SEO strategy advice for a new Real Estae site

[Alina847]

I'd like to get some opinions on SEO budget and strategy for a re-designed of real estate website. Domain name is 8 years old and I run real estate search on it now with old content and low user traffic.
I hired a developer that totally reworking the site now. New site will have addition service for users (to make it sticky),Lots of new data and well structured for SEO.

Real Estate very competitive and some keywords like "<City NAME> home for sale" return 62,000,000. (yes, i didn't typo extra 000 .
we have about 400+ cities that we cover, so its probably unrealistic to be spot 1-3 in Google for all of them.
let's say there is 40-50 keywords per city and I want to rank for as many as I can with about $10K to 20K budget.

1.How far will my money go? (3 month and 1 city or 1 year and 100 cities) ??? guesstimate is OK :D

2.Do I want to back link to homepage for all cities, so I get the best Rank on home page?

3.instead of #2 create baklinks for every city separate to its own sub page http://<site NAME>/<City Name> (deep linking)
If i use approach #2 for only 200 top cities i will need tons of extra links to Rank good.

I need to beet R E A L T O R . C O M, Z I L L O W, T R U L I A and so on...

do you think its crazy=impossible ?

 

[codyjames]

What I would do is use google keywords, and type in keywords and find ones that hit the sweet spot (Have decent amount of search per month, with low competition). Then start building links for those keywords, you have a fair amount of money for seo ranking. I would say maybe pay for backlinks from high PR sites

 

[eBrandStores]

My 2 cents:

Sounds like you have the budget to do some real damage but I wouldn't go giving it to an SEO company just yet. You should probably learn more about SEO first and get a solid game plan going.

I would focus on building up the homepage mostly, giving it a lot of authority. Your going to need to deep link as well though. I would pick a set of keywords that seems reasonable and start to deep link these first. You are going to rank easier and faster for your long tails. Get these ranking first so you can start generating income, which you can take and reinvest.

Don't try to target 400 cities with 100 keywords each. Or anything close to that to start. If you try to rank for everything you will probably get really frustrated and burn through your budget really quickly. Instead, focus on getting smaller groups of keywords and cities ranked. Segment it out and rank, then move on to the next segment. Also, make sure you maintain your previous segments so they don't lose their rank.

Remember that anything is possible given enough time and resources you can outrank anybody. That being said you have to be in this for the long haul. Odds are your going to have to create an authority site in the real estate niche. This may take years to do but if you divide and conquer you can take a small investment and turn it into a massive company in quite a short time span.

Good luck,

-Nick

 

[pappukumar]

Hi,

First try to target the right keywords for the site and than work on back links process for the site.