If you are new to real estate online marketing, you must be legging behind your competitors big time as they have already invested hundreds of hours and a lot of money into ramping up their online lead generation campaigns.
If this is the case, your first priority will be to know what online real estate marketing strategies your competitors are using successfully. A part of these strategies may be their brand’s strong presence in search engine results. Obviously, you will want to know what keywords your competitors are ranking high for.
[optinform]Keyword competition analysis is a major part of search engine optimization (SEO). In your case, it will mostly revolve around your immediate competitors because real estate is largely a local business. Most real estate agents serve a particular city or town or a few communities in a city.
It makes keyword competition analysis a lot easier because you need to compete against just other real estate professions in your area, not real estate professionals across the web.
Why keyword competition analysis is important for real estate marketing
Keyword competition analysis is important because it helps you identify which keywords other real estate professionals are already targeting, and how successful they are.
You can also find weaknesses and opportunities to compete for those keywords. Besides, you can determine what tactics others are using to gain an advantage.
You can also try to find out which keywords your competitors are not targeting. If these keywords look important to drive traffic and leads to your website, you can easily target them as there would be little or no competition in ranking for them.
How to perform keyword competition analysis
The easiest way to gauge competition for a keyword you are targeting is to type that keyword in Google search and look at the number of search results it comes up with. It is quite obvious that fewer the search results, less completion for that keyword.
Let’s look at an example for a keyword: Downtown Brooklyn apartments for sale under $500,000
Google throws up 132,000 results for this search query. You should go through the first few search engine result pages and make a list of websites that comes up on the top for this exact keyword. These are your competitors.
Go to each of the pages and examine the content.
Can you write better content for this keyword than what you see on other websites?
Check out this page from cityreality.com which appears on one of the first few pages in search results:
They have listed five NYC apartments available under $500K. This looks like an authority website, so they are ranking high. But can you come up with 50 apartments under $500K available for sale and give more detailed description for each of these listings?
If you can, you have a good chance of ranking higher for the keyword. However, there are other factors to take into account like domain authority, backlinks etc.
Advanced search tools for keyword competition analysis
It is not possible to log into the Google Analytics Account of your competitors to know what keywords they are ranking, the volume of traffic to their website, conversion rate etc. But there are several free and paid advanced keyword search tools that will give you an idea what you are up against.
SimilarWeb
The basic plan for this tool is free where you get 5 results per website metric (traffic overview, traffic sources, referrals, the volume of traffic from search engines, keywords etc.). You will have to sign up to get the keyword data. You can also compare up to three websites at once.
Keyword Spy
You can easily uncover the competition landscape by knowing your competitors’ PPC and Organic campaign strategies in seconds. You can also build a list of keywords using your competitors’ keywords and by accessing a massive database of related and similar terms and phrases. Besides you can pinpoint exactly the profitable keyword and ad-copy combinations of your competitors. Keyword spy offers a lifetime free trial with limited features.
SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty Tool
They are one of the leaders in the SEO industry. With this premium tool, you can understand how difficult a keyword may be to rank for based on key indicating factors.
Moz’s Difficulty score takes into account the Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA) scores of the results ranking on the first page of Google’s search engine for the given query. It also intelligently modifies for projected click-through-rate (CTR) of a given page (putting more weight on high-ranking, more visible pages and less on low-ranking, less visible pages). The algorithm also accounts for newer pages on powerful domains that may have DA scores but not yet assigned PA values.
SEMRush
It is very hand tool to get insights into your competitors’ strategies in display advertising, organic and paid search, and link building.
Some others tools that you can consider are SpyFu, Keyword Eye, and Market Samurai. The best part is that all these tools offer free trial. You can try each of the tools for a specific period of time to decide which one is best suited for your requirements.
The bottom line
If you want to be successful in real estate online marketing, you would need to know your competition and then prepare marketing campaigns accordingly. You can scale up your marketing efforts easily after knowing what keywords your competitors are ranking high for.
Please let me know in comments if you have any ideas related to keyword competition analysis, not mentioned in the blog.
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