Say a neighborhood is called the Heights by everyone who lives there, and the city's maps list it as Eastbrook. A buyer who types the first name will never reach a page that only uses the second.
Keyword research is the work of finding the words buyers and sellers type into Google and matching them to pages on your site. An assistant can do most of it with a spreadsheet and a few free reports, and you decide which pages are worth writing.
Understanding Real Estate Keyword Research
Google's SEO Starter Guide tells site owners to think about the words that a user might search for to find a piece of their content. For an agent, those words come from clients before they come from any tool.
What is Keyword Research and Why is it Important for Real Estate?
A keyword is any word or phrase someone types into a search box. In real estate, the phrases fall into three groups. Some name a place or a home, such as a neighborhood plus "condos". Some name a task, such as selling a house that still has a mortgage. Some name a person, usually an agent whose name the searcher was given.
Each group wants a different page. A person typing a neighborhood name wants to learn about the area, a person describing a task wants an answer, and a person typing your name wants your contact details. The research pays off when each page answers the want behind its phrase.
Keep the results in a sheet with one row per phrase. Give it columns for the page the phrase belongs to, what the searcher wants and the date you checked. Without dates, a list that is a year old looks as trustworthy as one from last week.
How to Conduct Effective Keyword Research for Real Estate
The routine below suits an assistant working a few hours a month, with the agent reviewing the sheet at the end:
- Write the seed list. Start with the areas you serve, the property types you sell and the services you offer.
- Mine your own inbox. The questions clients asked in the last quarter are real phrases in real wording, so copy them from email and CRM notes.
- Check what the site already earns. Google Search Console lists the queries your pages appear for, with clicks and impressions.
- Add what Google suggests. Type each seed phrase and note the suggestions that appear as you type.
- Look at the results. Search each phrase and note what kind of pages show up: agent sites, listing portals, local news or city pages.
- Map phrases to pages. Give every page one main phrase, and flag the phrases that have no page yet.
Tools and Techniques for Finding Relevant Keywords
Search Console is the first stop because it shows the real searches where your pages already appeared. Its Performance report gives clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position, and it groups them by query or by page. The default view covers the past three months. Google adds that a query may appear in your list even when you cannot find your site by running it yourself, because results depend on the time, place, device and recent history of the person searching.
The same caution applies to autocomplete. Google says its predictions can draw on your own search history when search personalization is on, so the assistant's suggestions will differ from yours. Treat them as ideas and record the date.
Google Keyword Planner sits inside Google Ads, and Google built it to research keywords for Search campaigns. It shows estimates of the searches a keyword gets each month. Its help page says you must finish account setup, including billing information, to use the basic features, and that keywords with very low search volumes aren't discoverable. Many neighborhood phrases are small, so a missing phrase may still be worth a page.
Google Trends answers a different question. Google says each data point is divided by the total searches in that place and period to compare relative popularity, and the results are scaled from 0 to 100. The chart shows relative interest, which suits spotting seasonal swings in a neighborhood or a topic.
Paid suites add competitor views and difficulty scores. Ahrefs lists a keyword generator and a keyword difficulty checker among its free tools, and Semrush offers a seven-day free trial of its Keyword Magic Tool. Each tool computes its own numbers, so use them to rank phrases against each other and do not treat one figure as fact.
Using Keywords in Real Estate Content
Once a page has its phrase, use it where a reader would expect it: in the title, in a heading, in the first paragraph and in the alt text of a photo. Google offers plain standards for each of those places, and none of them calls for repetition.
Optimizing Website and Blog Content
Google says a good title is unique to the page, clear and concise, and accurately describes the contents of the page. A good meta description, in the same guide, is short, unique to one particular page and includes the most relevant points. Alt text is a short, descriptive piece of text that explains the relationship between the image and your content. Google also says its search does not use the meta keywords tag, and that the tag has no effect on indexing and ranking.
Web addresses follow the same logic. Google advises using readable words and hyphens in URLs and trimming parameters that don't change the content, so a page whose address names the neighborhood follows that advice better than one that ends in a string of digits.
Link the pages to each other. Google says every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site, and that good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to the page it points to. Its link guidance also says Google can generally only crawl a link that is an a element with an href attribute, which is a question for whoever built the site.
For blog posts, start from the client questions in the sheet. A post that answers one of them in the client's own words, with local facts the agent knows, serves the reader first and the keyword second.
Incorporating Keywords in Property Descriptions and Listings
A listing description uses the words buyers search when those words are true. Say a house has a fenced backyard and a finished basement. A line such as "Fenced backyard and finished basement, a short walk to the downtown trail" includes phrases people type and says nothing untrue.
Two rules sit above any keyword plan. NAR's Code of Ethics, Standard of Practice 12-10, prohibits members from deceptively using metatags, keywords or other devices to direct, drive or divert internet traffic. And the Fair Housing Act's advertising rule, section 3604(c), bars any notice, statement or advertisement about the sale or rental of a dwelling that indicates a preference, limitation or discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status or national origin. Describe the home and its location, and leave out words that name a preferred buyer.
Your MLS may also have rules on how listing descriptions are edited and republished, so the assistant should read them before touching a listing.
Common Mistakes to Avoid in Real Estate Keyword Research
Four habits spoil keyword research:
- Chasing big phrases. Broad phrases look best in a tool, but Keyword Planner can't show keywords with very low search volumes, so the specific phrases your buyers use may be missing from it, and a missing phrase can still deserve a page.
- Skipping the results page. A phrase is only worth a page if your kind of page appears for it today.
- Copying a competitor's wording. Their phrase list answers their market, and your clients may speak differently.
- Leaving the research undated. A sheet with no dates cannot tell you what has gone stale.
Keyword Stuffing and Other Black Hat Tactics
Google defines keyword stuffing as filling a page with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate rankings, and says the keywords often appear in a list or group, unnaturally or out of context. Its spam policies list blocks of text naming the cities or regions a page is trying to rank for as an example, so a footer that lists every nearby town is the kind of block it means. The SEO Starter Guide adds that excessively repeating the same words, even in variations, is tiring for users.
Other tactics sit in the same policy. Doorway abuse covers pages made for specific regions or cities that send visitors on to a single destination. Scaled content abuse covers many pages generated mainly to manipulate rankings. Link spam includes buying or selling links and excessive link exchanges. A keyword plan that needs any of these has stopped being research.
Tracking and Analyzing Keyword Performance
Search Console answers the main question, which is whether the pages you built for a phrase now appear and get clicked. Do not check by searching the phrase yourself and reading off your position, because the results change with who is looking.
Google Analytics shows what visitors do after the click. It defines engagement rate as the percentage of engaged sessions, and a session counts as engaged if it lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a key event or has two or more page views. Ask whoever manages the site to collect form submissions and phone taps as events and mark them as key events, which Google defines as events that measure an action particularly important to the success of your business.
Measuring Success and Making Adjustments
Set a monthly routine. Export the query and page data from Search Console, put it beside the same period a year earlier if you have it, and mark each page that earns many impressions but few clicks. Its title and description may not match what searchers want.
Google says some changes take effect in a few hours and others could take several months, so judge a rewrite after a few weeks. Keep a change log with the date and the edit, which lets you trace a rise or a fall to its cause. Then add one row of notes to the sheet for every page you changed.
Open a spreadsheet with four columns: phrase, page, what the searcher wants and date checked. Ask your assistant to fill the first twenty rows from your inbox and Search Console, then review them together before anyone writes a word.