Keyword Research
Keyword research is a very valuable and important part of SEO. By knowing what your prospects are actually typing into the search engines to find you, you can better understand what they are looking to find when they get to your site. Armed with this information you can target the appropriate pages to the right keywords and produce content that your visitors are looking for.
Before you go out and find what keywords potential clients are searching for, you should first write down what pages you already have on your site. There are likely a few pages on your site that you don’t need or want to rank… still I recommend you write them down(maybe something will fit there.
Here are some example pages gathered from other real estate websites.
- Homepage – this is basically a portal to direct traffic to where they want to go on your site.
- Listing Page – if you work in multiple cities you can and should have a listing page for each city.
- Rental Page – if you do rentals you should have a page specifically for that.
- About page – self explanatory.
- Blog – you should have a blog or some sort of page on your site where you can put up articles.
Each of these pages should be targeting different keyword phrases. And each of these pages can target more than one keyword.
Commonly Used Real Estate Keywords
There are some commonly used keywords that are used to find real estate websites. These should be your starting point for finding your keywords and determining which ones should have top priority.
(insert your city name here) real estate, (your city) homes and (your city) homes for sale: will likely be the keywords with the most search volume. But don’t jump in without doing the research first.
Keyword Research Tools
There are plenty of keyword research tools out there that you can use but for our purposes we’re going to use a free tool from Google.
Google Adwords – Keyword Tool – You should create an account or if you already have and account, log in using the link at the top right of the page. By logging in you will get more data then you will logged out.
Now put your commonly used keyword phrases in the box labeled, Word or phrase. You can check the box labeled “
After you search and get your keyword results, there will be a new option in the left navigation area called Match Types.
Deselect Broad and check the box next to “Phrase”. Feel free to play around with the match types to get a feel for what people are actually typing in to the search engines.
Now you should have a list with the keyword terms you typed in as well as a list of keyword ideas(example screenshot below) . There will also be search volume data and competition data for each keyword phrase.
The competition data is for Adwords advertisers and for our purposes can be ignored. The global and local monthly search volume is what we’re looking for. In most real estate markets the global volume vs the monthly volume will be the same or very close so focus on the Global Monthly Search volume.
Now make a file in word, notepad, excel or whichever program you feel most comfortable with. Add all the keywords that are relevant to your business to this file with the search volumes next to them.
Example:
- san jacinto real estate – Broad= 880 , Phrase= 170
- san jacinto homes – Broad= 2400 , Phrase= 170
Save this file somewhere on your computer so you can find it later.
Keyword Grouping
Each page that you want to get rankings for should target 1-3 keywords. There is no rule on how many keywords you can target on one page but it’s best to keep it at a few closely related phrases.
The best way to group keywords is to think of which page they best apply to. And, the easiest page on a website to get ranked is the homepage so lets start there.
For example, I would target the homepage with:” San Jacinto real estate”, “San Jacinto CA real estate” and “real estate San Jacinto”. The top priority keyword in this group would be “San Jacinto real estate” because it has the highest search volume of the 3 phrases.
You may end up with some keyword groups that are larger than a few phrases. In this case you can:
try to split them up,
you can pick the ones with the highest search volume,
or you can pick the ones that make the most sense grammatically (recommended).
If you haven’t already done so, assign each keyword group to the page on your site that’s the most relevant. If you have keyword groups that don’t match a page on your site save them and down the road you may want to make a page or pages for those keyword phrases.
Save all the data you gathered and use it to optimize the pages on your site and to get ideas for new content to create.