Long Tail SEO and Local Search

I get questions all the time and actually will answer you if you email in or ask on the comment section of the blog. I just got this question from Will Klopp of Morgan hill, California.

Question

Spider Juice Tim,

Love your houseblogger.com site.  I am a small town Realtor and looking to get some "juice" on the search engines so I can make it to page 1.  I have read about long tail and short tale search and wanted to know if you had any datapoints on what are some of the "most relevant" long and short tail search phrases for Realtors.

Is there any guidance you have on what works?

I am in a small town of Morgan Hill, CA and was thinking:

Morgan Hill Real estate, homes for sale in morgan hill, morgan hill mls search, etc...BUT, to me (the novice) it would seem that these would be flooded in content by every Realtor in my market.  What say you?

Thanks for your great articles and insights.

Morgan Hill Real Estate (a.k.a. Will Klopp)

Answer

Will-

Thanks for the question. Long tail in real estate is more or less super long tail.

In other words technically, real estate is fat tail.

City + real estate is long tail because of the qualifier or specifier.
So city real estate for sale, city homes for sale, beachport village condos for sale, beachport village playa del rey condos, etc.
< Would be really into the long tail.

The way to do this so it makes sense and you do not have a site with redundant words all over the place is to break your site down into neighborhoods or as we like to call it sub-localities.

This takes care of the qualifier part and makes sense to a visitor.

Go after larger or fatter words on the page while also including longer tail words in the body of that article or post. That way you can give the harder-fatter tail phrase its needed representation as the topic (title, H1s etc). While also representing the synonymous-long tail phrases in the body.

This makes for a much more organized approach to grabbing long tail keyword phrases.

Cheers,
Tim O'Keefe