Type a property manager's website into Google's Keyword Planner and you'll get back a long list of searches with volumes and prices next to them. It looks like a shopping list. It isn't one yet. Somewhere in that list are the owners you want, and mixed in with them are renters looking for a house, people looking for a job in property management, managers shopping for software, and tenants trying to log in to pay their rent.
This chapter builds an owner keyword list the way we build one: seeded from the competitors already bidding in your area, sorted by hand, launched on exact match, and protected by a negative list that grows every week. It uses real Keyword Planner pulls from twelve property advertisers around Orlando, our one example market. Your city's numbers will differ, but the sorting works the same anywhere.
A Competitor's Website Is the Best Seed for Your Property Management Keyword List
Start by finding out who's already paying for the owner searches in your area. The right tool is Google's Ad preview and diagnosis page. Checking the results there, instead of searching, keeps your snooping out of your own campaign's impression counts. Look up "property management near me" and "property management company [your city]" with the location set to your market, and write down every manager whose ad appears. Don't click their ads; you'd be spending their money and muddying your own research.
Then take each competitor's website to Keyword Planner. Under "Start with a website," Google lets you "enter any website" and it will suggest searches related to that site's content. Set the planner to the metro where your doors are; owners in another state don't hire you, so their volume and prices don't help. Run your own website the same way. Your own site shows you how Google reads your business, which matters later when Google decides which searches your ads are relevant for.
Keyword Planner's bid ranges are estimates drawn from past auctions, not quotes. In our experience they run high or low by a fair margin, so use them to compare searches with each other rather than to set a budget to the dollar.
One Manager's Website Handed Keyword Planner 450,000 Searches for Rental Houses
We seeded Keyword Planner with each of the four residential managers' websites in our example set and sorted the top 40 ideas from each list by who would type them.
Three of the four lists came back mostly owner searches. On those three, 74%, 74% and 64% of the top-40 volume was owner searches, with company and near-me phrasings at the top. Their pages speak mostly to owners, and the tool picked that up.
The fourth list was different. Its top idea was "rental houses for rent," at 450,000 searches a month nationally, and 70% of the top-40 volume came from renters looking for a home. That site puts its rental listings front and center, so Keyword Planner decided it was a rental search site. Nothing was wrong with the tool. It did exactly what it says: it read the website's content.
The lesson is about where the list comes from. A seed from a listings-heavy site, including your own if your home page is mostly rentals, produces a renter list. If you loaded those ideas into an owner campaign without reading them, most of your budget would go to people looking for a house to rent.
An HOA Firm's Website Fills Keyword Planner With Generic Searches, Not the Boards That Hire It
The four HOA and condo management firms in our set produced the weakest lists. Searches a board member would type made up only 6% to 13% of the top-40 volume on all four national lists. The lists were led instead by generic phrases like "property mgmt," which could come from an owner, a tenant or a student, and by homeowner searches such as "home hoa" from residents looking for their own association.
That fits who visits an HOA firm's website. Most of its traffic is homeowners paying dues or checking rules, and the site is written for them. So for an HOA firm, the board keyword list is mostly written by hand: "hoa management company," "hoa management companies near me," "condo association management," "community association management," each tested in Keyword Planner for volume. Chapter 16 covers the board side in full.
Job Hunters, Software Shoppers and Tenant Logins Ride Along With Every Owner Keyword List
Even the clean owner lists carried passengers. On the three residential lists that were mostly owner searches, job searches made up 7% to 8% of the top-40 volume; "jobs property management" alone draws about 22,200 searches a month nationally. "Property management software" brought in 14,800 more, from managers shopping for AppFolio or Buildium, not owners looking for a manager.
Then there are your own tenants. A company's name followed by "login" or "portal" is someone trying to reach their account, not a new client; one HOA firm's name plus "login" drew about 720 searches a month in the Orlando area alone. If your brand campaign pays for those, it's paying to send residents to a page they already use. Leave your brand campaign on, and put the login words on its negative list.
Here's a starter owner negative list, by theme. Add your own as you read search terms:
- Renters: rent, for rent, rentals, apartments, houses for rent, homes for rent, cheap.
- Residents: login, portal, pay rent, pay online, maintenance request, resident, tenant.
- Jobs: jobs, careers, hiring, salary, assistant, internship.
- Software and tools: software, app, appfolio, buildium, template, spreadsheet.
- Do-it-yourself and learning: how to become, license, course, certification, class.
Check each word against your own business before you add it; a word that's noise for one manager can be a buyer for another. On the leasing side, a negative aimed at the kind of person searching, rather than the thing searched for, can cross a legal line. Chapter 14 covers why.
A Rival Manager's Name Goes on the Negative List, Never Into an Owner Ad Group
Seeding from rivals' sites surfaces rivals' names, and broad match will surface far more of them once it runs. On one HOA firm's list, the name of a national association management company was among the top ideas, at 74,000 searches a month nationally.
Those searches belong to the company being named. Someone who types a specific manager's name is looking for that manager, often because they're already a client. Put competitor names on your negative list so they never sit in an owner ad group. A separate competitor campaign is a different decision with its own costs and risks; if it ever makes sense, it gets its own campaign and its own budget, later, and it's a big if.
Exact Match Keeps Tenant Searches Out While Your Owner List Is Still New
At launch, the owner keywords go in on exact match. Google is candid about the trade: exact match narrows who sees your ad more than phrase or broad does, and it reaches fewer people. That's the trade we want early. Since exact match covers same-meaning searches, a plural or a reordered phrase still triggers the owner keyword, while a renter's "houses for rent near me" stays out.
BrandRocket calls this opening campaign Isolation; it's the hand-bid, exact-match half of the plan. Sort the keywords into the small themed ad groups from Chapter 4, five or six keywords each, so every ad group has one ad written for one kind of owner search. The near-me group, the company-plus-town group, the fees group and the rental-property-management group each get their own.
Negative Keywords Earn Their Keep the Day Broad Match Goes Live
A negative list matters on exact match, but it matters far more later. Google's broad match lets the ad show on searches related to your keyword, not just the same meaning, and that's where tenant searches, job searches and competitor names pour in. We start that broader campaign, which we call Exploration, once the owner campaign logs about 30 quality leads a month, often two or three months in for a smaller account and sooner for a larger one.
Two rules from Google shape how you build the list. First, a negative keyword doesn't stretch to plurals or synonyms the way a regular keyword does (it does catch misspellings), so blocking "rental" leaves "rentals" open, and you need both. Second, a negative works on the words you give it and nothing more, so the list keeps growing as you find new searches. During Exploration's first month, open the search terms report daily; the first time a renter, job seeker or software shopper slips through, block the word.
One agency that sells marketing to property managers says the negative list should end up "10 times the size of your positive keyword list." That's one firm's rule of thumb, not Google's, but the direction is right: on the owner side, there are far more ways to search for the wrong thing than the right one.
Renter Keyword Lists Come Back Clean. The Work Is Splitting Them by Bedroom and Neighborhood.
The leasing campaign has the opposite problem. Seeded from our four apartment communities' websites, three of the lists were 91% to 95% renter searches, and the fourth site returned too few ideas to judge, led by a phrase that mixes its name with a place name. Renters are almost the only people who search for apartments, so the list is easy to get and hard to organize.
The work is the grouping. Split renter keywords by bedroom count and by neighborhood, so the two-bedroom search lands on the two-bedroom floor plan from Chapter 4, and the neighborhood search lands on a page that names the neighborhood. Listing-site names, such as Zillow or Apartments.com, go on the leasing campaign's negative list unless you've decided to compete on them, and Chapter 15 covers that decision.
For the same competitor-seeded approach in other local trades, see how local businesses build a keyword list from competitors' sites.
Next: The Owner Searches to Launch First
Chapter 6 picks the first owner searches to go live, why "near me" searches lead, and when the long tail gets its turn. Earlier chapters cover tracking, where the owner funnel starts, what a door is worth and the owner landing page. The full chapter list is on the Google Ads for Property Management guide home, and our Google Ads management page explains how we'd build this list for you.
