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 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 website 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 websites 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 website will better demonstrate
to them that you specialize in what they need. See
our article on Targeting a 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 website while still covering the less competitive
longer phrase.
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