How to Perform Keyword Research for Real Estate Agents

This is the first stop on your real estate search optimization journey. Keyword Research for Real Estate Agents is an essential part of finding your audiences and learning about your competitors. First, you need to learn how to perform keywords research, take advantage of longtail keywords, and find out what you are up against (competition).

Keywords: phrases (terms) that people search for. A term that got you here could be “SEO for real estate agents,” or “SEO for real estate investors.”

Keywords can be single words or they can be phrases, also known as longtail keywords. In this stage in the SEO game, you need to make friends with longtail keywords. They are your biggest allies. Don’t count out short tail keywords though. They are extremely important as well.

Short tail examples: “real estate agent,” “real estate SEO,” “homes for sale,” “new homes.”

Long-tail keyword examples: “Where can I find a real estate agent near me?” “How to conduct real estate search engine optimization?” or “Who is the best real estate agent in Tennessee?”

Performing Keyword Research for Real Estate Agents

This is the beginning of the discovery process. This is where you find out what you need to do for your client or yourself depending on why you were looking into SEO for real estate agents.  if you don’t do this right you are going to waste a lot of time. This makes things quick and easy. It doesn’t take as long as most people think (shhh, that’s a secret).

It’s not just about going over the data in finding keywords. It’s also about using the data to find patterns and turn that data into information – which you can use to bring people to your site. The right people at the right time.

The Basics of Keyword Research for Real Estate Agents

First off you want to find keywords to target. This is your starting point and important but don’t sweat it because it’s not that hard. But you do need to be careful and see what your competitors are doing. That way you can see what’s working for other SEO for real estate companies, which is basically proof-of-concept.

If you can apply the same technique and you see you have a chance of beating them in the rankings you should do it.  Likewise, there are some keywords you just can’t rank for. You’re not going to be able to compete with a whale-like Amazon or Realtor.com who’s getting billions of people coming. So let’s get it started.

SEO for Realtors: Keyword Research in Action

Time-saving tools make all the difference. So there are a few examples we have that you can try out.  If you don’t have any budget or you just want to try stuff out you can use all of these tools for free. The thing is you might want more.

It’s not uncommon for people to sign up for free trials to get full access and then cancel before it’s time to pay. If you wanted to you could do this over and over because there are dozens and dozens of different tools that are great for keyword research and the other SEO for realtors related-tasks.

SEMrush: SEO for Real Estate Agents

SemRush has a free version, they offer free trials but sometimes they don’t. You can sign up for a free account and get started. The free version is quite useful. You may not need a full account and less you have multiple clients to work for.

Use the keyword tool to check out keywords. As you can see I searched for “SEO for real estate agent.” One thing I should mention. If you want bulk tracking for multiple words you need to take the trial or sign up for a subscription. This allows you to search for multiple keywords rather than just one term.

Hit the analyze button to see the results page. It gives you a lot of information here, it shows you variations of your keyword, related keywords, questions related to those keywords. So if you look at the keyword variation you’ll see that it has a monthly volume of 260, and the difficulty is 48%.

A term with those stats may be good to target but it may not, it depends on what your competitors are doing and if you can rank. Another one below is “SEO services for real estate agents.” That looks like a good prospect.

The results page also includes questions that people are searching for. Even if there is no monthly volume, it doesn’t necessarily mean that people aren’t searching for it or people won’t be searching for it soon. It just means there’s no data on it. it might not be a safe bet but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try it. Best practices are solid but you have to go beyond them to beat your competitors.

Competitor Research

You need to see what other real estate SEO services marketers are doing to see where your opportunities are and where they aren’t. The results vary based on your location as well but for the most part, local SEO for real estate agents is a good way to find out what kind of content is working for your direct competitors.

Note: it’s not all about just keywords though, backlinks have a huge influence on whether a site shows up on the first page or not. We talk more about back blinks in Backlinking 101.

All right let’s get it started. So we search for the keywords “real estate agent search optimization” and up pops the results.

These are some of the top pages. If you want to see what kind of content is doing well, check some of them out. Now let’s talk about what kind of content to publish.

More Competitor Research

If you are trying to rank keywords for a real estate agent or a blog about real estate, you will want to see how others are doing it. We are going to try SEMrush again but this time, to research one of the top sites for the keyword “real estate agent in Rochester NY.”

Go to the Domain Overview Tool and enter the URL.

We are only searching in the US and for organic traffic. You can see there are over 59K backlinks. That means 59K links are pointing to the site. Below shows more information about their position in the results pages.

As you can see researching keywords makes a big difference. Real Estate Agents who take the time and effort to research keywords that target the home buyers and sellers they are trying to reach will have a considerable advantage over the competition.