Mar 5
2012
DIY REALTOR SEO Guide #1: How to Pick the Right Keywords
Written by Chris Adams | posted in DIY SEO Guide, SEO | 0 Comments
Don’t be fooled, keyword research may sound boring it is VERY critical. Getting this right will make all your future SEO efforts much easier to plan and implement. But if you get this wrong you’ll realize 6-months down the road you need to start all over.
- Time Commitment: 2 hours
- Projected Expenses: $0
- Click here to download the printable check list
Are there such a thing as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ keywords? Well, not in the sense of good vs. evil, but you can certainly make good decisions and bad decisions when it comes to keyword selection.
- A ‘good’ keyword is one that brings in transactional traffic, that is to say it brings in traffic that results in a higher rate of conversions, leads, clients, customers, etc.
- A ‘bad’ keyword is one that brings in research traffic, that is to say traffic that isn’t interested in making a transaction but is still in the research phase.
Action Steps EXPLAINED
1. Brainstorm
- Using a pad of paper, whiteboard, or Excel spreadsheet create a giant list of keywords you think people might use to find your website. By giant we mean more than 100 keywords.
- Include short-tail and long-tail keywords, for example: “Phoenix real estate” “Luxury Phoenix real estate in the Biltmore district”
- If you’re having trouble thinking up keywords then try out Google’s keyword tool (click here)
A few things to remember:
- Don’t shoot down any keyword ideas until you’ve ran some numbers (see Action Step 3)
- Rearrange your keywords for new keywords (i.e. “phoenix real estate” is NOT the same as “real estate in phoenix”)
- Don’t be afraid of long-tail keywords (i.e. keywords with more than 4 words in them) like “real estate agent in Phoenix AZ”
- It’s tempting to want to rank for a term like “real estate” but for 99.99% of real estate agents that would be a great waste of resources
- Don’t forget to geo-locate your keywords as well – often these have higher conversion rates (i.e. become clients/leads), and are easy to rank for, one examples would be “Realtor in Scottsdale AZ”
- It’s not a bad idea to use adjectives in your keywords like “best Realtor in Phoenix AZ”
2. Get the Spreadsheet Ready
- Once you’ve completed your brainstorming session(s) compile everything into a spreadsheet
- Some programs to help you here: Microsoft Excel, Google Docs, iWork, Zoho Docs, or OpenOffice
3. Run the Numbers
- Once you’ve compiled your list of potential keywords, click here head over to Google’s Traffic Estimator Tool (You might need to log in to Google first; if you don’t have an account, click here to set one up)
- Copy and paste your keywords from your spreadsheet into the first box “Word or phrase” – enter the “Captcha” code – then click “Estimate”
- Once the data populates below you want to copy down the following number, ‘Global Monthly Searches’ and place that number under the ‘Estimated Global Search Volume’ column in the spreadsheet
- Chances are high that many of your keywords won’t have any corresponding monthly search volume, instead it’s just a dash (-) mark or it says “no data”. When you see this that’s Google’s way of saying “more or less 0” searches occur every month for that keyword
Why does it say ‘estimated’ ?
- It would be nice to think that these numbers are 100% accurate – but they’re not and even Google admits that. So take these numbers with a grain of salt.
- In our experience we’ve found the numbers to be good approximations, roughly +/-30%
- How can the numbers can be so off? Part of that question has to be answered by Google but one reason might be due to seasonality (i.e. Certain keywords are searched more often during certain times of the year).
4. Filter Your Data
- Rearrange your keywords to those with the highest ‘Estimated Global Search Volume’ and cut those that fall under 100 searches per month (unless you suspect the number is low due to seasonality or is a keyword you think will be highly searched in the future).
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DIY REALTOR SEO GUIDE: How To Pick the Right Keywords (Printable Guide)
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