Optimizing a real estate site for a Realtor® whose service area covers some suburbs near a large city can be especially challenging. With this article, I’ll share some insights on how I or Rich Blessing, the SEO consultant with whom many of my clients work, go about a selecting a keyphrase strategy for our clients’ sites. I’ll also talk about special approaches to choosing keyphrases to use when optimizing a site for a Realtor® who serves a suburban area.
The most natural target audience for many real estate websites is buyers who are relocating from some distance away. This type of buyer may be unfamiliar with your metro area, so the buyer will search keyphrases for the city itself instead of for its suburbs.
That works great for a Realtor® who, like my client Barbara Reeves, got started early with online marketing. Though Barbara is actually more likely to sell a buyer a home in one of Mobile, Alabama’s suburbs, since 2003 she has focused search engine optimization (SEO) efforts for her primary site directly on Mobile itself because those are the keyphrases people use to search for Mobile metro area homes most often. She was able to grab and hold #1 spots in Google search results for a wide variety of Mobile real estate keyphrases. Another reason this strategy works well for Barbara is that her MLS board’s listings cover both Mobile and its East Mobile Bay suburbs.
One of my clients serves both the Santa Cruz CA area and towns in San Francisco’s East Bay area, one of the main commuter areas for people who work in San Francisco. His situation is more difficult than Barbara’s. Because his MLS doesn’t cover San Francisco, it’s only logical for SEO efforts for his site to focus on towns in San Francisco’s East Bay area.
The graphic below shows you the average number of people who search the main San Francisco real estate keyphrases per month. When we start talking about the number who search East Bay keyphrases, you’ll appreciate the special challenge posed by my East Bay client’s market area.
I know from experience that to generate a healthy number of leads, a Realtor’s® site needs to get a minimum of around 3000 to 5000 visitors/month. And since research has shown that some 46% of all clicks go to the first organic listing in Google search results, I can see that getting this client’s site ranked #1 for “San Francisco real estate” would probably do the trick for this client if his site’s MLS listings covered San Francisco. They don’t and since realistically we’re too late to the Web party anyway to optimize for such competitive keyphrases, we’ll have to look to the East Bay suburbs for traffic.
I’ve uploaded a large graphic that will show you how I would approach choosing keyphrases to use while SEO’ing my client’s East Bay real estate site. Click this link, then click the graphic itself to make it display full size.
My first step was to type a list of keyphrases suggested by my client along with some ideas of my own into the “Find keywords” area of Google Adwords Keywords Tool.
Important!: After clicking “Search,” I chose “Exact” in the “Match Types” area of the left column.
Scroll down through my screen capture and you will see each of these keywords listed along with it competitiveness rating and Global Monthly Searches, the average number of searches on each keyphrase per month.
The first thing the numbers show me is that even though I know that San Francisco Bay Area people refer to the opposite side of San Francisco Bay as “the East Bay,” not many people use that term for real estate searches. (You may recall that I’ve written elsewhere that people tend to search more by city names than by names of geographic regions.)
First, I’ll ignore any keyphrases for which no data is shown, indicated by hyphens in the data columns. I’ll also ignore any that are so broad in meaning that optimizing for them might attract traffic uninterested in East Bay real estate, such as “East Bay,” “East Bay CA” and “California homes for sale.”
Then I’ll scan both the “Search Terms” and “Keyword Ideas” lookling for keyphrases that are not terribly competitive, as indicated by the green bar graphics. They are what my SEO guy Rich Blessing cals “low hanging fruit” and include “East Bay MLS,” and “Bay Area real estate.” These are indicated by pink checkmarks.
I’ve also put pink checkmarks beside some keyphrases that, even though they are more competitive, are a natural fit for the way I write bits of text that are critical to SEO — page title tags and page headlines. Optimizing for these keyphrases won’t require any extra effort. Examples include “East Bay Real Estate Listings” and “East Bay homes for Sale.”
The average number of searches for all the keyphrases with pink check marks totals 6104. Assuming we could get this site to #1 ranking for each of these keyphrases and that each #1 link will get 46% of searches on Google for that keyphrase, I calculate that the site could potentially get around 3000 visitors/month.
There’s no guarantee that this site will rank #1 for all these keyphrases, so assuming that it will get 3000 visitors/month may be risky. So I’ll keep expanding my search to find some keyphrases that might yield good traffic, indicating them with blue check marks. Some, like “Oakland real estate” are searched frequently enough that it might be worth biting the bullet and trying to get good ranking for them. I’ve marked these selections with blue checkmarks. I will continue to explore options by researching keyphrases for more of the towns within the client’s service area.
I’ve come to rely on “longtail” keyword search traffic on subdivision names to bring copious amounts of traffic to my clients’ sites. But, having worked with this client’s particular MLS before, I know that listing agents in his area rarely, if ever, indicate subdivision names. So optimizing for subdivision names isn’t an option.
I will continue to refine my list, consulting with my client to cut or add keyphrases to the list. For example, he might tell me that he doesn’t like driving as far as one town, or he especially likes showing homes in another. For practicality’s sake, I would try to confine the list to no more than two or three towns.
Once I’ve settled on a final list of perhaps 15-20 keyphrases, I I would use the keyphrases in certain spots in the HTML for pages within the website itself and would recommend:
- having an SEO copywriter write one or more pages optimized for each of the keyphrases
- having back-links created using these keyphrases as anchor text
As you can see, optimizing a site for a Realtor® who serves a number of different suburban town requires poses special challenges since searches for keyphrases for any single town are unlikely to yield high volumes of traffic.
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