Switching Your SEO Strategy from Keyword Matching to Topic Ownership to Get Better Leads
In the past few years, a lot has changed in what it takes to build, and see success from, your SEO strategy, primarily because the way people search and get answers has changed so much.
While people still use traditional search results consistently (and will into the future), they also use LLMs and AI to get the answers to questions, so to see SEO success, your strategy must focus on being found everywhere that your target audience is looking, whenever, wherever, and however they’re searching.
That’s where building your search strategy around complete topic ownership, rather than keyword matching, comes in.
Topic ownership involves positioning your marketing and content strategy to show you as the expert and online authority for a specific topic by consistently showing up in a wide amount of search results, rather than focusing on showing up for a few specific keywords or keyphrases.
Why is ranking for keywords and keyphrases less important? One of the reasons is because of the eventual adoption of more personalized search results.
For example, right now, if 5 different people search the same question, they more or less get the same results, but with the personalization of search results, that changes – and that’s especially true when it comes to AI search results.
The more that AI search engines learn about the people performing the search, the more they adjust search results for that individual. Meaning, if 5 different people search the same topics in AI search results, they’re more likely to get different search results based on who they are and what searches they’ve done in the past (and that’s likely to become more prominent into the future).
★ Want to learn more about planning for AI search? Have a look at these posts:
- Building a Real Estate Online Presence Strategy to Get Found in LLMs (like ChatGPT)
- Building a Successful SEO Strategy for AI Search Results
- Pivoting Your Website Content Strategy to See More Success in AI Search Results
- Building an Answers Engine Optimization (AEO) Strategy for AI
By focusing on complete topic ownership, you’ll be working towards owning (and dominating) an entire topic, rather than a specific keyword, which gives you more opportunities to display in search at the right time and for the right reasons, no matter who searches it or where they search it.
Nowadays, Google (and other search engines) are incredibly smart, complex, and completely capable of understanding exactly what you and your brand are all about, so by focusing on complete ownership of a topic, you have an increased chance of search engines seeing you as an authority on that topic, and continually better positioning you in search as a result of that.
When creating a topic ownership strategy, the best place to focus your efforts is on a specific situation, and in real estate, there’s no shortage of options available to you. For example, you could focus on:
- Young families that are buying their first single-family home.
- People that are trying to navigate separation, divorce, and sale of the family home in a difficult time.
- Professionals that are relocating to your area from a different part of the country.
- The list goes on…
A solid topic ownership strategy is 2 parts:
- Content Strategy: planning and writing all of the content around your topic.
- SEO Optimization: optimizing all of your content to best position it to display in search results.
★ Both of these are fairly complex topics, but if you want to explore it more, you can click right here to learn about content strategy, and click right here to learn about SEO optimization.
And the 2 are equally important – it’s not enough to just write a lot of content about a specific topic if you haven’t built a plan around how search engines will find it and consistently show it in search results.
Topic ownership also works because it helps you build a strategy that attracts and engages your target audience at every stage of their journey from contact to contract.
For example, you can you can easily build out your content strategy to ensure it covers people that are in the early interest phase, in the early decision making phase, and in the ready to make a decision phase, which will allow you to completely dominate all aspects of the topic you’re working to take ownership of.
★ Want to learn more about building a high-quality content strategy that performs well in search? Have a look at these posts:
- Creating a People-Powered, People-First Content Strategy
- Creating an Evergreen Real Estate Content Strategy
- Does Using AI-Generated Content Negatively Affect Your SEO Strategy?
- Optimizing Your Content for Humans (And Not Just for Search Engines)
- Writing Successful Real Estate Content that Converts
Nowadays, if you want to build a modern SEO strategy that sets you up for success now and in the future, you have to move beyond just looking at where your website ranks for specific keywords and keyphrases, otherwise, and instead, focus on complete topic ownership, otherwise, you run the risk of losing your position, and ultimately more leads, as a result.
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.
