Planning for How Your Audience Searches For You (and Finds You) Online
When it comes to planning a search strategy for their website, most agents make the mistake of creating their strategy around what they’d search themselves rather than what people are actually searching. Agents often say: I wouldn’t search that way. Or, they ask a handful of people what they would search, and based their entire strategy around that, which usually doesn’t work out because it’s often incorrect.
The fact is, most agents guess what their target audience is searching without much thought into into understanding any of the information around how they actually search for answers to questions.
And that isn’t effective because, in most cases, agents guess incorrectly and end up positioning their search strategy around topics that either get very few searches or are highly competitive and very difficult to rank for without a lot of time, experience, and patience.
Planning a successful search strategy that actually brings in traffic, leads, and conversions, means having a solid understanding of exactly what your audience is searching for, where they’re searching for it, and how they’re searching for – without that as part of your plan, you won’t have a successful search strategy.
Building out a solid search strategy that gets results, based on what your target audience is searching for, is made up of 2 main steps:
1. Understanding the When and What of Their Search
The first step is to understand when and what your target audience is searching for something, which is based on the available data, analytics, and research, not by guessing.
That means you should have a solid understanding of all of the technical information around the search, including what specifically is being searched, how often it displays in search, how many searches it actually gets in your market, how competitive it is to work towards ranking, and many other technical details that will help you determine if it’s worth the time and effort it will take for you to rank.
And while if you’re not technical, that can be difficult to do, but there are a lot of basic, free tools online that can help with your research. For example, a good place to start is with AHREFs’ free keyword tool: www.ahrefs.com/keyword-generator.
If you plan to do a lot of keyword research, it might be worth it for you to upgrade to their paid version, but at a basic level, the free version will give you some general information, like keyword density and keyword volume, which is better than not doing any research at all.
You can also use Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, WordStream, or a combination of all of them, depending on how thorough you want to be in your research.
Regardless of how you do it, it’s important to do the initial research around the what and when of your target audience’s search, instead of relying on guessing, if you want to put together a search strategy that has the best chance of showing up when your target audience is actually searching.
★ Want to learn more about doing research for your SEO strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- Building a Long-Tail Real Estate Keyword Strategy
- How to Do Keyword Research for Your Real Estate SEO Strategy
- How to Build an Online Presence Strategy for Your Real Estate Brand
- How Long Does it Take to Build a Successful Real Estate SEO Strategy?
2. Understanding the Who and Why of Their Search
The second step is to understand who and why your target audience is searching for something, which is based on their emotion, their situation, and the psychology of their search.
This step doesn’t have anything to do with actual technical research or data, but rather, focusing on putting yourself in the exact situation of your target audience doing a search, and working towards understanding the who and why of their search.
This starts by having a deep understanding of who your target audience is, and from there, you have to work towards deeply understanding all of the parameters around their emotional search, and putting yourself in their situation, and ultimately, understanding why they would search for something.
For example, if one of your target audiences is people that are selling their parent’s home after they pass away, that’s going to be a deeply emotional search.
Will someone just search for the top agent in their area to help sell the home? It’s unlikely, especially if they’re early on in the process. They’re far more likely to do emotional based searches to get information about what to do first. For example, they might search:
- First things to do when selling parents home
- How to declutter parents home
- How to get parents home ready for sale
And if you show up early in those searches, you create an opportunity to build trust with someone because you’ve provided some initial, helpful information, and that’s one step closer to them reaching out to you once they are ready to take the first steps around selling.
From there, the key to planning for the why and when of their search is to build complete topic ownership around every thing they might search so that you can dominate the search results, and continually show up as an authority on being knowledgeable about and helping someone through that difficult time in their lives.
★ Want to learn more about understanding emotion in search? Have a look at these posts:
- Creating a Content Strategy Based On Emotional Search (To Get Better Leads)
- The Benefits of Building a Long-Form Real Estate Content Strategy
- Creating a Relevant Traffic Strategy for Your Real Estate Website
Balance Between the Two
A solid search strategy that brings in traffic, conversions, and leads, starts by understanding everything around when, why, what, and ultimately, how, your target audience is searching online. If you don’t consider all of those factors, you won’t be able to build a plan that gets continued, consistent results.
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.
