ILSs own the rankings for many top search results. Here's how to remix their tactics for your own site.

If you want to rank like the ILSs in the search results, it’s worth paying attention to what they do differently with their sites.

One recent example I’m seeing: Using Schema markup and rich data formatting in new ways to help their search results stand out.

Check out this example:

And this one:

In these examples, you’ll see that the ILSs are using event markup to highlight tour “events” that allow them to eat up more real estate in the search results.

In both cases, these aren’t actual events; the ILS uses the event markup in their webpage code to steer traffic to individual property listings. (I could see ILSs offering this as an upgrade package to their advertisers at some point.)

Now, I think it’s pretty misleading to make the searcher think there’s a live event happening when there’s no such event. But that aside, the tactic being deployed here is intriguing.

It’s intriguing because it doesn’t require a huge budget or massive troves of content powered by thousands of listings. With a flexible website platform (or even a working knowledge of Google Tag Manager), you can easily add this kind of content and CTAs to your site for free.

So how could individual operators or single property websites use this to their advantage?

Let’s borrow the concept and remix it.

Here are three quick ways you can use events and event markup to convince prospects that your website is worth a deeper look:

Host an open house at your property, and use the event markup to encourage prospects to attend.

We’ve seen a lot of success with this in the past. Host an open house to showcase your amenities or a featured unit, or try hosting a virtual tour on Zoom or Instagram Live at a scheduled time for the folks who can’t make it to your property during regular office hours.

If you go the virtual route, test the timing. You might find you get a great turnout at off hours like a Sunday night or a Wednesday evening.

Make it consistent — offer tours or an open house at the same time every week, and you now have an event schedule you can share and promote on your site (and social channels).

Level up: Use a landing page or a pop-up to let prospects opt in to attend. Send them reminder emails with the link or login info leading up to the event.

Offer Live Q&A times with your staff so prospects or incoming residents can chat with you over Zoom.

Give customers the opportunity to ask their questions about the neighborhood, or use it as a way to share important “orientation” info for new residents moving in soon.

Share your resident event schedule on your website.

In all the ways you can, your marketing should answer the question, “What is it like to live here?” Our property websites often paint a beautiful picture of the real estate, but they can often fall short when it comes to the true resident experience.

But that changes quickly once you start to share all the resident events happening at your community. And I mean *all the events* — besides your pool party and the grab ‘n go breakfast, also include the resident book club, the Saturday morning running club, the pick-up pickleball group, the WFH Wednesday lunch group, and the crew that gets together in the lounge to watch Ted Lasso or Succession together every week.

Let prospects see that they’ll be able to make connections and truly enjoy the community (in every sense of the word).

With a proper content management system (CMS), it’s not hard to add an event calendar with the proper formatting (called Schema Markup) to your site to help you stand out.

And events aren’t the only way to add structured data to your site.

There are a host of ways you can add structured data to your site to give search engines more information about you. At a minimum, talk with your website partner and verify that you have the Schema Markup for apartments in place.

Schema isn’t the only thing we can take away from how the ILSs do SEO.

There are countless strategies that you can learn from and remix for your own site … and in many cases, your local expertise will help you execute it better than they do.

If you’re ever looking for more ways to stand out in search — especially now as AI changes the way search looks forever — don’t hesitate to reach out. I promise any meeting booked with me is a real one; it’s not just there to take up real estate.