Aaron Hoos

It doesn’t make much sense for someone to type in the word “real estate professional” or “REALTOR” and find your website or blog in the search results. If they’re in Dustytown, Australia and you’re in Wausau, Wisconsin, there’s not much you can do to help them.

So you need a plan to focus your search engine optimization on only your most likely prospects. So where do you start?

STEP 1: FIGURE OUT WHAT YOUR TARGET MARKET IS LOOKING FOR

Well, you first need to start by figuring out who your most likely prospects are. Are they people moving into town from out of town? Are they people buying or selling within town? Do you have an even more focused niche than that? (Hopefully you do).

Each of these groups is looking for something different.

If your target market is military families who are moving to Wausau, Wisconsin from elsewhere to work on the ultra-secret military base then they are searching the web for very different terms than if your target market is soccer moms and dads who are looking to sell their first home and upgrade because they have baby #3 on the way.

Figure out what your target market is looking for and the types of words they are using to search online.

STEP 2: GET THE SEARCH TERMS

Head over to Google’s Keyword Tool and type in some of those words into Google’s keyword search. In the example below, you see I’ve done that with the fairly generic term “Homes for sale Wausau Wisconsin”…

By the way: The key here is to combine an action verb — “buy home”, “sell home”, “list home”, “find home” — with a location — in this case “Wausau Wisconsin”. Don’t forget to try mixing words like “buy house” instead of “buy home” and also try the short form of your state instead of the full name (or, drop the state altogether and see what the results are).

When you click the Search button you get the result of your search…

And just below that, you get a big list of ideas that are similar to the terms you’ve written…

This list is useful because it shows you related keywords that people are searching for that you might be able to use.

Find a few that you want to focus on — somewhere between 3 and 6 keywords. If you help people buy AND list homes then consider focusing on 3 buying-specific keywords and 3 listing-specific keywords.

STEP 3: USE THOSE SEARCH TERMS EVERYWHERE

You’ve found the terms that your clients are looking for. Now it’s time to use those search terms everywhere. Use them in the following places:

• In your website domain name
• In your website title and subtitle
• In the title of your blog posts and web pages
• In your article marketing (in the title of the article and in the text)
• In your press releases
• In the title of your ebooks
• In the title of your print book
• As the name of your ezine
• In the title of your Storify locally-focused stories
• In your Twitter description
• … and anywhere else that you put online and offline

Mix and match them. Pepper them throughout your work. “Own” the words by making your brand synonymous with those words.

When someone wants to find something on Google (or on some other search engine), they type a word or a phrase into the search engine and they get a list of websites that the search engine feels is relevant to that word or phrase.

For example, I’ve searched “Orlando real estate agent” to get a list of real estate agents in and around Orlando.

Websites don’t just appear by magic in those search results.

Search engines scan all websites to know what each website is about. Then the search engine files the site appropriately so that it only appears in search results when specific words or phrases are typed in. A website about Orlando real estate professionals should appear when someone searches with words relating to Orlando and to real estate agents. Search engines call these words and phrases “keywords“.

Search engines just use robots to scan websites, not real people. So these robots just look at all the lines of code that make up your site and they make their best robotic guess about what your website is talking about. They might do a pretty good job but they might not file you exactly where you want your site to show up.

For example, if people are Googling a phrase like “Buy a home in Orlando”, and you want your website to show up when someone searches that phrase, you need to build your website in such a way that it tells the search engine robots that your site is all about that phrase.

If you haven’t used the right combination of words, the robots won’t understand where to file your site. You need to be specific about the keywords that you want your website to be searchable for or your site will end up appearing lower down in searches or for completely different phrases.

Example: Let’s say that you are a real estate agent in the nice, friendly town of Sunnyville. If your clients use the phrase “Sunnyville real estate agent” when they’re searching for a real estate professional in Sunnyville, you will probably want to use that keyword on your website so the search engine robots will know that you want to your website to be found when someone searches that phrase.

If you don’t use that exact phrase in your website (maybe you use “real estate agent” and “Sunnyville” elsewhere on your site), but one of your competitors uses the exact phrase “Sunnyville real estate agent”, the robot that scans their site will file them higher on the list than you. That means your competitor will appear higher in the search engine results than you when a potential client types in “Sunnyville real estate agent” into the search engine.

So your first job is to figure out what keywords you want your website to be searchable for. I’ll show you how to do that in tomorrow’s blog post. Once you’ve discovered what keywords you want your website to be searchable for, the next thing you have to do is strategically use those keywords so that the search engine robots can easily understand what your site is all about, and so the robots can file you correctly.

Your website can potentially reach a massive global audience. But if you’re an accountant, you’re not so concerned about website visitor from the other side of the world. Rather, you’d prefer website visitors from the other side of the street! Your website needs to reach a local audience.

In this video, I show accountants how to make one simple tweak on their website to help them get more local traffic to their website.