Use this link to see all the posts in this series: Do-It-Yourself SEO. 

SELECTING KEYWORD PHRASES

What’s the Big Deal About Selecting Keywords?

Selecting keyword phrases is to SEO as selecting a location is to a retail store.

Let’s say that you were going to build a new greeting card store in your town.   You got plans for the store, you located a building site, built the store and stocked it with the widest range of greeting cards possible to meet any need .  Then, you waited for the customers to come flocking in.  But, no one visited your store.  Why not?

Well, the one thing you forgot to do was figure out how much traffic was on the road leading to your store.  Too late, you discovered that while you got a great deal on the building site, very few cars passed by your store.  And, the location was too far out of town for people to make a special trip just to purchase a greeting card.

You can do the same thing to your website if you don’t choose the right keyword phrases.  As was discussed in the series on Content Mistakes, the biggest mistake you can make when selecting keywords is to use common sense.

You can’t use keyword phrases that you would use to find homes in your area.  You must use phrases that the majority of other people use to find homes in your area.

How to Research Keywords

How can you figure out which keyword phrases other people use to find homes in your area?  The most effective way to do that is to use one of the online tools that gather information from a variety of search engines.  There are two popular paid research tools.

• WordTracker.com – Lowest cost subscription $30 for one week
• KeywordDiscovery.com – Lowest cost subscription $70 for one month

These tools will help you identify the number of searches done on a particular term, the competition for that term (the number of other websites that optimize for the term), and suggestions for related keywords.

There are also some free online tools that provide varying degrees of accuracy.  Here are just a few:

• Digital Point
• Yahoo
• Google

How to Select Keywords

The most commonly used search terms for real estate are typically CITY Real Estate and CITY Homes for Sale.  I’ve found that people typically search by the name of the city they want to live in.  They’re less likely to search by County or State.  And, that makes sense to me.   Counties are usually fairly large places and people typically don’t want to live anywhere in a county.

So, you might think that the best keyword would be City Real Estate.  But, it depends on what you mean by best.  My definition of best goes something like this:

The keyword phrase that 1) attracts the most targeted traffic, and 2) has the best balance between the amount of usage and the amount of competition.

Let’s take Atlanta as an example.  The search term Atlanta Real Estate is probably the most used search term in my area, but it also has the highest level of competition.  In addition, metro Atlanta covers a lot of territory.  Ranking for Atlanta Real Estate would take time, effort and expense.  It would be a great SEO accomplishment.  However, it wouldn’t attract very targeted traffic.

So, really think about what you want to accomplish with your website.  If your website and domain name are new, you already know that it will take longer to rank in the search engines.  If you want to generate traffic as quickly as possible, it might make more sense to optimize for a term that is very targeted and has a good balance between usage and competition.

If ranking for the highest usage term in your area is a good business decision, you can include that term in your list of keyword phrases, but even then you may want to optimize your home page for a less competitive term to get the quickest results, then work on the most competitive keyword over time.

Look for Keyword Gems

Researching related keywords can sometimes identify what I call Keyword Gems.  To me, a Keyword Gem is a term that has almost as much usage as the main keyword in your area, but much less competition.  For example, sometimes just putting the two-letter state designation in the phrase will make a big difference.

When you find a keyword like CITY ST Real Estate where the usage is 90% of the main keyword, but the competition is 50% of the main keyword, you know you’ve got a real gem!