The Best Keywords for Apartments: Branded Keywords

Looking for the best keywords for your apartments can be tricky, but did you know that your brand name can be a great asset to build your keyword list? Most people don’t understand the reason marketers are bidding on branded keywords when people are already searching for them. But not for long!

Below are four reasons why our team recommends bidding on your branded keywords. Let’s get started!

First, let’s define branded keywords. Branded keywords are keywords that include your property name. These types of keywords have a lot of similarities to long-tail keywords, which are specific keyword phrases with high click-through rates. 

Branded Keyword Examples: 

Non-branded keywords are relevant to what you’re advertising but don’t include your property’s name. In addition, these keywords can be expensive and competitive to bid on.

Nonbranded Keyword Examples: 

Why bid on branded keywords?

Branded keywords provide an excellent opportunity for your community to show high on the paid portion of a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). When searchers put your property name in their search terms, you already know they are looking for your property information specifically.

Your ads for your branded terms should be extremely relevant to searchers’ needs. Moreover, ad relevance is an important component in Quality Score. Quality Score is Google’s rating of the quality and relevance of your ads and keywords in an SEM campaign. A highly relevant ad with a high-quality score is generally granted a higher position once an ad auction occurs.

Your competitors are most likely not bidding on your branded keywords because you are the property associated with that keyword. Without the competition, your branded keywords are cheaper to bid on. 

Some competitors might try to add your branded keywords to their keyword lists in order to steal your traffic. Google will generally punish this by awarding low-quality scores and high average CPCs to those who bid on branded terms that aren’t their own. Bidding on branded keywords that are not your own lowers your average CTR, raises your average CPC and lowers your quality score. As a result, we generally don’t recommend doing this.

Having your apartment name rule the search results page leaves no chance for competitors to interrupt your SERP with their ads. Both ads and organic search results will show up when people search for your property name.

For example, when users search for a property name on Google, the first result would be a property’s ads. Following ad results will be organic results like the home page or blog of an apartment website. The rest of the Google results page will most likely be filled by different apartment rating websites like apartment.com, etc. 

Additionally, dominating your property SERP allows you to push down any negative reviews and results that you do not want users to see. Take all the space to show your searchers what your community can provide by highlighting key features and attractions within your ads and organic results.

Branded search ads can compensate for poor organic search results because it increases the chance of your property showing on top of the Google search page. 

SEO requires a lot of work and time to show on top of the search result, but your branded ads should always show at the top of the page. If your SEO is not performing as well as you’d like, branded search ads can make up for that in some capacity. 

Now it is your turn to brainstorm all the branded keyword phrases you need to add to your keyword list. Get ready to see the results!

Don’t forget – we’re always here to help. Our in-house digital marketing team specializes in all digital ad platforms. Schedule your demo or learn about our REPLI Ads today!