When it comes to marketing, many real estate agents try to be all things to all people, often with the end result being them marketing themselves to anyone and everyone, in huge geographical areas, without targeting anyone in particular.
But overall, that isn’t an effective strategy to adopt because it makes you and your seem business generic, and it also creates a lot of competition because you’re positioning yourself to compete with every agent in that area and demographic; and depending on what real estate market you’re in, that can be a lot of agents.
For example, if one of your search strategy goals is to rank online for terms like New York City real estate agent, or Chicago homes for sale, you’re immediately setting yourself up for a long, difficult path full of heavy competition (and probably disappointment); plus, you’d also missing out on a lot of easier to rank for opportunities that are more likely to get you the type of business you actually want.
A far more effective approach is to build out your search strategy with more specific, targeted niches in mind, which not only gives you more opportunities in your search strategy but also helps you to appear more specialized and more focused.
And a great way to do that is by building a long-tail real estate keyword strategy. Doing so enables you to build a search strategy that’s a lot more specific, but also allows you to attract the right types of leads, that are often ready to convert sooner.
A long-tail keyword strategy where you focus on displaying in search results for more specific, niche searches and audiences, with the goal of dominating them completely.
The idea is that because these long-tail niche searches may get fewer searches, they’re also less competitive, and often are easier to rank for; and the people doing these searches are often better leads because they’re looking for someone to solve a specific problem for them. If you build your strategy around those specific niches, and focus on providing answers to those problems, you’ll appear as an expert to that audience for that niche (and people will reach out to work with you as a result).
While there are a lot of different ways to do this, the best way to build it is into your content strategy, as part of your overall inbound marketing strategy.
★ Want to learn more about inbound marketing? Have a look at these posts:
- The Philosophy of Inbound Marketing, and Why it Works for Agents
- Building an Inbound Marketing Strategy to Get Higher Quality Leads
- Planning a Real Estate Lead Flow Through Inbound Marketing
The first step is to figure out where the best niche opportunities, primarily based on who your target audience is (which is who you work with now, who you want to work with in the future, and who you don’t want to work with) and identifying what questions they’re likely to be asking, based on those niches.
From there, the goal is to write high-quality content, authoritative, answer-based content that answers a specific question for someone.
The key here is that you need a lot of content, and it has to be well-written. In most cases, websites that have the most original, authoritative, valued-based content, that directly answers questions for people, also attracts the most people within that niche.
For example, let’s say you wanted to target divorce real estate transactions as one of your niches. Instead of focusing on building everything around “divorce real estate agent” you could build your content pillar based on the long-tail searches people are likely to make when they’re looking for help in this situation. If someone is going through a divorce and is doing related searches online, it’s unlikely they’re looking for the “top real estate agents”. Instead, it’s more likely that, early on, they’d be doing more emotional, question-based searches to get the information they need, which is where the long-tail keyword opportunities lay. For example, they might search for things like:
- Who keeps the house in a divorce?
- Do I need 1 agent or 2 to sell my house during a divorce?
- How do I sell my house during a divorce if my partner refuses?
- Or any other topic related to divorce and real estate…
★ Want to learn more about building a quality content strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- Writing Successful Real Estate Content that Converts
- Optimizing Your Content for Humans (And Not Just for Search Engines)
- How to Plan Content that Attracts and Engages
If you show up multiple times when someone is doing these types of searches, and you provide a valuable answer to a question for them, you’ve already helped them, and as a result, you and your brand started building trust with them and begun to prove yourself as an expert. And because of that, they’re more likely to reach out to you, for help with their transaction, in most cases without contacting anyone else. That’s where the value in establishing a niche and building a long-tail keyword strategy is.
And for real estate agents, there’s no shortage of niches. You can build a niche based on neighborhood, demographics, situation, type of transaction, or anything else that allows you to show yourself as an expert in a particular area to your target audience.
By building a long-tail keyword strategy, and focusing on showing up for searches that your target audience is looking for, helps you set a solid foundation to be able to prove yourself to be an expert to the people you really want to work with, and as a result, have them reach out to you for help with their next real estate transaction.
And more than that, the future of search engines supports this type of strategy. The Google algorithm is always advancing, and recent updates have made it even more clear that valuable, insightful, and helpful content is the way to go. When building your search strategy, you should almost think of it as ‘Answers Engine Optimization‘ where you influence Google to show your website for the super-specific searches that potential clients might have. Not only will this strategy put your site in front of the people who need to see it, but it will also improve overall search rankings, and future-proof your search strategy as search engines begin to incorporate more AI into the algorithm.
Want to get better, more qualified leads and build your authority? Our Inbound Marketing Guide is a walkthrough of the overall philosophy of inbound marketing, why it’s effective, and how you can build it into your own real estate marketing strategy to get better marketing results.
