Hawaii Investment Advice: SEO for Success
Tools like print and social media are excellent for helping your Hawaii investment operation gain attention and traction in the industry. However, print media is becoming increasingly obsolete. And social media can be a difficult platform for advertising. Posting on Facebook or Instagram only provides information on your business to those who already know and follow you. So how is one to get the word out about his or her Hawaii investment operation online?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools have changed the game in online marketing for Hawaii investment and business in general. Instead of paying for ads and using social media, SEO tools allow you to optimize your web content, ensuring that more people visit your webpage and learn about your business. In this week’s post, we explore the basics of SEO and selecting effective keywords.
What Are Search Engine Optimization Tools?
Search Engine Optimization tools are designed to ensure that a given page ranks highly on a search engine’s list of results. Of course, that list of results depends entirely upon the phrase, or “keyword,” that an Internet user is searching. SEO tools can’t help you rank arbitrarily high on a list of search results. That’s what Google Ads are for. Rather, SEO tools allow you to optimize your content for a given keyword to ensure that, when someone searches that specific keyword, your page is more likely to show up at the top of the results list and, by extension, generate more web traffic and business exposure.
How Do SEO Tools Work?
There are a number of ways in which SEO tools allow you to optimize your content for a higher search engine ranking. These tools typically analyze your text, providing feedback and guidelines for revising your content to maximize exposure. For example: if your keyword density, or the ratio of the keyword phrase to the total word count of your web content, is too low, your SEO program will instruct you to incorporate your keyword more frequently in the text. It may also recommend that you add more content or create internal links to other pages on your website. It will guide you in adding images and revising the URL, meta-description, and other aspects of your page.
Most SEO tools also provide guidelines for improving the “readability” of your text. The purpose of such guidelines is to ensure that visitors on your page actually stay on your page and read your content. And, the longer people spend on your page, the stronger your web presence and the more traction your content will gain. Often, readability tools will encourage you to shorten long paragraphs, incorporate subheadings, and eliminate passive voice. They may also highlight sentences that are too long or redundancies that exist in your text. In essence, readability tools are like personal editors designed to make your content palatable to the layperson.
The Keyword Economy
Identifying effective keywords requires keyword research, which we conduct through Nichebuilder. In seeking a keyword, it is not enough to simply select a phrase that is related to your content. Rather, you must conduct careful research to ensure that your keywords are competitive. To understand how to do so, you must understand the nature of the keyword economy.
Say you have an idea for a product that you want to place on the market. Unless you’re a recreational entrepreneur (if there even is such a thing) you will want to ensure that your product is profitable. You wouldn’t place a product on the market that was in low demand and/or high supply. It simply wouldn’t generate profit.
Keywords work in much the same way, possessing their own supply and demand. The number of people that search for that keyword comprises the demand. And the number of pages that utilize that keyword constitutes the supply. You want to select a keyword that is in low demand and high supply. To do so, you may have to avoid seemingly appropriate yet dangerously generic terms. For example, “real estate investor” might be in high demand, but it’s incredibly high supply renders it an “unprofitable” keyword.
How to Select the Right Keyword for Hawaii Investment Purposes
You must select a keyword that is broad enough to capture sufficient demand and specific enough to remain in low supply. There are a few factors to consider in refining your keyword phrases.
Say that you, like us, are in Hawaii investment in real estate. You search for the keyword “Hawaii Real Estate” and realize that, though in high demand, it is in incredibly high supply. How do you refine your phrase for Search Engine Optimization?
- Make your keyword more specific. One of the best ways to do so is to become more location specific. For example: “Kailua Kona Hawaii Real Estate” may yield better supply and demand than “Hawaii Real Estate.” You can also be more specific about the sector you work in. If you are renting condominiums, “Kailua Kona Hawaii Condominiums” may be an even better choice.
- Engage searchers’ intentions. As an investor, are you looking to attract sellers to your page, or buyers? Are you functioning as a resource for other investors or for those interested in moving to the area? Ascertain exactly whom it is that you are attempting to reach through your page or post. Then think about ways to make your keyword phrase more specific to that group of people. For example: say you have a property for rent and are seeking renters. “Rentals in Kona Hawaii” trumps “Hawaii Real Estate” in reaching your target group. If you are trying to reach others in the field, you might search “Advice for Investors in Hawaii.”