Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
If you're in the real estate business, you know how important it is to distinguish yourself from your competitors. The website for your business is the perfect place to begin that process, but there's a lot of competition out there -- you've got to ensure that people find your Realtor site first before anyone else's.
This is why you need to ensure your real estate website uses the right language to attract the attention of prospective clients. The most effective way to do this is to ensure your website is armed with the right keywords that will show up in user searches on Google, Bing, and other search engines. Here's a list of ten of the most useful keywords to boost your online reach and why these keywords are effective.
If you're developing a keyword strategy for your real estate website, a good first place to start is to discover the most popular trending keywords. In 2017, for instance, the Google Keyword Planner found that "houses for sale", "real estate", and "homes for sale" were the three most often searched keywords by month. This means that, if you include these keywords in your real estate website, your website is likely to appear in these search results as well.
Of course, this is a double-edged sword. The most popular searches return the most number of results -- "houses for sale" alone was searched close to 670,000 on average per month in 2017. It's likely that your site will still be lost in the crowd, even if you do ensure these three high-popularity keywords are included.
Using the most common keywords, as discussed above, is a good start but suffers from not being unique enough. That's why it's important to also include subtly different versions of the keyword to account for users who might either spell things differently or use a different turn of phrase.
For example, a number of people use plural nouns when using search engines, but a good proportion of others might not. That means that while "home for sale" and "homes for sale" look practically identical, they're not when it comes to search engine results. The same goes for "house for sale" and "houses for sale".
This is where the next step in designing effective real estate keywords comes in. Adding specificity to these first three keywords to create new ones will narrow search parameters and make it much more likely you're going to come out on top, or at least on the first page of a typical search engine's results. In this case, we're talking about targeting the type of people you're looking for as clients.
Does your agency deal primarily in townhouses? Alter the above keywords by changing them to reflect that, such as "townhouses for sale". Do you specialize in a specific neighborhood? Adding to a keyword to create "houses for sale in Staten Island", "real estate in Brooklyn" or "homes for sale in Queens" to filter even further. Get even more specific by combining both traits in a single, long-tail keyword, such as "two-story homes for sale in Park Slope". Just make sure the content on your website matches those keywords!
Still scratching your head? Here's a list of those ten keywords. Remember: you'll need to fill in the blanks for your neighborhood and specialty for them to be the most effective!
