This may be old hat to most of you but not everyone is familiar with the Google keyword tool. In order to optimize your real estate website it helps to know what people are searching for and in what volumes.

Wouldn’t it be nice to know how many people are searching for the phrase ‘condos for sale in sarasota florida’ before you optimize a page for that phrase and go through the painstaking process of building links? Well, you can.

There are several traffic estimating tools out there but the Google keyword tool will work just fine in my opinion.

You can be much more productive in your SEO and link building efforts if you have a general idea of traffic volumes.

For example, you can focus your efforts on trying to rank for ‘condos for sale in sarasota florida’ which is searched for roughly 110 times a month or you can spend your time trying to rank for ‘sarasota condos’ which is searched nearly 7 times more at 720 monthly searches.

All you have to do is enter the phrase into the keyword tool and Google will spit out a variety of useful data.

Data provided includes information like the number of global and local searches, competition and search trends. I like to look at the ‘Exact” match types to see traffic for the exact phrase that I am inquiring about.

Google will also provide alternative phrases to consider as well. This tool can keep you busy for hours.

You can create a variety of strategies for your website rankings. Most people want to rank for the phrases with the highest number of searches. However, these phrases are also more competitive. It might be smarter to go after the low hanging fruit. This is a great tool to find long tail search phrases.