When I started my 4wallsinphilly.com site, I figured most of my traffic was going to come from the search phrase “philadelphia apartments.” I was wrong.

Today, we have excellent, first, second or third positioning on the first page of the major search engines for this keyword phrase. Yet, the keyword phrase “philadelphia apartments” accounts for less than 1.5% of our total traffic. That’s because people looking for apartments, or to purchase any goods or services for that matter, type in dozens of different keywords.

I know now that it requires research to ascertain what keyword phrases people enter into search engines and which keywords are used most frequently. Even though I’ve been doing this for years, it continues to surprise me what people actually type in.

To demonstrate my research process, I’ll go through the steps I used to come up with the keyword list I use for people looking for apartments in Philadelphia. I start by brainstorming one, two or three keyword phrases that I think people are using to find what I’m offering. In my case, the keyword “apartments” was too broad, so I started with two keywords and quickly came up with:

Philadelphia apartment
Philadelphia apartments
Philadelphia pa apartment
Philadelphia pa apartments
Apartment in Philadelphia
Apartments in Philadelphia

Next, I do some “thinking outside of the box” to come up with synonyms, substitutes or additional words that a person might think to use when searching for Philadelphia apartments. This is especially important, because this is the step that many people miss. Because people frequently fail to perform this step, there is often less competition for the keywords you develop in this manner. Less competition means that your site will get a better placement on search engine results when people use the keywords developed at this stage. In our case, we came up with:

Apt
Apts
Rent
Rental
Philly

In Part II of this “how I did it” article, I’ll introduce you to available keyword research tools. In parts III and IV, we’ll put it all together and create our new keyword list.

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