Morgul Marketing

    Ranking for buildings on both sides of the Ohio River

    A national portal already owns the phrase "commercial real estate Louisville." You will not take it, and taking it would help less than you think, because the people typing it are students, appraisers and browsers. The searches worth writing for are narrower: a county, a side of the river, a spec, a use. Louisville hands you that narrowness for free. One metro, two states, a merged city county government in the middle, and a ring of counties that behave nothing like it. Build pages that match how a requirement actually gets described out loud, and the thin, qualified searches start finding you instead of the portal.

    Talk to us

    A Jeffersonville searcher will not see your St. Matthews pin

    Map results are computed from where the searcher is standing, so a river crossing removes you from the pack no matter how well your profile is built.

    Your Google Business Profile does one job well. It puts your office in front of somebody who is already looking for a commercial broker nearby and wants a phone number. Keep it accurate, keep the hours right, keep photographs of the actual office on it.

    What it will not do is carry inventory. Nobody with a signed corporate requirement for 60,000 square feet begins in the local pack. They begin with a portal, a referral, or a specific search their site selection consultant wrote down.

    In a metro split by the Ohio River, proximity works against you in a way it does not in a landlocked market. An office in St. Matthews reads as far from a searcher in New Albany even when the drive is short. Chasing that with citation cleanup is wasted money.

    Spend the effort on pages instead. A page can rank for a searcher anywhere. A pin generally cannot travel.

    Kentuckiana is the word your buyers use and no national portal writes it

    Local vocabulary is the cheapest advantage on this list, because portals publish from a template and templates do not know what people here call things.

    Occupiers and owners here describe location by ring road and by neighborhood. Inside the Watterson. Out past the Gene Snyder. Kentuckiana when they mean the whole thing. Write the way they talk and you match queries a national database will never generate.

    Neighborhood names carry real weight for retail and small office. NuLu, Butchertown, Germantown, Crescent Hill and Old Louisville are not interchangeable, and a tenant looking at a storefront in one of them is not considering the others. Give each a page when you have something to say about it, and only then.

    A short glossary page earns more links than it should. Relocating operations managers arrive with no idea which counties matter or what the ring roads are called, and they read the page that explains it.

    Do not overdo it. Repeating "Kentuckiana" eleven times in 400 words reads like what it is. Use the words where they belong and leave them alone.

    The air freight tenant searches dock doors and truck access, not Class A

    Operations people search in the units of their operation, and those queries are thin, unglamorous and almost uncontested.

    Clear height. Dock doors. Drive-in bays. Trailer parking. Outside storage. Twenty four hour access. Each of those is a query theme, and each of them crossed with a county gives you a page that a portal's auto-generated listing grid cannot answer.

    The logistics and air freight base here means second and third shift operations are ordinary. A tenant who runs overnight has questions about access, neighbors and hours that a nine to five office tenant never asks. Write those answers down once and they work for years.

    Volume on these searches is low. That is the point. Ten visits from people who typed a dock count are worth more to a brokerage than a thousand from people who typed the city name.

    Keep any regulatory content general. Permitted hours of operation and truck routing practice differ by jurisdiction across this metro, and readers should confirm with the local building department or planning office rather than with your marketing page.

    Metro is one government and Oldham and Bullitt are not

    The moment a requirement leaves Jefferson County, the rules, the process and the buyer all change at the same time.

    Louisville Metro and Jefferson County are merged. The counties around them are not, and neither is anything across the river. A single metro-level page tries to speak to all of that at once and ends up saying nothing specific enough to rank.

    County-level pages generally outperform metro-level pages here for exactly that reason. An Oldham County land inquiry and a Jefferson County adaptive reuse inquiry share almost no vocabulary.

    The buyer profile shifts too. Further out you find more owner users, more small bay, more land with utility questions attached. Downtown and the older neighborhoods bring reuse, parking and floor load questions instead.

    Write about process differences carefully. Practice varies county to county and is worth confirming locally rather than asserting on a page that will sit there for three years.

    Write for the owner deciding whether to sell, not only the tenant deciding where to move

    Owner side searches are thinner and less contested than tenant searches, and they lead to a listing rather than a showing.

    A tenant search produces a tour. An owner search produces an assignment. One of those pays considerably better and the content behind it barely exists in this market.

    The owner of a building in Butchertown or a small industrial property in Bullitt County searches things like what the property might be worth, how a sale process runs, what documents a buyer will demand, and what a sale leaseback involves. None of that is a listing query.

    Answer the process questions and stay away from conclusions about any specific property. You can explain how an opinion of value gets built without publishing a number that will be quoted back at you.

    Put a real request form at the end of each of those pages, and route it somewhere different from the tenant inquiries. The two paths deserve different first replies.

    Questions we get

    How long does SEO take for a commercial brokerage?
    Nobody can honestly promise a date. What is predictable is the order things move in. Pages targeting narrow, low-competition queries such as a county plus a building spec tend to show movement well before anything competing with a national portal does. If an agency gives you a ranking timeline, ask what happens contractually when it is missed.
    We are licensed in Kentucky only. Should we still publish Indiana pages?
    Generally yes, but written as market context rather than as representation, and with a plain statement of what you can and cannot do across the river. Licensing requirements differ by state and are worth confirming with your broker of record and your own counsel. Publishing pages that imply Indiana representation you do not have buys you inquiries you have to hand away.
    Do we need a blog?
    You need a library, which is a different thing. A blog is dated posts nobody revisits. A library is a small number of pages you keep current: the county pages, the spec pages, the process explainers for owners. Most brokerage blogs would be more useful as four well maintained pages.
    Our listings are syndicated to the portals. Are they competing with our own site?
    For the building's own name, sometimes. For everything else, no. The portal ranks on its authority for generic phrases you were not going to win anyway. Your pages win on the specific: a county, a spec, a submarket, a process question. Syndicate the listings and build the pages that portals do not have the local knowledge to write.
    Should we write separate pages for every neighborhood?
    Only where you have something to say. A page about NuLu retail is worth writing if you have leased there and can describe the space, the frontage and the parking situation honestly. A thin page per neighborhood generated from a template tends to underperform and can drag down the pages around it.

    Rules that affect your marketing

    Brokerage is licensed and advertising generally has to identify the brokerage rather than only the individual. The more practical constraint is that this industry is bought at submarket grain: a downtown tower and a suburban flex park are different products with different tenants, and content pitched at a whole metro tends to speak to neither.

    Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing. Updated .

    Talk to us about SEO for commercial real estate firms in Louisville

    Tell us about your business and where your marketing stands. We'll tell you what we'd do first, and what we'd leave alone.

    We won't add you to a mailing list. A person will reply.