Web Site Design and Development

For many types of web site promotion campaigns, it’s very important to pick the right keywords to target. This is true whether your web site deals with real estate or not, so let’s take the general case first. Any web site owner wants to target keywords that a buyer will be likely to search for, and the more specific the better. You want to include the keywords that a likely buyer will select, and, believe it or not, you also want to exclude some keyword combinations, too. If you’re selling shoes and the user is searching for “brake shoes”, for example, chances are that that’s not a click you want to pay for. The matching options of both Yahoo Sponsored Search (formerly Overture) and Google Adwords let you specify such combinations to exclude.

In the specific case of real estate web sites, finding the right keywords to target is straightforward. We recommend making two lists. The first is a list of geographical areas near you. For Oakland, for example, one might choose Oakland, Berkeley, Alameda, Hayward, Fremont and the like. The second list always starts with “real estate” and then gets into synonyms and special types of real estate. So this list might include “real estate, homes, land, luxury homes, condos, duplexes, townhomes, town homes, starter homes, investment properties” etc. etc. You might also include in the second list such terms as “first time buyer, home loan, mortgage, relocation” etc. Your keyword choices then include a word from the first list plus a word from the second, so if each list includes ten items, you end up with 100 keyword combinations.

Alright, that’s fine, but which keywords do you either bid on (pay per click) or optimize your site for (organic search results)? Choosing which keywords to target is a more time consuming process. You want to strike a balance between keywords that get lots of clicks, and keywords that are relatively inexpensive or have low competition. For example, in general, “Bigtown Real Estate” is going to be the most searched keyword, but that means that it also will be the one with the most competition. On the other hand, “Smalltown condos” may cost much less per click, but may not bring you enough visitors.

High competition keywords mean more work to optimize your site for the keyword if you’re talking about search engine optimization. If you’re doing pay-per-click, it typically means a higher bid to achieve the same position.

A great free search tool for keyword research is Yahoo’s keyword selection tool. Take some of the 100 keywords you came up with from your list above, and enter them here. For each keyword, jot down the resulting numbers, “5232″ or “523″, for example. Overture is sometimes criticized for having misleading numbers, but we really don’t care about absolute numbers so much as relative traffic. In the contrived example above, for instance, clearly one keyword gets about 10 times as much traffic as the other.

By understanding how much traffic you can expect from a given keyword, you’ll be able to spot whatever “bargains” may be lurking in the existing bids for these keywords. Keywords priced low are great, but keywords priced low but that offer a moderate amount of traffic are even better.

Once you’ve gleaned what you can from the Yahoo Keyword tool, you may also want to investigate the Wordtracker paid keyword database. Wordtracker offers more tools for doing keyword research, and their database is compiled from several different “metacrawlers” (search engines that compile results from different search engines), so the results have somewhat more broad appeal than the Overture results.

Of course, having the right keywords is only half the battle — you also want to send your visitors to a page that’s relevant to what they’re searching for. Landing page creation is a whole different branch of the art. In the months ahead we may have a product offering that will facilitate this, or at minimum we will have some more articles about this subject.