separate audiences. All they have in common is the property manager.
