HomeI get a lot of questions about keyword rankings and traffic. People wondering why their traffic has gone up but their keyword rankings have not, or the reverse: keyword rankings have increased dramatically with only a few more hits in a month. So I thought that I would take a few moments here and discuss the two methods of tracking SEO success and which ones as a real estate agent you should be looking at.
To start, keyword ranking is your webpage’s position in a search engine when someone types in the appropriate keywords. How you rank depends on a wide range of factors like how much competition is there for that keyword, how long have other sites been around, and what actions they are taking to rank. In theory, the higher your keyword ranks the more traffic will come to your site because searchers will find your site before they find the others.
Traffic relates to how many visitors you have to your site. Traffic can be analyzed in a wide range of different ways. The primary way to break down traffic is by direct, referral, PPC, and organic. Direct traffic means that a user typed your url rsgray.com into the address bar and came to your site. Referral traffic means they followed a link somewhere to your site. This means they could have followed a link on a review in yelp!, or a blog in Linkedin. PPC [Pay-per-click] is traffic that came to you from an adwords campaign. These are the sponsored links you pay Google for. And finally organic traffic is traffic that comes to your site through a search engine. It is organic, not forced or paid for. If someone types in “nintendo generation” and then clicks on my website, that would be organic traffic. Strictly speaking most SEO companies look exclusively at that organic traffic because that is what is coming from those search engines they focus on. Lately, as more SEO companies get their clients involved with blogs, article submission sites, youtube videos, and of course social media, we are looking more at that referral and direct traffic. If you can create a really good piece of link bait (quality article about staging a home, a youtube video about repainting a home to sell it, podcasts on filling out paperwork, etc.) you will see leads coming to your site from this link bait referral. As well, if you can get your url stuck in someone’s head so that they bypass Google all together and come to your site by directly typing your website into their browser, that would increase your Direct Traffic stats.
Let’s get back to those keyword rankings for a second before we talk about which one is more important. The number one ranked keyword is going to receive the lion’s share of the traffic coming to that Search Engine Results Page. So the reason you want to be listed in the number keyword ranking spot is to capture that majority of the traffic.
So let’s get back to the question, as a real estate agent which should you be focused on, keyword rankings or traffic? The quick answer is both. If you can increase your rankings you’re going to see more traffic. But remember increased rankings bring more traffic, so if your traffic is increasing regardless of what happens to your keywords you’re still meeting your primary goal. Moving those keywords up is going to cause a significant increase in traffic, but any increase in traffic is still the primary goal and should be nurtured and analyzed so you can increase it whether it’s organic, referral, or direct traffic.
