Real Estate SEO Adviser

Marketers and Consumers Often Speak Differently

Pop Quiz — If money were no object, would you rather have a custom home or a luxury estate?

If you worked on the marketing team of a high-end home builder, you might opt for the phrase “luxury estate.” But if you were an average consumer, you would be more familiar with (and more inclined to search for) a “custom home.”

What’s my point?
Technically speaking, both of these phrases describe the same thing — a nice house! But the latter phrase (custom home) gets typed into search engines a lot more than “luxury estate.” A lot of ego-blind home builders tout their luxury estates in brochures, direct mail pieces, and on their websites. But if you want to connect with your ideal audience online, you have to speak the “language of the people.” And the people are looking for “custom homes,” not luxury estate.

How do I know this?
Because we have the technology to find out. You can use one of a dozen research tools to find out what search phrases people are using online. There’s really no mystery to it. And in most cities, a lot of folks are looking for custom homes online. But few, if any, are looking for luxury estates. Same product … totally different language (and SEO value).

Conclusion
Don’t assume your ideal audience uses the same terminology as you do. If you want your website to be found certain people, you have to do some homework to discover what those people are looking for online.

Or to state it differently:

If you were a home builder, would you rather have luxury estates that nobody could find, or custom homes that everyone could find?