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For a short time I had a bit of a widget installed here that would let me chat with people.  One gentleman who struck up a conversation was in the beginning phases of writing a blog for San Jose Real Estate.  I felt a fair bit of sympathy for him, since it seemed to me he definitely had his work cut out for him.  I had researched San Jose as a possible topic of a real estate web site some time ago, and ended up rejecting it as being too ambitious.

New Projects, Research Main Keywords

I believe that the first ideal time when you absolutely must do keyword research is when launching a new web site or blog.  Some keywords are simply far too competitive.  For example, querying “intitle:San Jose Real Estate” gives over 7 million results!  By just looking at some of the nearby areas we may be able to come up with something much more manageable.  The query “intitle:Santa Clara real estate”, for example, yields a far less daunting 241,000 results.  Sure, you’d still have your work cut out for you to compete for that keyword, but by comparison, going after San Jose is rather like getting into a prize fight with a heavyweight champ.

Sure, you can change your title later on, but the reason it’s so important to do keyword research at the outset of a project is that if you’re writing good content and networking with your peers like you should, chances are good you’re going to start attracting a few incoming links to your blog, and chances are a few of these folks will use the title in their link text — which is a good thing (unless you overdo it).  So you want to try to get it right up front.

Ongoing Projects — Strive For Depth of Focus

The other best time to do real estate keyword research besides whenever you’re starting a new project is really three ideal times in one:  morning, noon and night!  Well, OK, maybe not night — you do have to save some time for watching Stephen Colbert.  My point is, you have an opportunity with every article you write to capture a topic that a reader may be interested in.  One of my agents, Purva Brown, recently discovered the power of this when she got a client from an article she wrote about Crosswoods Condos.  Such “obscure” keywords are often called “long tail” search keywords (after the shape of the curve drawn by the many thousands of non-core keywords buyers may reach your site for).  These long-tail keywords have several important characteristics:

• There is less competition for them.  This means an article about such a topic has a good chance of getting a high placement on the search engines.
• There are fewer people searching for them (individually).  Because of this, they’re inappropriate as the focus of a whole web site, but perfect for a single article.
• Collectively, they can account for a huge portion of your site’s traffic.

Because there are fewer people searching for long tail keywords, they’re difficult or impossible to turn up with traditional key word suggestion tools like Wordtracker (see also their free keyword tool) or Overture. 

However, brainstorming long tail keywords works quite well.  Think about how people search for homes, and where they might want to live.  Try combinations of:

• Subdivision names.
• Neighborhood names. 
• Parks or other recreation facilities.  Sports arenas?  Theaters?
• Schools or school districts.
• Names of Builders.
• Other local place names.

Often just adding “real estate” to your main place name will do the trick, but for things like school districts you might even try suggesting a radius.  “Homes near Mount Vernon High School”  or the like.

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Selecting Real Estate Keywords