SEO for Real Estate Agents

Compete where portals are weak

A portal wins when someone types a street, a building or "2 bedroom flat for sale" plus a town. It usually has more listings, more links and more reviews than you do. Fighting for those searches rarely repays the budget.

Portals handle other searches badly, because they have no opinion and no local memory. This table shows where a local agent has the advantage.

The middle and lower rows are where the local expert has the edge. Build those pages before you spend time polishing listings.

Listings that exist on many sites

Your listings often appear on portals and on your own website. Google says that when it finds duplicate or very similar pages and you have not said which you prefer, it picks the one it judges best. It reads your redirects, your canonical tags and your sitemaps, but the choice is its own.

A feed page with the same photos and text as ten other sites gives Google no reason to pick yours. Move each listing up a level.

1. Feed only. Same text as the portal. Least likely to show.
2. Enriched. Your own opening paragraph, a floor plan, the service charge, the year built and the distance to transport and schools.
3. Original. Your own photos, a short video, viewing notes and the reason the property is good for a particular buyer.

You do not need level three for every listing. Do it for the ones you most want to sell, and for any property you can speak about with real knowledge.

What to do with sold and expired listings

Listings pile up. Each sold property leaves a page behind, and what you do with it affects both users and crawling.

Review your listing archive every quarter. A site with two thousand empty sold pages looks neglected to a visitor, whatever it looks like to a crawler.

Neighbourhood pages that carry weight

A neighbourhood page should tell a buyer something they cannot get from a map. Write what you actually know: the walk to the nearest school, which streets flood, typical service charges in the buildings you sell, parking rules, what the area is like at night, and which agents or surveyors you trust. Cite official figures when you quote numbers and give the date.

Skip pages that swap one town's name into the same paragraph. They add pages without adding information. Our local SEO for small business guide covers local pages more widely.

Agent profiles and reviews

People often check the agent before the property. Give each agent a profile page with a photo, areas covered, languages, licence or registration details where your law requires them, and a way to book a call.

Google's profile guidelines include real estate agents among individual practitioners, who can have their own listing when they are public-facing and contactable. Put reviews on the page if you like, but know that Google makes pages that use local business markup ineligible for review stars when the business controls the reviews about itself, including reviews embedded from a third party.

Structured data

Schema.org has a RealEstateListing type, which is a kind of web page with a posting date. You can use it to label listing pages, and you should mark up only what visitors can see. Google says structured data does not guarantee any special display in results, so treat it as a label that helps machines read the page.

What to measure

Count enquiries by page type: listing, neighbourhood, valuation, profile. If listing pages bring traffic but few enquiries, the pages probably attract browsers. If neighbourhood pages bring enquiries, publish more of them. Our real estate website design guide covers the build side, and our SEO service page explains what we can take on. For a Cyprus angle on portals and foreign buyers, read marketing for real estate agents and developers in Cyprus.