Realtor SEO for the map the portals do not own.
Zillow wins the listing search and will keep winning it. The person typing realtor near me gets back three profiles on a map, not a portal, and that is the search worth having. Realtor SEO, for us, is winning it: the listing for the office and one for every agent, the site, the search and the reviews, run for brokerages and teams around Rockford and the Chicago suburbs.
Ask us where to start Get a free SEO auditProof, from the search box.
What people in Rockford typed into Google each month for the last year, from Google's own numbers. The first search is the portals' and always will be. The second is smaller by a long way, and every one of them is a person choosing an agent from a map. Pick either one up.
Two searches
The portals own the listing search. Nobody owns the map.
Two people, two searches, two different pages. Flip between them and read what each one sees with your name on it, and which one is worth fighting for.
Which one of these is you?
Six lines we hear from brokers and team leads on first calls, and one of them is usually yours.
Real estate lead generation is one of the most expensive terms in this entire market, with clicks averaging into the forties. What that price buys is usually a lead sold more than once, to agents who then race each other to the phone. It is not that paid never works, it is that buying the same name as your competitor is the weakest version of it.
How we run the adsRealtor near me and real estate agent near me together run to well over a hundred thousand searches a month and both of them return a map. Three offices get shown. The primary category, the service areas, real photographs of your actual office and a reply under every review are what decide which three, and almost no brokerage is doing all four.
How we run the listingA brokerage with twelve agent microsites has twelve weak domains instead of one that could rank. Agents should have a page and a profile; the searching, the neighborhood pages and the reviews belong to the brokerage, where they compound instead of walking out the door with whoever leaves.
The pages that do the rankingThat search belongs to portals with budgets and inventory feeds you cannot match, and anybody selling you a plan to beat them is selling you a quarter of nothing. What is genuinely open is the neighborhood, the school district, the question a buyer types before they know what to search for, and your own name.
What we would actually targetAn IDX feed pasted onto a site produces a great many near-identical pages that appear and vanish as listings turn over, and Google treats them accordingly. The feed is a tool for buyers already on your site. It is not the site, and it will not do the ranking.
How we build sitesSomebody leaves, their page stays up for a year, their listings are stale and their email still bounces to the office. Roster changes are the most common edit in this trade and the one most sites make hardest, so we build for it rather than treating each one as a job.
How the ongoing work runsAll of it, for a brokerage.
Realtor SEO and the listings are where most brokerages start with us, and search is one of six things we run. Here is the whole shop, in your situation.
The first ninety days, for a brokerage.
In the order the buyer feels it. The listings first, because that is the map, and the map is the search worth having.
The brokerage listing and one per agent, categories and service areas right, photographs of the agents and the sold homes, every review answered in the office's voice, and call tracking on from day one.
How we run the listingsFast on a phone, the listings feed, a page for every neighborhood and town in the words people type, the agents with faces and names, and an inquiry that reaches a person. If the site is sound we fix it; if it is not, we say so.
What we buildA review ask built into every closing, ads on the seller searches and the neighborhoods you farm, and the first monthly report: inquiries, showings, and where each one came from.
Reviews, answered in your voiceTell us where the office is.
Three lines and we come back to you, usually within a working day, with what we would look at first. No pitch deck, no quote until there is a plan.
Or the free look first: a free SEO audit of your site and your listing, sent over with nothing to sit through. Or call (815) 880-8676.
Questions brokers ask before they call us.
The ones that come up on nearly every first call, answered here so you do not have to spend a call getting to them.
No, and we will not take money to try. The portals have inventory feeds, budgets and link profiles that a brokerage cannot match on listing searches, and that is not a gap that closes with effort. What is open is the map, your own name, the neighborhoods you actually work and the questions buyers and sellers ask before they start browsing. That is where the work goes.
The brokerage. Agent pages and agent profiles are worth having, but the domain authority, the neighborhood pages and the reviews should belong to the office, because that is what stays when somebody moves. Twelve microsites is twelve weak sites, and it hands your best asset to whoever leaves.
Sometimes, and rarely at the price this trade pays. Real estate lead generation clicks average into the forties, and the lead is often sold more than once. Before you spend there we would rather look at what happens to the calls the map already sends you, because that is usually the cheaper leak.
Almost never. A feed produces thousands of near-identical pages that come and go with the inventory, and search engines treat them as exactly that. Keep the feed for buyers who are already on your site and do the ranking with pages you actually wrote.
Not for search or ads. Two brokerages chasing the same rankings in the same market would be paying us to compete with each other. One brokerage per market for that work, and if we are already doing it for somebody where you are we will tell you on the first call.
What we won't promise you.
This trade is sold more marketing per person than almost anything else on this list, most of it priced on hope. Here is the honest version.
Search work puts you in front of somebody at the moment they decide to call an agent. Whether they list with you is the appointment, the pricing conversation and the relationship, and none of that is ours. Anyone quoting you listings from a marketing budget is guessing.
Said plainly because a lot of this trade is sold on the opposite. Homes for sale, and every variation of it, belongs to companies with the inventory. We will point you at what is winnable and decline the rest.
We can build the ask into the close, make it one tap and reply to every one. We cannot write them, gate them, or make a client who was not delighted say they were. In a trade this reputational that line matters more than usual.
Nobody buys a plan they haven't seen.
The free audit is a look at what you already have and what it is costing you, sent over with nothing to sit through. The plan is a conversation about where the business is and where you want it to get to, and it ends with a path written down rather than a quote. Or you call, and somebody who works on accounts picks up.