Before you start any kind of SEO campaign, do what the SEO experts do first. Research. Steve Wiideman, the number one SEO expert calls this the Analyze layer in his fourfold SEO model. Analyze what your market is. That’s likely already done on an informal basis- you know what you’re selling or providing as a service and you know where you’re offering it, right? Next is a little bit of art and applied intuition. Your market may or may not be typing your product or service directly into search engines. What if they aren’t? You have to be creative in tying together, your product or service to their need and then present it where they are looking for a solution to that need. A person who needs to sell their home is probably never going to type listing agents into Google. My office is on the border of the city of Fullerton. You may think people in Fullerton who are selling their home may be typing in something like best real estate agents in Fullerton or any variation of agents in Fullerton, but you can check the Google AdWords Keyword Tool and quickly find out they are not. In all of Orange County with a population of 3 million, people aren’t looking on the web for listing agents. They are doing research on the market, however. People are looking at what’s trending all the time. The results in the Keyword Tool show that people are typing in one phrase more than many others for the Fullerton market, “Fullerton homes for sale.” Agents who have done their homework know this, thereby competition for this phrase is high. Agents who have not done their homework erroneously choose the phrase, “homes for sale in Fullerton”, a phrase that has around 5% of the search volume of the previous version of the same words but a different order. The former phrase has a global monthly search volume of 22,200 while the latter has only 1,300.

Keyword research matters. As an agent, you have to stay connected to the buying side if you want to use the web to locate listings. Believe me, people are checking things out on the web long before they take the relatively tenuous step of actually contacting an agent.

If you don’t hire an SEO expert, make sure you do as much as you can to become one on your own behalf before undertaking a keyword campaign that isn’t doing you much good.

By contrast, sometimes you can discover a niche keyword, a long-tail keyword that nets close to 100% paying customers for your business. In real estate it could be something very specific such as a search term I recently saw that brought a person to one of my client’s websites. The term was simple and to the point with no competition but definitely found someone looking for a specific kind of agent to work with. What was that term? It was, “realtors in that spend time with you.” My client has made a point of letting customers know that they’ll get the face time they need and it shows in their web pages and blogs.

The Google Keyword screenshot below illustrates the importance of keyword research as described in this article. Be an SEO Expert on your own behalf and give plenty of thought to your keywords for both long term and short term SEO strategies in Orange County and anywhere you are marketing.

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Keyword research, Orange County SEO, Orange County SEO Expert, Orange County Web Design, SEO analysis