Find a real estate agent: Yeah, they’re looking for you

Today, just for ducks, I put “real estate agent” into Google Adwords. These are among the top results:

• find an agent real estate

• find a real estate agent

• best real estate agent

• Best real estate agent

• real estate agent search

• i need a real estate agent

• real estate agent directory

• real estate agent finder

• which real estate agent

• a real estate agent

• good real estate agent

• find best real estate agent

Amazing, isn’t it? With the thousands of agents in any given town, that a real estate consumer would have to search for one on Google boggles the mind.

Especially that pitiable "i need a real estate agent"

I then headed over to the keyword planner to find out how many impressions and clicks these bad boys get. Most of them got few, but the top four are ones you should pay attention to:

• find an agent real estate -- 4,509 impressions, 235 clicks

• find a real estate agent – 6,159 impressions, 232 clicks

• best real estate agent -- 6,697 impressions, 114 clicks

• Best real estate agent – 6,261 impressions, 102 clicks

Yes, number three and number four are identical, except for one thing: number three starts with a lowercase “b” and number four starts with a capital “B.”

“The average click-through rate on AdWords paid search ads is about 2%. Accordingly, anything over 2% can be considered an above average CTR,” claims an unnamed writer at WordStream.com.

The CTR for the first term above, “find an agent real estate” is 5.2 percent. It’s 3.8 percent for find a real estate agent.”

But wait . . .

I did the same search, subbing “real estate agent” with “realtor.”

• find a realtor – 13,760 impressions, 442 clicks

• best realtor – 14,666 impressions, 350 clicks

• best Realtor – 14,172 impressions, 338 clicks

Apparently, they are searching for a Realtor twice as often as a real estate agent.

So, what should you do with this scintillating information?

I plugged each of these into a Google search box and the results, at least when searching the exact phrase (with quotations) were interesting.

The first three organic results were from the same site: NestSeekers.com. And, all three were for their Real Estate Agent Directory. In fact, the exact pages that made it to this coveted spot are all titled “Find an Agent: Real Estate Agents Directory”

As you can see, the pages match, exactly, the top keyword phrase “find an agent real estate.”

Without the quotation marks, on the other hand, you’re competing with all the usual suspects (Realtor.com, Zillow, Yelp, etc)

What to do with this info? Well, you could join their brokerage. Or, you could beef up your content marketing to compete with their first-page, organic Google ranking.

A couple of brokerages have done so, and successfully, occupying the spots below NestSeekers. I checked out these sites and there are a couple of them that can easily be knocked off the page with the right content.

If you have a team, change the name of your About the Team page “Find an Agent: Real Estate Agents.”

I’d take it a step further, though and get that exact match in up front, but tag it with the name of my town. “Find an Agent: Real Estate Agents in Las Vegas.”

It’s a lot easier to get to the front page if you tag the search term with your city.

What about find a realtor?

Realtor.com and the NAR have page one pretty much locked down for that search phrase. “best realtor” (lower case “r”) did a bit better.

Google’s intuition returned three sites on the first page of results that were local to my city. So, the “best realtor in [your city]” is a possibility.

IF, however, the rest of your site stacks up. Meaning, you’re offering plenty of valuable content that people are searching for.

Don’t forget to optimize for your name

It’s a safe bet that when a potential client is researching agents, he or she will search by the agent’s name.

Head over to your bio and ensure that your full name is in the title and meta tag. Also, if there’s a photo of your cute little mug, optimize the file name with your name.

In other words, “BruceClay.jpg, not 001345.jpg,” according to Bruce Clay at bruceclay.com, a digital marketing optimization company.

That’s it for today. Now, go slay some real estate dragons!