Are you struggling to find hyperlocal real estate keywords that will help you promote your website? Are you frustrated every time you try to do keyword research for a smaller local area but end up with nothing because the Google Keyword Planner returns zero results? In this post, we’ll show you how to find hyperlocal keywords for your real estate website that will get you seen by the right people.
Generic vs. hyperlocal keywords: what’s the problem?
It’s not an easy task to beat large property portals that are dominating the SERPs. They rank high for broad keywords like ‘homes for sale in Dublin’ and it’s virtually impossible to outrank them. So even if your agency happens to sell homes in Dublin and your website pages are properly optimized, you’ll still find it hard to get into the top ten results.
The best way out is to start targeting hyperlocal keywords. In fact, it’s the only way to promote your area and listings in that area. These queries are less popular but so much more effective for lead generation. Besides, the competition for these queries is less fierce and it’s easier to land your real estate website on top really quick.
BUT: once you start targeting these hyperlocal keywords, another problem pops up. You head to your Keyword Planner or any other keyword research tool, only to discover that they don’t provide any data on these queries whatsoever.
Why is this happening?
The fundamental problem is that keyword tools rely on search volume data, i.e. the number of times people searched for a particular query within some time (month, year, etc.). You’ll have no problem uncovering popular keywords like ‘houses for sale in Dublin’ but what about ‘houses for sale in Skerries’? Skerries is a smaller town near Dublin and keyword tools produce only a few results which aren’t very helpful for agents working there.
So what can you do if you need to target these queries? How should you know which ones to target? And most importantly, how to find hyperlocal real estate keywords for your site?
Luckily, there are a few ways you can overcome the limitations of these keyword tools and uncover relevant keyword data to use on your real estate website.
How to find hyperlocal real estate keywords
1) Find keyword data for large areas nearby
One thing you can start with is research keywords for large regions or cities near you. When using this technique, we presume that people living in Skerries and Dublin may share their search patterns. They’re located not far from each other so we’ll take it as a fairly good assumption.
Next, go ahead and find keywords for the larger cities nearby. There’s going to be loads of keyword data for Dublin which you can then replicate and apply to Skerries. Not a perfect solution, of course, but it does help to get a better idea of what the queries for smaller nearby localities might look like.
This technique is a good way to start building your list of hyperlocal real estate keywords. Call it intelligent guesswork because in most cases capitalizing on similar search patterns for local areas works really well.
2) Use LSI keywords
Another effective technique to find hyperlocal keywords for your real estate website is to use latent semantic indexing keywords (LSI keywords). There’s a great idea behind this technique.
All you have to do is come up with keywords that carry similar meaning to the one you’re targeting. You can call them lexical or semantic keywords because they basically have the same meaning as your target keyword. Of course, you’d want to target these queries on your real estate website as well in order to capture more traffic and leads.
Essentially, there are three ways to find LSI keywords:
1. use tools like SEMRush or LSIGraph to build a list of related queries. For example, you can tape ‘houses for sale in Skerries’ and automatically get some suggestions (the data below is produced by LSIGraph):
2. type your focus keyword in Google search and scroll down the page to find related searches:
3. broaden your list by removing the name of the city or town. ‘Home’ can mean different property types like houses, apartments, condos, etc. If that’s part of your offering, use all of these keywords and apply the name of your city.
3. Use Google Autosuggest
Lastly, another way to find hyperlocal real estate keywords is to see what results Google Autosuggest returns:
Likewise, you can try to type one of your target hyperlocal queries in other search engines like Bing, Yahoo, etc. plus YouTube and Google Maps. Finally, try to do the same on mobile. Sometimes, mobile search can return new results that you didn’t come across on the desktop.
Where to use hyperlocal keywords on a real estate website?
By now, you have a solid list of hyperlocal real estate keywords for your website. They may not be backed up by volume data but there’s a strong logic in how you retrieved them. Chances are very big they’ll do you a lot of good.
Now the question is what to do with all these hyperlocal keywords?
The short answer is to use them just like any other keyword. The long answer with a few specific suggestions is right below.
Page titles
Putting your target keywords in page titles is essential for strong SEO. Keywords in title tags is an important ranking factor.
URLs
Target keyword in URL helps search engines index the page faster and rank it higher. Keep your URLs short and targeted.
Content
Remember to add your hyperlocal keywords to the website content but don’t overdo it (ultimately, it depends on how long the post is). A few times would be perfect.
Neighborhood pages
Create dedicated neighborhood landing pages and link them to your blog posts. These pages are crucial for local real estate SEO.
Anchor text
When linking other relevant pages, choose anchor text strategically. Use your target keywords as anchor text so search engines see the pattern and understand how the pages relate to one another.
Alt tags for images
A very helpful SEO technique. Google recommends paying great attention to optimizing images. Proper alt tags help search engines index your real estate website faster and send yet another signal that this site is all about a particular area.
Footer
Include quick links to the properties in specific areas in the footer of your website. Put as many as you need so that you cover each location you work in.
What’s next?
It’s easy to get frustrated when trying to find hyperlocal real estate keywords. They may sound like too small a thing to focus on but the truth is hyperlocal keywords can bring you the best sales-ready leads.
Additionally, your efforts will add up and you’ll see that your website will rank higher for broader, more popular queries too. All in all, never abandon the power of hyperlocal keywords and don’t limit yourself to popular queries that might take you years to rank high for.
