Another question from Jason Richards:

How do you determine whether or not to target common search phrases vs uncommon search phrases? How do you find a happy medium?

As a general rule of thumb, specifically targeting uncommon search phrases is not a good use of time. It only makes sense to “target” and “optimize for” keywords with a decent amount of traffic since targeting and optimizing a website takes time. If ranking #1 instead of #5 or 6 for the keyword “ballard street fair dates and times 2012” and the traffic potential is 3 additional visitors a month? It’s probably not worth your time. If you are an agent with unlimited time to spend on your computer, then chances are good you aren’t spending time with clients (and probably aren’t making any money). Remember, you have to factor in the opportunity cost of your time before tackling any task you choose to undertake.

If you consistently produce content about your local area, you’re going to start to attract organic long-tail SEO traffic (meaning from uncommon search phrases) without specifically targeting those terms. That said, one thing I would recommend related to long tail traffic is to pour through your Google Analytics once a month and figure out what 3 long tail keywords are driving the most traffic to your website. Check your Google rankings for those keywords and, if you are not in the top 3, then investigate whether there is significant enough traffic potential to warrant spending additional time by doing keyword research related to those terms. For each term that’s fairly non competitive with decent search volume, write more content over the next month or two about that same topic (making sure to link back to your original post that’s already ranking) in an effort to boost that post’s rankings in hopes of attracting additional traffic.

In short — don’t optimize for uncommon search phrases until you know there is traffic potential associated with those keywords worth chasing.