Choosing the Most Effective Keywords for a Real Estate Agent Website
As many times as I have seen the improper use of keywords, I still can’t help but wonder what so many real estate agents were thinking when they chose them. Then it hit me, its not that they are just really bad at deciding on which keywords to use for their real estate site, it was that they don’t know how to find valuable keywords, so I am going to give a helping hand with that nasty problem.
The Problems I See with Real Estate Websites
Managing a website focused on the real estate industry may possibly be one of the most difficult things to do, simply because of the sheer amount of competition you will face. For instance, while I am writing this Google is showing over 690 million competing pages for the term “real estate” and most of the top positions are taken by sites like Yahoo, CNN and Remax. It would take years of search engine optimization and hard work, not to mention more money than most of us have to even humor the thought of a respectable rank for that term, yet many real estate agents still seem to be going after it without knowing any better.
Now, don’t get me wrong, ranking for a term like that is not impossible, but unlikely, and the truth of the matter is that it probably wouldn’t do you any good anyways. The key to turning site visitors into clients who may actually buy a house from you are laser targeted keywords. Suppose you want people interested in homes for sale in Vancouver, what percentage of your traffic coming in for the term “real estate” would be interested in that, probably a very small amount which means a very high bounce rate. So in this case an effective keyword would be, “homes for sale Vancouver” assuming that the traffic for that search term is respectable.
Another common problem I see with real estate agent websites are that they tend to target their names. Now unless you are famous, in the news frequently or the most popular guy/gal in the country, how many potential clients do you think will be searching for your name on the search engines? I would venture to guess few to none. Therefor it would be a better use of your time and work to target search terms that people are actually searching for and let your name come around on its own.
So How Do You Find These Golden Keywords
There are a lot of great keyword research tools out there, however for the limited amount of time that many agents will likely be using them, the paid versions will probably not recoup their value. The good news is that there are some great free options that will benefit you, and the primary one is provided by Google, how much more reliable can it get than that? You can find Google’s Keyword Research Tool here or also give the Wordtracker Free version a spin and see how that helps.
The process of using these tools is fairly straight forward. Simply type in some keywords that relate to your business, for instance “buying homes in Vancouver” and these tools will create a list of possible variations along with the amount of people searching for those particular terms. So lets say that one term has thirty thousand searches a month, you can type that term into a google search and see how many results there are, the lower the better. I would recommend not targeting any search term with over a million competitors until you get a little more comfortable with the whole process, but its up to you.
What to Do When You Find a Good Real Estate Term
Alright, you went through the steps below and found a great search term, now you need to implement that into your website for it to be any help. Start using the whole search term along with variations of the term within the main text(body) of your chosen page. Be sure to use the term in the title of the page as well as the link text used on other pages, in other words instead of having a link to your homepage that says home, set it up to say your new search term instead.
Doing this will allow the search engines to easily determine what that page or site is about, and hopefully rank you in their index accordingly. We as webmasters have to create our sites in a way that will tell the search engines what we want to rank for, if you leave it to the search engines to decide you will never get anywhere.
Hopefully this has shed a little light on the process of finding search terms or keywords for your website, I know for those of you with little experience in the technical field it can seem daunting, but it is fairly easily obtainable. If you have any questions on how to do something please feel free to ask them in the comment section below, I will answer them as soon as I can. You might also view our other article on real estate internet marketing for additional info.
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Tags for this article: buying homes in vancouver, choosing keywords, getting traffic to real estate website, homes for sale vancouver, real estate agent websites, real estate internet marketing, real estate keywords, real estate website
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Good basic overview of what an agent needs to consider when building and maintaining a website. Followed you over from Active Rain.
Like the comment about using your name as a url, most of the traffic I get for my name originates from my own brokerage…..not the high quality traffic I’m searching for. LOL
Hey Brett glad you stopped by! The name issue seems to be very common for many real estate agents, hopefully we can educate everyone well enough to change that.
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