Real Estate SEO – Keyword Research
Real Estate SEO – Keyword Research
Keyword Research is the building block of any Real Estate SEO strategy. You do not want to define your SEO strategy blind and this is what you would be doing without adequate keyword research.
If you do not set up your website and linking SEO with a knowledge of the keywords that people actually use when they search then you will miss a great deal of valuable traffic.
Upfront Keyword Research – Optimize your Real Estate SEO
First, realize that the target audience you want to attract night not use the same terms to describe things as you would – they may not be aware of industry terminology – hence they will not use industry language when they conduct a search.
Second, with the right keywords defined, you can optimize your website by using these keywords in your link building, your web copy and in your on-page real estate SEO. These 3 factors need to be optimized for your real estate website to achieve a higher search engine position.
How to Research Keywords
Good keywords have the following characteristics:
- They are associated with sufficiently high search traffic
- They relate well to your business
- The competition level allows you to be competitive
To do this keyword research is a fun task and also often an eye-opener.
By conducting keyword research you will be learning more about your market and this is always good for business.
A way I often start is to write down some phrases that I feel are relevant and that I think have search volume. Once you have this list go to Google Adwords and use the Google keyword tool to confirm your ideas and to get more (and perhaps better) ideas.
Google Adwords Keyword Tool
The Google free keyword tool is a good place to start to associate some numbers to your keywords. Enter your core keywords and run the search…
When the search has run I like to observe the following:
Competition: The relative number of advertisers worldwide bidding on each keyword. It is purely quantitative. It says nothing about the “quality” of the competition nor does it have to if you will enter into the auction. Since the focus of this post is organic (non auction) search positioning we do care about the quality level of the competition.
Global Monthly Searches: The approximate 12-month average number of search terms matching each keyword. This statistic includes traffic in all countries and all languages.
Local Monthly Searches: The approximate 12-month average number of search terms matching each keyword. This statistic is specific to your targeted country and language.
If you have logged into your Google account you will also see approximate CPC (cost per click). In the adwords program this is a number averaged over all the ad positions. It does tell you about the monetary level that competitors are willing to pay for a click.
Now it is time to focus your research a bit more and move away from more generic terms. You can select three options for specific match types based on broad, exact and phrase.
Broad: This is the sum of the search volumes for the keyword idea, related grammatical forms, synonyms and related words. For example search results for commercial real estate would show up with any searches including commercial or real estate.
Phrase: This is the sum of the search volumes for all terms that include that whole phrase. Therefore if your targeted phrase was commercial real estate anyone who typed in commercial real estate with or without additional keywords would be counted.
Exact: This is the search volume for that specific keyword idea. It means these exact words in this exact order.
It is difficult to get high position for generic terms. These terms may also be of little value as more specific phrases indicate more passionate searchers who really know what they are looking for.
Narrow down your real estate SEO keyword list to 10-15 terms that make a great deal of commercial sense for your optimization project.
Look for additional posts on keyword research as this is a very important topic.
About Gary Horsman