You want to start a blog on your business website but aren’t sure what keywords to use, or even if you need to worry about keywords (spoiler alert: you do). Here is a short post that will help you choose the right keywords for your blog.
Firstly, what are keywords?
Keywords are the phrases that a customer of yours will type into Google to find you. The trick is figuring out what your customers are typing to arrive at your virtual door.
This is the key to ranking well on Google. Choosing the right keywords is an art and SEO-savvy bloggers/content producers spend a lot of time choosing the right keywords.
Keywords are not hash tags. Don’t make the mistake of thinking the keywords are the hash tags you use on social media posts. They’re different and have a completely different purpose (see my post on Hash Tags For Real Estate Social Media Posts here).
Why do I need keywords?
Ideally, your website and your blog will be search engine optimised, which means they’ll be structured and written in a way that will focus on specific search engine terms that are relevant to your business. (A basic understanding of SEO is good if you’re planning on managing your website and writing your blog yourself).
It is important to understand that as Google’s algorithm becomes ever more sophisticated it is virtually impossible to game the system. You can’t stuff irrelevant keywords into your website and blog to try to rank higher than your competitors. Your blog articles must be very useful, very helpful (and where possible, very long) to ensure your readers/customers are interested and find them helpful, in order for your site to continue to rise up through the ranks.
OK, so what are my keywords?
So, now you know what keywords are let’s choose yours. If you’re a real estate sales agent in Queensland, there are a few obvious keywords that will work well: “Sales agent [suburb]” would be a leading key phrase to consider, along with “real estate [suburb]”.
In the interests of keeping it simple, those would be two suggestions that would work well for most real estate professionals in Australia.
If you’d like to get a bit more sophisticated and data-driven you can use Google Trends, which is a tool to help mine keywords and topics from all the search data that Google collates.
Here’s a good blog post on the ProBlogger site that can help you use Google Trends, although be aware that in the vast world of Google search terms, real estate queries are very few in number. You may not get much joy.
It’s possibly better to do your own market research. Ask customers who ring for an appraisal what they typed in to Google when researching their real estate choices.
Got my keywords, now what?
Now it’s time to start blogging!
Using your keywords, plan the next 12 or so topics for your real estate blog. Trust me, the first dozen or so topics are easy, but then things start to get a bit harder. If you spend an hour or two each week coming up with three or four topics and adding them to your content calendar you’re going to minimise one of the biggest challenges that bloggers face!
Use your Content Calendar (see my post here on How To Create A Content Calendar) to map out the topics and the keywords you’re using for each blog post (so you can avoid doubling up) and any other important metadata, such as the staff members who you’ve profiled in your blog posts (so you can make sure everyone gets the same airtime) or the services you’ve highlighted (so nothing gets overlooked) and you’ll be good to go!
Happy blogging!
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