Ultimate Guide To Real Estate Keywords (+ Examples!)
Looking for the perfect real estate website keywords but not sure where to start? This guide is perfect for beginners who know they need to rank in local searches but have no idea how to do it!
Looking for the perfect real estate website keywords? You’ve come to the right guide.
Seriously, when you think about what’s most important to your real estate business, you are not a “real estate agent,” even though that’s what consumers consider you.
Sure, you drive clients around or you give tons of listing presentations. But you wouldn’t have those duties without leads.
You are, in reality, a lead generator.
Whether you’re good at it or suck at it doesn’t change the fact that lead generation is your most important duty, at least if you hope to last in the business.
So, why not excel at choosing the perfect real estate website keywords?
And, since we’re all about saving money, why not wring every last lead you can out of free lead gen techniques?
Showing up in organic internet searches takes some effort, but it beats paying for leads, don’t you agree?
Today we give you some tips on increasing traffic to your Easy Agent Pro real estate website using real estate website keywords.
Since we have a lot of new agents among our clients, we’ll start with the baby steps.
Joshua Hardwick, head of content at ahref.com, offers up a definition: “Keywords are the words and phrases that people type into search engines to find what they’re looking for.”
Notice that he says “…words and phrases.” While a keyword can most certainly be one word, consumers understand the lousy results they’ll be offered if they stick to one-word searches.
Type in “t-shirt” for instance and see what Google gives you. FAR too many choices when I’m looking for a “women’s t-shirt with long sleeves.”
Unfortunately, that search term returns too many results for “shirts.”
“Women’s tee with long sleeves” gives me a Goldilocks moment – it’s just right.
The tee shop owner who uses this keyword (and others) is optimizing her pages for SEO, or search engine optimization. Optimized pages are more likely to get noticed by Google’s spiders and, hopefully, found valuable enough to rank higher in search results.
Why is that important?
“The first organic result in Google Search has an average click-through rate of 28.5%,”
according to Matt Southern (searchenginejournal.com) citing a recent study by Sistrix.
Either Google is really good at serving up the “just right” result for searchers or searchers are too lazy to scroll to the other results on page one.
“Average CTR [click-through rate] falls sharply after position one, the study finds, with the second and third positions having a 15% and 11% click-through rate respectively,” Southern continues.
If your website shows up as number 10 on page one there is only an “abysmal” 2.5% CTR, notes Southern.
While 2.5% may be abysmal, it’s a whole lot better than it would be if your site was ranked on page three.
That’s where the agents who don’t bother optimizing their sites end up, hidden among the “dead bodies.”
We consulted the experts at Google on this one.
They recommend that you “Write down the main categories of your business, and then write down the terms or phrases that might fall under each of those categories.”
In other words, use phrases that a consumer might use when searching for an agent, homes for sale or just general real estate information.
Keep your aim solely on what a visitor might be looking for, because “… what you want to rank for and what your audience actually wants are often two wildly different things,” cautions Britney Muller and the staff at moz.com.
“Focusing on your audience and then using keyword data to hone those insights will make for much more successful campaigns than focusing on arbitrary keywords,” they note.
You most likely have a general idea of what real estate consumers are searching for online. But a “general idea” isn’t enough when you want to laser-target certain real estate consumers, such as condo owners, sellers, landlords or folks in the market for acreage.
If you still need help coming up with keywords, check out Ubersuggest at neilpatel.com.
Once you have a list of keywords, it’s time to prioritize them and one of the best ways to do this is to find those that your competition isn’t doing particularly well with.
There are several online keyword checkers, most will ask you for your credit card number before sharing the goodies.
If you don’t mind paying, check out:
Alexa.com offers a free service but to get all the advanced features, you’ll need to pay. Enter your URL into the search box and, for free, learn about:
Alexa.com is a good place to get a basic list of keywords and to figure out where you might gain a competitive SEO edge.
Note: Just because your competitor is ranking for real estate website keywords doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be on your list. Take a look at how he or she is using it – the content. If you can create a better piece of content (longer, more info-packed, better organized, etc.) go for it.
Check out these 10 tips to help you rank in local search results – and optimize your content for ANY market:
Yes, it would be amazing for your business to show up as the number one organic result for the terms “real estate,” “real estate agent” or “how to sell a house.”
Unless you’re Zillow or one of the other page one hogs, it’s not gonna happen.
That’s not bad news, however. If you sell real estate in Cowansburg, Pennsylvania you don’t need or want visitors looking for real estate in Anaheim, California.
I entered “real estate agent” into Google’s Keyword Search tool to come up with a short list of generic real estate keywords getting tons of searches.
Some of the results were useless because they weren’t even local to the U.S. (such as “property agent,” used in Hong Kong, among other regions, and “estate agent,” a very British term).
There were some, however, that would give me a good start:
There were even some real estate keywords specific to brokerages, such as:
Remember, these keywords are a “good start,” but, because they are overly competitive, they need tweaking.
The first place to tweak is by making the keyword phrase local:
That’s not enough, however. Find additional ways to make your real estate website keywords hyper-local:
Neighborhood pages are ideal for loading up with your real estate website keywords:
You get the idea, right?
The pros at moz.com call for diversification when determining how and where to use your real estate website keywords.
“It’s important to note that entire websites don’t rank for keywords — pages do”
We see agents attempting to get their home pages to rank for tons of keywords and while this is a worthy goal, it probably isn’t working.
Muller notes that your site will most likely “… receive more organic traffic to pages other than the homepage, which is why it’s so important to diversify your website’s pages by optimizing each for uniquely valuable keywords.”
This means you’ll need to create (or have a professional real estate writer create) content for the site. Not just content for content’s sake, though; it needs to be valuable content if you hope to rank for your chosen real estate website keywords.
If you do hire a writer to create content for your site, ensure he or she actually knows your industry and the buying and selling process before you trust them with your real estate website keywords.
“In-depth, niche industry knowledge can mean the difference between ‘good enough’ and ‘groundbreaking’ when it comes to” … your local content strategy,” according to moz.com’s State of Local SEO Industry Report, 2020.
Check out “72 Real Estate Keywords To Dominate Any Market Or Niche” here on Easy Agent Pro for a list of additional real estate website keywords.
And remember, “knowing your audience and catering to their unique needs is more vital than ever,” in 2021, according to the Moz report.
Get started on creating compelling content that tells them what to consider when buying a home with a septic tank and/or well, waterfront property or an HOA.
Get those neighborhood pages optimized and add lots of yummy photos of the places you write about.
Can’t wait to see you on page one!
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