The keywords you are aiming for are the foundation of any search marketing campaign. Your website's domain name selection, SEO content pages, and paid search engine adverts are all dependent on keywords. Selecting the key phrases you want to position your business and its online brand as an authority on is crucial since it can mean the difference between drawing visitors from the right demographic to your site and wasting money on irrelevant impressions and traffic. We're here to give you a fundamental primer on keyword research and picking the top ones for your real estate company.

Considering Relevance

The keyword "real estate" is fairly broad. Determine which particular keywords that contain or are related to this term are relevant to your real estate firm. You can focus more tightly by asking yourself the following questions:

1. What are the main geographical markets that you serve? Work your way up from the smallest geographic unit (neighborhoods in heavily populated urban areas, counties in very remote areas where residents do not view local towns as entities of their own). These geographic identifiers can be applied as modifiers to the primary keyword topics relating to real estate.

2. What is "real estate" referred to as in your market? Consider the various names locals in your community give to their houses. Homes, condominiums, townhomes, villas, estates, and properties are among the common real estate categories.

3. What kinds of properties are available in your market? Here, we focus even more on the particular kinds of properties that you handle in your capacity as a real estate expert. Acreage houses, seaside real estate, bank-owned properties, midrise condos, and luxury estates are all distinctive forms of real estate that a certain kind of customer prospect will be searching for through search engines.

Examine The Opposition

Why does choosing which keywords to target need you to put in all the effort? It's likely that your rivals have already invested time and effort (through trial and error) that you can use at this very moment. Here are two excellent methods for stealing keyword suggestions from your rivals:

1. Where does your rival rank in the sponsored results? Search for these words on Google, Yahoo, and MSN using the "keyword brainstorming" list you created using the first section of this essay. Which ones do the leading agents in your market use in their advertising? Make note of these. Also take into account any word that they are not overtly marketing to, as that may present a chance for you to brand your company and acquire a competitive edge for those excellent impressions.

2. What keywords do the domain names, TITLE tags, META keywords, and META descriptions of your rivals' websites contain? Write down the top ten rivals in your market, then just search the websites of each of them for relevant keywords. Use the criteria in the first section of this piece to help you focus on the particular keywords that will be most beneficial.

Utilize The Keyword Tools Available to Cross-Reference Your List

You most likely have a pretty long list of keywords by the time you reach this stage of the process. It makes no sense to promote yourself aggressively around a list of 200 phrases since it will cost you a fortune and be similar to throwing a lot of words at a wall to see what sticks. You can choose the top 10 to 15 relevant terms to focus your online marketing on using free keyword research tools.

Here is a handful that we heartily endorse:

Various Search Engines

Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft Live By observing how many pertinent results appear on the top search engines, you can get a sense of what keywords will be challenging to rank for. As you begin your initial SEO strategy, we advise against targeting any phrase with more than 500,000 results. Using the search engines, you can also observe how many people are placing advertisements in the sponsored results; note which terms have more competition in the sponsored results. If your sponsored ad budget is small, you might want to concentrate on keywords that have little competition. Additionally, you can get a sense of the "top phrases" to aim for if you really want to go all out!

The Keyword Tool For Google Adwords

This keyword research tool is offered by Google, and it's great. You can nearly endlessly search for and filter keyword searches, and it provides estimates for monthly impressions based on keyword phrases.

The Keyword Suggestion Tool From SEOBook

- The fantastic website of Aaron Wall offers you this delectable keyword tool that collects search information from a number of trustworthy sources and can be a useful cross-referencing tool.

(Excel) AdCenter Add-In

Even while this Microsoft-provided keyword tool only uses MSN and Microsoft Live Search, it still provides some useful information that can help you plan your keyword strategy.