How do you know which keywords you should focus on and which keywords are going to make your phone ring with a prospective client? 
The keywords you choose to use on your blog and website should be determined by who you are speaking to through your blog and website. This is called your niche market.
Niching brings a better return on your investment of time and money than generalizing.
Let's put keywords into perspective. Different products and services require different types of keywords and the ones you choose should depend on the commercial value of those keywords.
The higher the price point of a product, the less prospects you need to get a good return on your keywords.
For instance: If you sell tshirts for $20 each on the internet the estimated profit on each of those tshirts is about $5. So in order for you to make $18,000 in one month selling those t-shirts online you would have to sell 3,600 tshirts each month. In this business you would not be able to go after just long tail keywords. It would never generate enough searches to get the sales you would need to get to your income goal. So you would need to find keywords that were more general and short tailed and then be able to funnel them into your site and convert them to sales.
But real estate is different. A lot of it depends on what your price point is for a sale in your market. If your typical sale gets you $30,000 in commission than you of course don't need to sell 3,600 houses in order to make money. One sale a year would warrant going after a long tail keyword that would generate one good prospect who turns into a sale. So in this case, your keywords would not even have to be on Google's radar screen.
The lower the price point you have in your market, the more houses you need to sell so the more keywords you will need to dominate.
The beauty of blogging is that more times than not you get found for the unintentional keywords that you did not purposely blog with. But you may also be in a market where the total of your long tail keywords does not garner enough traffic to convert to sales.
Each case, niche and market are different. The measuring stick is your phone. Is it ringing with enough prospects to make your blogging efforts pay off? If it is, then keep on doing what you are doing. If however, you are not getting the phone to ring it is highly likely it is because you are not blogging with the correct keywords for your market or niche.
With long tail keywords you can dominate an entire page one on Google. If you dominate 8 out of 10 spots on page one of google for a long tail keyword that would mean that you are getting the majority of the clicks. In many markets, that may just keep you busy closing sales.
Every time a listing prospect calls us from the internet I ask them what did they type in to the search box. People love to help so they will even use their back button to find their search query. 8 out of 10 of our listings that we get from Active Rain or our website are for terms that are long tail and that google says there is not enough search volume for. Yet, these folks are typing in these words. Google does not bring back terms with less than 12 searches a month for a term. We need less than that amount in our market to do a great business.So search is relative.
If your phone is not ringing than you need to revamp your keyword research and figure out what the people in your market or moving to your market type into the search engines to find the content you are ready to provide to them.
I will show you a case study with Eileen Hsu- Chinese Speaking Agent and Foreigner NY Condo Expert the week after next. She is getting a brand new wordpress site up and running and already is ranking high in the search engines for long tail keywords that she gets closed business from at the end of the day. I am really excited about her progress and how diligent she is in getting her content written and her site structured for SEO and for the searcher's experience. For more updates, subscribe to our Real Estate SEO TIPS here.
Copyright © By Katerina Gasset 2011*Finding The Right Keywords For Your Real Estate Blogs and Sites*
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