Focus Areas
WHY USE THEM...AND HOW?
Focus Areas are used to highlight geographic areas on your website. They may display your farm area or any other locations you want to show your website visitors easily. Each Focus Area displays a small photo to represent the area, followed by links directing the visitor to available listings. You can also use Focus Areas on neighbourhood information/profile pages to direct visitors to the interactive listing map search for the specific area.
For example, you may have written a custom page about your farm area, with a photo of the local park, a list of schools and possibly a brief comment on a couple of your favourite restaurants in the area. Throw in a couple of local photos and possibly a testimonial from a past client moving into the area and you have a nice story that can position you as the neighbourhood expert and help your search engine ranking resulting from the unique content. Then, once a visitor has read this page, he or she will want to look for relevant properties in the neighbourhood, so why not add a focus area link so they can search the area by property type without having to navigate your site to find it? Making it easy for them to search one or more specific areas and learn more about those areas is what is going to separate your site from any other.
There are many predefined areas to choose from for your Focus Areas, including neighbourhoods within the GTA as defined by TREB and other real estate boards. However, you may want to specify an exact point, intersection, or region for your focus area that isn’t covered in the list of pre-defined areas. No problem… that can be done too.
To do this, you first need to add a Focus Area “Content Item” to the relevant page.
1. Add Content > Focus Areas, then Edit
2. The map coordinates for your chosen area will be associated with the Focus Area. Once you save the content item, it will be updated on your website.
And that’s all there is to it! Remember to view the results online because, if you specify too small/specific of an area, there may be a very limited number of listings available.
If you find you need to re-adjust your Focus Area, just repeat the above steps.
Authored by: Tara, Client Relations