Here’s a quick hit / tip for those of you wanting to create great blog content that will rank for organically and help improve your real estate SEO.
Step 1: Pick a keyword phrase (go medium/long-tail, the most competitive phrases most realtors don’t have enough authority to compete for) - let’s use “downtown Nanaimo condo buildings” - (Naniamo is where we live).
Step 2: Capture the top 2-3 sites that are ranking for the keyword. Copy their “content” (not the rest of the HTML etc, just their content) into a doc.
Step 3: Use chatGPT or your favourite AI tool and ask them to summarize the main points covered in each article (review them 1 by 1)
Step 4: Ask your AI to identify all of the similar topics / themes covered in each article
Step 5: As AI for any suggestions to add or improve upon the themes / ideas for a consumer who may be wanting to learn more about x.
Step 6: Bringing it all together - now that you have all the info, ask your AI to suggest a structure for the article that would have great flow and appeal to search engines given that the articles studied already ranked in search engines.
The content itself? You MUST write it yourself (uniquely) - don’t ask ChatGPT or your AI to write it.
BUT - if you don’t know what to say, you already have the main / most important points covered and summarized, so you can use those as a guide.
Add some relevant reference links, some unique images (go take em yourself, don’t be lazy) and if you’re really feeling creative - embed a custom video you’ve created that covers the topic.
Another thing you can do when trying to break into the top rankings for specific medium/long tail keywords is to look at the generative AI summary that Google provides. This will give you insights into what Google has decided is important to showcase for that specific query:
Here’s an example from the phrase “Custom IDX solutions” (one of our medium tail keywords)
Do you see how Google has nicely laid out several of the benefits (and thus talking points) that you can cover in your article?
The logic here is Google is telling us what is important and what we should focus on. Certainly feel free to expand (you should be expanding) - but we have some great guidance right at our fingertips and we can use AI to help us research, condense and organize.
Excellent advice. How would we apply this when many of the top 10 search results are pages of current listings, followed by long lists of SEO-optimized home search keyword text links rather than any readable content? See the image below. For example, “Sammamish Homes for Sale” is considered easy keyword difficulty, with 500 monthly volume per ahrefs, and we rank #9. Most in the top 10 above us are spamming the page with many variations of “Sammamish X for sale” (condos, townhouses, waterfront, etc.) A few pages have cursory 5-question FAQs (we will implement this asap!) Would we need to create a dozen Sammamish-related search variations to compete? That feels low quality, but is seems to be working for higher ranked pages.
This is part of the reason I’ve suggested doing this for medium to long tail searches - highly competitive terms are likely going to be ranked for more heavily based on “authority” based criteria (which is off page, not on page) vs content based criteria.
The 800 lb gorillas of Zillow, Realtor, Redfin are focused on short tail, commercial terms - even with perfect onpage you can’t beat them (and that is even when their on page is not perfect like in your examples) -
That doesn’t mean though, that you can’t still take some advice from the exercise - if Google seems to value a list of properties as part of the features it considers a great result for that query - then you should make sure you include a list of properties as well - does that make sense?
You see the highlighted keyword? “Waterfront Cottage For Sale Vancouver Island By Owner”
That’s pretty niche / long tail - but still has 232 searches and we already (without any specific effort) rank position 2.5
With some improvements, I should be able to take #1 quite easily. (Thuogh in this case, I’ll likely edit the exiting page to improve it rather than needing to create a new one).
I’d then do that search, I’d ask AI what kinds of content are the other sites in the top 5 covering that I’m not. Any patterns or items you think I should highlight to improve my own?
I’d then either edit the exiting page (likely) or create a new page and link it from relevant pages, then blast it out to socials etc to get it “out there” - and ideally we pop up a spot or two over the coming months,
Thanks! Your real-world advice makes this forum great. Yes, Sammamish Homes for Sale was a parent keyword rather than medium or long tail. I figured since it was low volume and difficulty, the same concept might work. I am trying another experiment on medium/long tails for buyer rebates. I will also add some home searches to our Sammamish Homes page and see if that bumps us higher than #9. Will report back!
Great! If your competitors are doing it, ranking well and you are not, that is the purpose of this exercise - learn from Google (let AI help where relevant) and then effect the change.
Be sure that your snippets/home search provide as good or better experience to the sites ranking above you. My recommendation is setting your searches (always) to newest first so you have constantly refreshing content, and ensuring you check boxes like “only show listings with photos” so you don’t get any MLS listings showing with no photos etc
Also don’t forget - pages need to be discoverable - so link with appropriate anchor text using the SEO Pillar concept as much as necessary / reasonable in order to provide internal link support.
Great answer by @Morgan. There’s another free keyword tool that’s absolute gem - Google Keyword Planner. It used to be a standalone tool but Google moved inside Google Ads. Once inside your Google Ads dashboard - click tools and then Keyword planner under “Planning” dropdown.
We use “Discover new KWs” to find new ideas (allows 10 entries per search) and once we have sizeable search variations, feed it into “Get search volume and forecasts” to see historical search volumes and popularity. This has been very useful to us in finding new long tail, low competition keywords.
Great point about Google Keyword Planner! It’s definitely a classic tool that still has a place in today’s workflows. One thing I’ve found really helpful is using this tool for identifying regional variations in phrasing that you can use to make content even more hyper local. For example, when targeting real estate keywords, “condo” vs. “apartment” vs “flat” (not often used in North America), they can vary a lot depending on geography. By combining that insight with Morgan’s method of studying top-ranking pages and AI summaries, you can create even tighter, location-optimized content. Thanks for bringing this up! It’s always a great reminder.
