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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

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.