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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