Contributor: Drew Meyers – Zillow
When determining your SEO strategy, one of the first things you need to determine is what keywords you are going to optimize your site for. There are two primary schools of thought — focus on either a) the long-tail (a term coined by Chris Anderson from Wired) or b) the short-tail. We all know there is massive consumer traffic searching for keywords such as “Seattle real estate” and “Chicago real estate” — this is called the SHORT-TAIL (left side of chart below). However, there are also consumers searching for the web for terms like “2 bedroom condos in Queen Anne” and “mobile homes for sale in Auburn” — this is called the LONG-TAIL (right side of chart below).
Chart courtesy of Eric Stegemann at Tribus
This is a topic that has come up at every RE BarCamp that I’ve been to over the past few months, so thought it was worth a post here to discuss the long vs short tail debate as it relates to real estate. In the real estate space, it all comes down to converting traffic into clients and there are certainly arguments to be made in favor of both schools of thought:
Primary Short-tail benefit:
More potential consumer traffic to potentially capture and convert into leads
Primary Long-tail benefit:
MUCH higher conversion rates
As an agent or broker, is it really worth your time and effort to compete for the highly competitive short-tail traffic from an SEO perspective? Particularly for major metro areas (top 50 MSAs), the top 10-20 results on Google for “geo + real estate” and “geo + homes for sale” are usually dominated by aggregators or media sites that produce a lot of content and/or do a lot more than provide real estate information. As a result, their sites likely have a substantial number of inbound links –and hence, more SEO juice to distribute throughout their site. Why not instead target the less competitive, but arguable more valuable, long-tail SEO terms? After all, agents and brokers make money from selling houses, not from attracting as much traffic as possible to your web site — if your traffic doesn’t convert to clients (side note: remember to put calls to action on your site), who cares how much traffic you get?
Which camp are you in? Should agents and brokers focus on the long or the short tail?
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Since working in the long-tail market for 2 years now of the green building sector everything is very true. I have seen volume of business grow dramatically since incorporating this strategy.
I often advocate long term key word searches. When I look at my analytics, I’m always surprised of how many people find my site through a seven word searches on Google. Yes, people are doing that. They are dong that because the short terms are not giving them the results that they want. I advocate the long term keyword strategy for many of my clients. The best way to figure out what those are is too look at your analytics.
Agreed, long tail searches generally have a higher conversion rate to sales as the visitor is looking for specific infomation. Many visitors search for MLS#, street address, area of c ity, specific tracts/neighborhoods, etc. One of the easiest ways to generate long tail searches is to get an IDX solution that has individually indexed property pages with addresses, MLS#’s etc in the URL. Since the pages change daily, you also benefit from dynamic pages on your website.
Hi Drew~ Well said, as usual! I’ve found that I can really help my clients develop other target markets using this strategy as well, and continue to build consumer oriented content on websites. Once they can see the hits that they can receive with other search terms it can open them up to a lot more possibilities in terms of generating leads. Thanks again~