Century 21 Real Estate Presentation Keywords Part Deux

Posted • July 7, 2010 • 1 Comment

Are Keywords different for PPC and Organic Search? Why you want to rank organically on a word you wont pay for?

Is there a really a valid reason for trying to rank on a keyword or keyword phrase organically that you wouldn’t be willing to pay for in your pay-per-click campaign?

Let’s examine the examples from the “Century 21 Real Estate Presentation Post“.

Let’s take a look into the following keyword phrases:

• real estate
• Portland homes for sale
• Portland house for sale
• 3 bedroom house for sale in north Portland

Usually it is not a good idea to bid on keywords or keyword phrases for pay-per-click unless they will convert to sales. The more general keywords are usually reserved for your organic strategies.

Your short-tail keywords, “real estate” for example are so top level, even though they have a possibility of converting down the line they just don’t make sense to pay for click-throughs. Your long-tail keywords, “3 bedroom house for sale in north Portland” for example, are ripe for conversion and therefore perfect for pay-per-click.

This doesn’t mean that you will want to ignore these same conversion long-tail keywords for your organic campaign.

Once again using my favorite keyword research tool I have compiled some numbers for the four keywords listed above.

Competition = The number of sites listed with the matching phrase.

Predicted daily count = The number of times the exact phrase is entered into all the search engines.

KEI = Keyword Effectiveness Index. The larger the number the easer it is to rank for the keyword or keyword phrase.(Post from Search Engine Optimizician.)

Real Estate

Google returns 1,700,000,000 results.

• Competition – 536,000,000
• Predicted daily count – 14,727
• KEI – 0.19

Portland Homes for Sale

Google returns 8,080,000 results.

• Competition – 50,100
• Predicted daily count – 0
• KEI – 0.0

Better keyword phrase: “homes for sale portland oregon”
Google returns 14,900,000 results.

• Competition – 25,100
• Predicted daily count – 14
• KEI – 0.0

Portland House for Sale

Google returns 8,510,000 results.

• Competition – 8,200
• Predicted daily count – 0
• KEI – 0.0

Better keyword phrase: “houses for sale in portland oregon”
Google returns 6,630,000 results.

• Competition – 13
• Predicted daily count – 10
• KEI – 3.77

3 Bedroom House for Sale in North Portland

Google returns 265,000 results.

• Competition – 1
• Predicted daily count – 0
• KEI – 0.0

Keyword Wrap-Up

So there you have the long and short of keywords and their tails. Just because the results don’t show any searches are being made on a particular keyword or keyword phrase that doesn’t mean there are actually none. These tools are bulk tools and require a fair amount of data before the results are exposed. The 0 search counts are an average over a year divided by 365. One search a week would still show up as “0″ searches.

Guess who is the “1″ competition?

To answer my original question “Is there a really a valid reason for trying to rank on a keyword or keyword phrase organically that you wouldn’t be willing to pay for in your pay-per-click campaign?” my answer is an emphatic yes! As a business professional I understand the value of keeping the funnel full. What a great way to keep potential clients entering the funnel. Just make sure they are introduced to you early in their purchase process with your rankings on your top level or short-tail keywords.

Late,
Gary Pool SEO

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