Not too long ago I got a call from a very large franchise real estate company with a concern that I hear too often, “Our own agents are ‘stealing’ all our leads on the Internet. What do we do?” As is typical with large real estate companies and franchises, they are trying to be all things to all people. They cover such wide metropolitan areas, and, in many cases, they cross state boundaries, that they get crowded out by their agents who are more nimble and use more targeted approaches to getting found.
The Target Concept
The Target Concept is simple: stop shooting one arrow at the target, hoping to hit the bullseye, rather, shoot as many arrows as you can at the target and try to get as many groupings as close to the bullseye as possible. In other words, don’t try to get found by those tremendously competitive keyword phrases like “Denver real estate,” but by several minor keyword phrases that you can get on the first page of the search engines.
This is one of the few industries where the “worker” can actually take advantage of the boss by being smarter and more nimble. Try searches in your area for “Location real estate” and see how many of the major players are on the first page. I’ll bet there are a bunch. Now, try more targeted keyword phrases like “Location luxury homes for sale,” “short sale Location condos,” or “Location foreclosure properties.” You’ll find very few of the major players here, because they can’t cover it all.
Make Your Title STOP IT!
Did you know that there are many common words that the major search engines don’t even index because they are so common? I’m talking about more than words like “a”, “the”, and “my”. I’m also talking about numbers and words like “therefore”, “somewhat”, “Microsoft”, etc.
Why is this important to know? Because, “It’s in your title, Stupid”
Your title is one of the most important parts of your website. When you putgood keyword phrases into your title, they get picked up by those that are typing in a search term in any random order. In other words, your title of “My Denver Real Estate and Luxury Homes For Sale” fits perfectly with at least 30 different search phrases including “All home sales in the Denver real estate area.” Even though the words “all”, “in”, “the”, and “area” are not even in the title, they are “stop words” and not seen by the search engines. Further, the words “home” and “sales” can be interchanged with their plural/singular counterparts.
Target Your Prospect Searches
So, how do you know what your best keyword search terms are? Well, it would be helpful to know what your prospects are typing into the major search engines, and, of course, the largest search engine is Google. Google is highly invested in knowing how many people are searching what phrases. Best of all, they share this information with the public. This tool, called Google Adwords Keyword Tool is free and will concoct all sort of various keyword search just by putting in simple searches like “Denver real estate.”
Focus on these effective targeted keyword phrases, and you will be taking out those big, old, beasty lions in no time!
