How to Find Keywords for Your Real Estate Business Blog

For real estate businesses, getting more clients is the only way to grow. You can get clients in a number of ways in this industry, but one of the most important ways is by having people find your website and contact you.

But how, exactly, do you make that happen? By ranking your site for important real estate keywords that your ideal clients are actually searching online.

Keywords are the basis of all SEO, and finding the right keywords and optimizing your site for them can pay off in a big way for years. That’s why so many of your competitors are already doing SEO or paying someone to do it for them. 

If you’re interested in getting more clients online, you have to figure out which keywords your real estate website should rank for. In this post, we tell you how to do that. 

To rank for keywords relevant to your real estate blog, you have to have great content. Great content is what we do at Hire a Writer. Our SEO copywriters will find high-value real estate keywords and create amazing content that will rank for them. Contact us to learn more.

Why Do SEO Keywords Matter for Real Estate Websites?

First, why should you care about finding keywords in the first place? It’s a fair question, but it has an easy answer. Ranking your site for the right real estate keywords is one of the most effective inbound marketing strategies. That’s because people who are interested in working with a real estate professional often begin their search online.

If you publish content on your real estate website without a strong keyword strategy, you’re flying blind. You may get lucky and accidentally rank for a valuable keyword, but when the competition is as cutthroat as real estate can be, that’s not likely. 

With the right real estate keywords and the perfect content strategy, however, you can get your site ranking for those keywords and get more clients online.

What Makes a Keyword ‘Good’ for a Real Estate Website?

How do you know when you’ve found a good keyword for your real estate blog? Pretty much anything can be a keyword, but you need to look for a few key qualities to ensure you’re picking the right ones:

• It’s relevant to your business. The first and potentially most important criterion for any real estate keyword is relevance. Any keyword you go after should be relevant to your business. If you only operate in a certain city but find a possible keyword that contains a nearby city where you don’t do business, that keyword is irrelevant. 
• It has search volume. Search volume refers to the average number of times the exact keyword is searched online every month. There’s no reason to target a keyword that no one is searching for, and as a general rule, the higher the search volume, the better. Many free and paid SEO tools will give you search volume estimates. You can also use Google Keyword Planner to find search volume.
• It is reasonably competitive. Some keywords have an unbelievably high search volume, and seeing that high number may get you excited. But take a second to actually search the keyword and see who is currently ranking for it. If the entire first two pages of results are mega firms with million-dollar SEO budgets, it could take you years to rank for that keyword. It’s often worth your time to look for a less competitive — but still relevant — keyword to target.

5 Ways to Find Real Estate Keywords

With all of that in mind, let’s jump into the best ways to find SEO keywords for real estate businesses. There are keyword research methods that don’t make an appearance on this list, but the following five methods are the simplest and most likely to yield good results.

1. Try Location and Service Keywords

Think about the words that best describe what your business does. If, for example, you are a realtor in Miami, what would someone local search for if they were looking for a business like yours? They would probably start with the location and the service they need. Here’s what that would probably look like:

• Miami realtors

It’s pretty simple, but it’s often effective. That example, for the record, gets searched around 14,800 times every month. 

Even smaller cities will have pretty significant search volume for real estate keywords like that. For example, the small Miami suburb of North Bay Village has a population of only 8,161 people, but the keyword “North Bay Village realtors” has a search volume of 50. That’s a lot smaller, but if you were a North Bay Village realty website that ranked at No. 1 for that term, you could get 50 quality leads from that on a monthly basis.

2. Check People Also Ask

When you enter a search term into Google and scan through the results, you will usually see a small box labeled “People Also Ask.” The items in this box are questions related to what you just searched that people often search on Google. In other words, these are great potential real estate keywords to go after.

Try it out: search “Portland homes for sale,” and scroll down to the People Also Ask box. The questions that populate here change over time, but as of the time of this writing, one of them is as follows: “Is Portland a good place to buy a home?”

Imagine if your website was ranking at No. 1 for that exact question. You would get the attention of potentially hundreds of people who are thinking about moving to Portland and buying a home. That’s some marketing that’s way more targeted than a billboard or TV commercial.

3. Look at Related Searches

Much like the People Also Ask box, the related searches listed at the bottom of the search engine results page (SERP) show up because people are searching for them and Google thinks those keywords are related to what you’re searching. 

Any time a relevant keyword is getting searched for, you have a good candidate for your list of real estate keywords. Sticking with the “Portland homes for sale” keyword example, here are a few of the related searches listed at the bottom of that SERP:

• Houses for sale in Portland under 300K
• Northeast Portland homes for sale
• Southeast Portland homes for sale

Those are all great candidates, and they’re just from one quick Google search.

4. Use Answer the Public

Answer the Public is an incredibly popular tool among bloggers and SEO professionals. It uses autocomplete data from popular search engines to show you dozens of questions people are searching for in relation to the base words you enter.

You can be reasonably confident that any relevant question keyword that shows up in Answer the Public has some search volume behind it. It only takes seconds, and it can provide a wealth of real estate keyword possibilities. Oh, and it’s free.

5. See What Your Competitors Are Ranking For

If your competitors are already blogging regularly and getting a lot of clients online, you should probably check out the keywords they are currently ranking for. You can get an idea of the keywords they’re targeting by reading the content on their website, but to actually see which keywords they are ranking for, you will need to use an SEO tool.

With tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs and Moz, you can plug your competitors’ websites in and get a list of every keyword they are ranking for in seconds. If your competitors are ranking for a keyword and it’s relevant to your firm, too, you can add that keyword to your list. 

Most keyword research tools offer some kind of free trial, but to use them over the long term, you will probably have to pay for them. Still, when you use them correctly, they can pay for themselves many times over.

Save Time and Get More Clients with Hire a Writer

For busy real estate professionals, finding the time it takes to do keyword research is almost impossible. And that doesn’t even cover the weeks it takes to write compelling, keyword-optimized real estate content for your blog to rank for those keywords. 

We’re here to help. The team at Hire a Writer has ranked businesses like yours in some of the most competitive industries out there, including real estate. Ready to get a team of world-class SEO copywriters in your corner? Contact us.