Keyword Research: Brainstorming Keywords
Before you make any effort to SEO your website, you first need to know what keywords your prospects are using to find you. To start off, you're going to need at least one good keyword to go to the next step. Below I will give you a few of the most common keywords used.
Commonly Used Keywords
The keywords below are some of the more common search terms used to find real estate websites. Be sure to change (your city) to the name of the city you service. Write all of your keywords down in your word processor and we will add more and organize them later.
(Your city) real estate (City) (State) real estate (Your City) homes for sale
To start off, the three keywords above should be enough to get your keyword research rolling and if you want, you can skip the rest below. If you follow the process below you might just get a few keywords that are less competitive, easier to rank for and possibly more targeted.
You don't need a huge list of keywords at this point, so don't take to much time below. In the next step of this process you will be using a free keyword tool to expand your keyword list and gather some search data about those keywords.
Additional Keyword Brainstorming
The best way to get a keyword starter list is to put yourself into the shoes of your prospects and brainstorm keywords. As real estate agents, you have two different types of prospects: buyers and sellers, so you should do the process from both positions.
Pretend your looking to buy a house... What would you type into the search engines to find what you're looking for?
You want keywords that are very targeted and therefore will deliver the best chance of generating leads. In real estate, this is fairly easy. You work in a local market, in a lot of cases just one city. So you need to plug that into all your search term ideas.
You might try something like “houses for sale”. That keyword is to general and if you targeted that keyword you would probably get a lot of untargeted traffic and no leads. But if you were to add “your city name” in front of it (“your city” houses for sale), that might just be a good keyword. It's also a good idea to try word variations. We currently have: “your city houses for sale” so, “your city homes for sale” is also something to consider.
Don't hesitate to drill it down even more. The more you drill down, the easier it will be to create a good page that will hopefully generate leads. Keywords like: “your city condos“, “your city land”, etc. Also, adding your state or state abbreviation into some keywords might get more traffic or more targeted visitors.
In the next steps you will be getting more keywords and the amount of searches per month for each of them. Some keywords you might have thought to be good, might actually have little to no search volume.
Next Step:Keyword Research with Google