Researching your keyword competition

You should have your keyword list in front of you.

Go to Google and in the search box, type: allintitle:"keyword" and hit enter; remember to use quotes around your keyword. The allintitle: search command will show only web pages with all those words in the title tag. You should consider this your competition for that keyword and the greater the number of pages found, the harder it will be to get your site ranked highly.

Another useful Google search is allinanchor:"keyword". This shows any anchor links using that keyphrase, which is a good indicator of a keyword-based link building campaign. These searches do not work on other search engines.

For a brand new website entering a competitive online real estate market, it is best not to expect to be ranked well immediately for popular keywords; sometimes this can take more than a year. But if you know your market well, you can exploit keywords with less traffic to good success. In fact, some low traffic keywords can have better conversion rates than more popular terms.

A good example of this is: "Any Town Realtor." While "realtor" may have a lower search volume than "real estate," it is what is known as an "action keyword." Most people searching with "real estate" are actually looking for a starting point to see what's available; people searching with "realtor" are more often looking for someone to do business with. You may only receive 2-3 three hits per month on the "realtor" keyword, but the possible conversion of this type of visitor is often very good.

Do not try to "sneak" yourself into getting keyword traffic that is not related to your core business. While it is acceptable to try to capture search traffic for actual content on your site, using keywords that may relate to your area, but not your site pages, will backfire.

For example, if a realtor in Orlando with rental listings has valuable content about "Disney World vacations" and it would be acceptable to use that keyword. If they are just trying to skim visitors merely by using the keyword on the home page and offering no real information or service, this would be a worthless effort.