Effective keywords for your Real Estate Website

Search Engines: Choosing Effective Keywords

Learn what keywords your potential clients are searching for

It's extremely important to choose and focus on the right keywords. Very few sites spend enough time analyzing what terms and phrases they should be focusing on. What terms do your customers search by to find your competitors? What keywords are your competitors using? Obviously, these are important things to know when choosing your own keywords.

What many people don't know is that choosing your keywords isn't all guesswork. There are ways to find out exactly what terms users are searching for.

A tool we highly recommend is Wordtracker. It allows you to find the top related keywords searched for (by your target clients) by simply submitting a phrase on Wordtracker. Wordtracker not only gives you the list of most popular search phrases, but also lets you know how many competing sites there are for those particular keywords. We'll explain why this is valuable next.

The most highly searched keywords aren't always the best -- Target a niche market

It isn't enough to just know what the most popular terms are. The best terms are those that are not only popular, but also specifically targeted to your market, and have the least competition.

In recent years, the real estate industry has become one of the most competitive online. Large corporate real estate sites dominate most of the top search engine rankings and it is nearly impossible for a new web site to get a top ranking for terms such as "New York real estate" or "New York realtor".

While most large real estate firms and portals are focusing on greater metropolitan areas and broader real estate search phrases, individual agents and small brokerages should be concentrating on a much more targeted market. Be as specific as possible about your target market with your keywords. It's a common misconception to think that including a highly used search phrase in your site will generate a proportionate number of visits. This is because the popular search phrases will also have the most competition.

For example, if 100 searches are done on the term "San Francisco real estate" every minute but there are 75,000 web sites targeting the keywords "San Francisco real estate", your chances for getting many visitors from that term are very low. On the other hand, let's say you target each smaller neighborhood such as "Richmond District homes" or "Sunset District properties" specifically. Even if there are only a few searches per minute for these, your actual clickthroughs will be much higher with only 10-20 sites competing for them.

Your visitors will also be better qualified for your services and your web site will better demonstrate to them that you specialize in what they need. See our article on Targeting a Niche Market.

Brainstorming for additional keywords

Keep in mind that some keywords will be extremely competitive and you may not be able to get into the top 10 listings for quite some time, even if you've narrowed down your focus. More established sites with higher traffic and link popularity will be able to muscle out the top rankings even if you do use the all the right keywords in all the right places.

Don't be discouraged as there are always other keywords and phrases that are overlooked. Be clever and think of other less-competitive phrases to start while you work on building your site's link popularity. There are more people searching for these overlooked keyword phrases than you think.

Write down all the possible keywords that someone might enter into a search engine to find your site. Try entering different word combinations in Wordtracker and see what else you come up with.

Do not target single keywords

One common mistake is to target single keywords. With a few rare exceptions, searches on single words will match millions of web pages in any search engine. Your potential clients quickly learn that if they perform a search on "homes" or "properties" that they'll get hundreds of thousands of listings for real estate from all over the world. They will most likely use a much more specific search phrase to eliminate the irrelevant matches before continuing. For example, the following list of keywords will not be very effective.

real	properties
estate	house
agent	single
broker	family
realtor	homes

These terms need to be combined to take on the correct context.

Use the longer version of a keyword phrase

If possible, choose a longer form of a keyword phrase that also contains the shorter version. For example, if you use "Brooklyn real estate agent", you are also covering the shorter phrase "Brooklyn real estate". This way you can use the shorter and more popular search phrase as many times as possible in your web site while still covering the less competitive longer phrase.

Source:http://www.blitzdevelopment.com/real-estate-marketing-09.php