Real estate SEO for the searches the portals do not own
Real estate SEO works by conceding listing search to the portals and taking everything around it: neighborhood detail, seller questions, agent name searches and the local pack. We run it as a monthly retainer.
Start where every agent already is. Zillow, Realtor.com and Redfin hold the top of almost every homes for sale query, plus the app on the buyer's phone, and nothing you publish changes that. An agency pitching those keywords has not looked at the results page.
What is still open is everything a portal cannot write. Why one school boundary splits a street down the middle, and what that does to prices on the cheaper side. What the HOA in that subdivision charges, and what the fee covers. What a seller nets here this year.
Andmotive builds and maintains WordPress sites and has since 2018. Selling SEO monthly is the newer half of the business, and there are no agent results to publish. What is on offer is technical work and reporting you can verify yourself.
More on this:how the monthly SEO retainer is structured·real estate website design and build·SEO work on an existing WordPress site·sites we have designed and built
Why agent sites stall
Chasing listing queries you cannot win
Budget spent on homes for sale in your city buys impressions nobody sees. The portals have the feed and the install base.
IDX pages identical to 400 other sites
Your MLS feed renders the same description on every agent site in the board, and Google keeps one. Rarely yours.
A blog written to a calendar
Five hundred words of spring cleaning tips lists nobody.
Sold listings turning into dead URLs
Listing pages vanish at closing, and a site can build thousands of broken URLs in a year unnoticed.
What the monthly work covers
Neighborhood pages with something in them
One page per area you work, carrying HOA dues, school zones, median days on market from your MLS export, and the date it was checked. Portals run the same statistics everywhere.
The selling side, where the margin sits
Seller queries convert better and cost less to win: what to fix before listing, what a net sheet looks like, how buyer agency agreements changed in 2024.
IDX handled as a technical problem
We check what your plugin outputs: which domain the listing pages sit on, where the canonical points, what happens to a URL at closing.
Reporting you can open yourself
Rank tracker screenshots are the currency here, and they are not what Google reports. Real estate SEO gets measured in your own Search Console.
Copy that respects Article 12
The Code of Ethics asks members to present a true picture in advertising, and Standard of Practice 12-10 names deceptive use of metatags and keywords. Old agency work still hides rival brokerage names in title tags.
Shipped every month
- A month one audit of index coverage, IDX output, canonicals and Core Web Vitals
- Google Business Profile work: categories, service areas and the questions section
- Reporting from your own Search Console, portal owned queries excluded from targets
- Writing at 1,200 words or more per page, drafted from a call with you
- A quarterly review that reforecasts, or recommends stopping the retainer
What is left to win once Zillow has the listing pages
How the retainer runs
First we draw the line. Every query you care about gets sorted into portal territory, local pack territory, or open ground, and the retainer funds only the last two of the three. That conversation takes about an hour on a call, and it saves a quarter of wasted writing.
Then the IDX audit, because it decides how much of your site Google will keep at all. We inspect a live listing URL, read its canonical, check whether the vendor serves it from a subdomain you never verified, and count how many listing URLs sit in Search Console as crawled and not indexed.
Content comes after that, and slowly. One neighborhood page done properly beats twelve stubs. A stub with a map embed and two thin paragraphs is exactly the thing the portals already beat, so you supply the local knowledge on a twenty minute call and we write the page from it.
Links come from unglamorous places: the chamber of commerce you already pay dues to, the charity run you already sponsor, the local paper that already quotes you on the market every spring. We ask rather than buy them. You see which requests were ignored and which ones landed.
- Portal owned queries named out loud and deliberately dropped
- One neighborhood page at a time, fact checked by you
- Your IDX vendor settings read before any writing starts
- Monthly rolling, cancel on thirty days notice
The first quarter, week by week
- 01
Week one, sorting the queries
We pull your query data and mark every phrase as portal owned, winnable, or local pack only. You see the list before a page is planned.
- 02
Week two, IDX and index coverage
Listing URLs, canonicals, closed listing behaviour and the sitemap get checked against what Search Console has really indexed. Anything needing no design decision ships that week.
- 03
Week three, the neighborhood map
You pick the areas worth owning and we brief a page for each one. Briefs name the data we need and the questions the page has to settle.
- 04
Monthly, write, ship, ask
One or two pages, the technical backlog, the link requests we are making for you. The report shows which landed.
- 05
Day 90, then quarterly
Impressions and clicks get compared against the dated baseline, split by whether the query was ever winnable. Flat results with no explanation get said out loud.
What it costs
How many neighborhoods you want
Two done well is a smaller retainer than eight done thinly. Eight thin ones also risk reading as a doorway set, which is worse than never publishing.
What your IDX vendor allows
Some platforms hand over template control. Others render listings inside an iframe you cannot touch, and the work moves to pages you do own.
Brokerage or single agent
Forty agent bios and six offices carry more pages, more schema and more duplication risk than one agent working two zip codes.
How much of your time we get
Local knowledge is the one asset a portal cannot copy, and it lives in your head. A monthly call makes the writing better and the retainer cheaper to run.
Check this before you buy content
Open one live listing detail page on your own site and view source. On a good number of IDX installs the canonical there points at the vendor's domain, or at an idx subdomain, which means the crawl budget and any credit go to them. Search Console will not warn you, because that subdomain is a separate property you almost certainly never verified. Check it before anybody sells you a content plan.
Sources:Article 12 of the REALTOR Code of Ethics on truthful advertising·Google's documentation on canonical URLs and duplicate pages
Pick one subdivision you want to own, then send the HOA fee, the school boundary and last year's median days on market out of your MLS export. We will draft the page outline from it and send that back. If the outline comes out thin, the page would have been thin, and you learned that for free rather than after two quarters of retainer.
Brokerages running forty agent bios across six offices should ask for the duplication audit instead. Different problem, different first month, and the IDX canonical check comes with it.
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What agents ask us
What is real estate SEO?+
Real estate SEO is the work of ranking an agent or brokerage site for the searches that end in a listing appointment or a buyer call. In practice: neighborhood pages, seller guides, a Business Profile somebody actually maintains, and IDX configured so it helps.
Can an agent outrank Zillow?+
Not on homes for sale queries, and no honest agency will say otherwise. The portals hold the inventory, the apps, and two decades of accumulated links. You can beat them on neighborhood specifics, seller questions, your own name, and the local pack.
Is IDX content bad for SEO?+
Duplicated MLS descriptions across hundreds of agent sites will not rank, and they fill your index with pages Google crawls then discards. That does not make IDX useless, since it converts visitors who arrived another way. Configure it so the thin pages stop competing with your writing.
How long does SEO take for a real estate agent?+
Neighborhood pages are the slow half, because they need links as well as words, so plan on two to four quarters each. The quick wins sit elsewhere: fixing an IDX canonical or a wrong service area changes what Google indexes within a fortnight. Your own name ranks almost at once.
Do agents still need a website?+
Yes, for reasons that have nothing to do with listing search. It is the only place you control the message, it is where your name query lands, and it is where a referral checks you out before calling. Portals rent attention. The domain is yours.