Top placement almost never happens by accident. The first step in planning your search engine strategy is to consider the search phrases potential customers are likely to use to find your website. Start with listing a few phrases off the top of your head. If you’re a Realtor serving a local market in Kansas, you’ll probably come up with a few phrases like:
1) real estate
2) homes for sale
3) Wichita
4) Kansas
This list gets the ball rolling, but if you stop here the game is over. Your hope of gaining top placement on any of these individual search terms is practically nonexistent and would not serve you effectively even if you succeeded. The broad term “real estate” returned Google results from almost four hundred million web pages when I searched it recently. As a local real estate agent, you don’t have a chance of appearing in the natural results in this list.
Even if you did rank well for any of these terms individually, you’d be missing your market. With a broad search term (“Wichita”) the prospective customer is more likely to be browsing for general information and less likely to be in the mood to buy. A highly targeted search (“Wichita Crown Heights Homes for Sale”) represents a searcher with a specific goal in mind, and someone nearer to making a decision about purchasing a home.
The general term may provide more traffic (if you succeed in getting top placement for it) but the leads are more likely to be cold. A very specific search phrase may generate less traffic, but the leads are likely to be red hot.
Ideally you want to find a handful of highly specific phrases (not individual words) that uniquely describe what your business offers to the searching public.
Want to learn more? Request our free White Paper on SEO strategies: "Top Placement: Eight Strategies for Effective Search Placement."
{ 1 comment }