How to Choose the Best Keywords for your Real Estate Website

In the second part in our SEO primer series, this blog explains the purpose of keywords and offers for very helpful tips on how to select the best ones for your website. As a refresher from last blog, SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is doing the right things on your website to get found during an internet search. If a prospective home buyer, for example, is looking for a home in the neighborhood where you specialize, you want your website and listings to come up first in their search for homes. You have a much better chance of being seen if your website is optimized for SEO.

We do a lot of work on websites to make sure they are perfectly positioned for SEO. One of the elements we look at is keywords. Because this is such an important part of every quality website, it would be beneficial for you to understand a bit about it. Also, even if your website is optimized with perfect keywords, you may want to blog or update your site with your own content. Doing so would mean paying attention to certain words and phrases to make sure your blogs and articles come to the top of the page when someone searches those words/phrases.

What are Keywords and Why are they so Important?

Search engines, like Google, scour websites looking for content that is the closest match to what the person is looking for online. They do this by assessing the words and images on the site, and if the search engine finds the same words and phrases that the person put in their search, that website will be more likely to show up at the top of the results. This is very important because most people searching online will not go past the first few results, and rarely to the second page of results, to find what they want. If your website isn’t among the first, and definitely on the first page, you’re not likely to be found.

Setting up your website with the same words and phrases is crucial to this process of being found. Updating your website with fresh content through blogs, and using relevant keywords there too, are great ways to position your real estate website to be found online.

Tips to Choosing the best Keywords

1. Know your target audience and speak to their interests. Real estate has the advantage of clear search terms. Most people looking for homes tend to know the area where they want to move. This means location-based phrases are a good way to connect your site to their interest in that area. Think about how your prospects and clients would search to find what you offer. Imagine what you would put in a Google search bar for homes in your area or for help selling a home and use that as your guide.
2. Check out what other agents are doing on their websites. You may get some good ideas for your own site. You can look at agents in your immediate area or see how highly successful agents in other markets are representing themselves online.
3. Think of phrases not just words. Most people search with a string of words together. For example, if you wanted to find a home in the Washington DC area, you wouldn’t put “homes” in the search bar. That would bring up results that are way too broad. Rather, you narrow in using more specifics.  Staying with this example, you might search “condos in Adams Morgan” or “townhouses in Arlington”. You may get even more narrow if your specifications are very clear.
4. Use Google Adwords Keyword Search Tool. This is a very helpful resource that allows you to gather data on keywords by volume, trends, competition, similar keywords, and suggests options for you to add to your list of keywords. It takes some of the guesswork out of picking keywords for your site and content.

We hope this information is helpful as you continue to refine your knowledge of digital marketing for real estate professionals. Please let us know if you have questions or would like some help to get the right SEO optimized site for your business.