Andy_Langton - 11:25 pm on Sep 21, 2012 (gmt 0)

I think you need to rethink the approach a little. Perhaps one person a month searches for "homes for sale on the montclair-booton train line". One way of thinking about it is that if you wrote thirty variations on the same theme, that would be thirty visitors a month. But it isn't going to work that way.

For one thing, Google increasing wants to rank the other way round. the best match for "homes for sale on the montclair-booton train line" is either a page about the train line that discusses homes, or a page about homes that discusses the train line. this is a by-product of wanting to select trustworthy resources to rank. So you may well fail to rank anyway.

The other problem is that presumably, you are intending to grow your site over time. Unless you're planning on 're-optimising' your content constantly, your traffic potential is going to remain the same. There's just no room to grow with pages targeting ultra long tail keywords so specifically.

To me, you've made a great start in the thought process - you've recognised that you're not going to compete against big players on their playing field. But I think you've chosen the wrong approach.

You're already thinking about what your audience is looking for, and slanting that towards things that are less competitive. That's good! People looking for journey times are likely to include a percentage of people evaluating a move. So go the next step into seeing what people search for around journey times, and create real content to attract those people. In that way you can start to pick up traffic that includes a decent chunk of your target market, assuming you can find the right ideas.

Doing this is a slower burn, but the potential is that you end up with a site that has a growing audience that are going to be interested in real estate services - and especially interested in the site that already helped them out. And then some of those money keywords might start to look like something you can compete for after all.