How to Do Keyword Research for Your Real Estate SEO Strategy
When it comes to building a content strategy and writing blog content, a lot of agents have difficulty figuring out what to write about. Often, because it’s easiest, most will stick to writing about their listings or monthly real estate market trends and stats, but in most cases, that’s the wrong approach to take.
Why? Because your content will become outdated quickly.
Since your content will take a while to rank in search results (and since your long-term goal is to rank for a long time), it’s key that you write evergreen, quality content that will be relevant and still valuable for the searcher months (or even years) into the future.
But to meet those goals, the content you write should also be based on search results and search trends.
So how do you get your content to rank in search results, for the right keywords and keyphrases, so someone will actually find it organically?
While SEO and ranking your content in search can be a complex, technical topic with a lot of moving parts, it starts with understanding what people are actually searching and how often they’re searching it, and then structuring your content so that it actually has the chance to rank in the first place.
That’s where researching keyword and keyphrase topics comes in. Doing proper research, before you begin writing content, is an important part of building a long-term SEO strategy with high-ranking content that gets results.
★ Want to learn more about building a quality, evergreen content strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- Creating an Evergreen Real Estate Content Strategy
- Creating a People-Powered, People-First Content Strategy
- Optimizing Your Content for Humans (And Not Just for Search Engines)
Keyphrase research is important because it helps you determine, most importantly, if it’s worth it for you to take the time to write a specific piece of content because if you can’t get it to rank in search, or if no one is searching for the topic you’re writing about, there isn’t much point in writing in the first place.
Keyphrase research starts with using a professional, accurate keyword research tool, and while there are a lot out there, AHREFs is one of the better ones. If you decide to use a different keyword research tool, that’s totally fine too as they more or less all show the same type of information you need to do your keyphrase research.
★ You can access AHREFs keyphrase research tool right here.
In your keyword research tool, start by choosing your demographic area, and searching the topic you want to write about. For example: when is the best time to sell your home.
From there, you’ll see all of the applicable information you need to determine if it’s a good choice for your SEO and content strategy.
Keyphrase research has two main parts:
1. Researching Keyphrase Topic Ranking Difficulty
Depending on your strategy, and your skillset, understanding how difficult it will be to rank for a keyphrase should be a big part of your decision to try to rank for it or not.
In the keyword research tool, the main thing to look at is keyword difficulty. Keyword difficulty is typically shown as an overall score out of 100, with 100 being the most difficult (although, anything above 40 or so is usually considered “hard” to rank for).
The difficulty of the keyphrase should coincide with your skillset. If you’re just getting started with SEO, you should look easier opportunities, but if you have a strong strategy that’s getting resutls already in place, you can probably work towards ranking a more difficult keyphrase.
The second part of this step is to do an actual Google search for the keyphrase you’re researching. In the example above, you should do a Google search for” when is the best time to sell your home”, and take a look through the results.
What you see in the search results should factor into whether you use the keyphrase or not. Do you see a lot of other, well-written articles by real estate agents in your area? If so, combined with a high keyword difficulty, it might not be worth your time, so you can either adjust your keyphrase or come up with a new topic altogether. But if you don’t see a lot of other good content, ranking for that keyphrase, it could be a good opportunity (depending on the next step).
★ Want to learn more about building a successful SEO strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- The Three Components of a Successful Real Estate SEO Strategy
- Building a Successful Real Estate Off-Page SEO Strategy
- Why Building Trust is a Key Part of a Successful SEO Strategy
2. Researching Keyphrase Topic Search Volume
Just because you think something gets searched a lot, it doesn’t mean it actually does. That’s why understanding the search volume for your keyphrase is so important.
Search volume gives you the average number of searches, per month, in a specific demographic, for your keyphrase. That means that the search volume metric can help you decide if your keyphrase is worth taking the time to write about, based on whether your keyphrase gets enough searches to make it worth your time.
As a general rule, you’ll want to prioritize keyphrases that have a monthly search volume of at least 50, but if your keyphrase is focused more on long-tail, then sometimes fewer searches can still be worth writing content for if the result is more specific and more in line with exactly who and what you’re trying to target.
★ You can learn more about long-tail keywords in this blog post called: Building a Long-Tail Real Estate Keyword Strategy.
SEO Success Takes Planning
If you’re working towards building a strong SEO strategy as part of your overall digital marketing strategy, keyphrase research is key if you want to see success. After all, if your content won’t rank in search, either because it’s too competitive or because no one is searching it, it doesn’t make much sense to spend your time writing it.
Want to learn more about SEO and get more traffic to your website? Our SEO Strategy Building Guide is a mix of curated content and self-guided workbook that will help provide insight on how you can build and implement a modern SEO and overall search strategy.
