Best real estate SEO company, compared on published evidence

Agencies with a verified published price

How to shortlist a real estate SEO company

1. Decide which searches you are actually buying. Brokerage inventory searches, neighbourhood research queries, agent name searches, and seller intent queries such as valuations and cash offers behave like four separate markets. Make each candidate say in writing which of the four the proposal targets, because a plan aimed at all four at once is usually aimed at none of them.
2. Check the listings feed is crawlable at all. Ask for a live example of a client site where individual listing and community pages are indexed, then check whether those pages exist without JavaScript. Google's guidance on consolidating duplicate URLs matters here too, because syndicated listing text repeated across dozens of sites needs deliberate canonical handling or the pages compete with each other.
3. Ask what happens when a listing sells. Expired listing pages are the single largest source of quiet decay on a brokerage site, and most proposals never mention them. A competent supplier will describe what happens to the URL, whether it redirects, and how the accumulated links to a sold property are preserved rather than dumped into a soft 404.
4. Get retainer, term and ownership in one paragraph. Read the contract for who owns the content, the site and the Google Business Profile when the engagement ends, what the notice period is, and whether reporting continues during it. Ownership questions are cheap to settle before signing and expensive to argue afterwards.

What separates a real estate specialist from a general local agency

The specialist marker is not the vocabulary, it is whether the agency has worked inside your listings platform before. Feeds behave differently across IDX providers and website vendors, and an agency that has to learn yours will spend the first two months doing that on your retainer. Ask which platforms they have shipped on, name for name, and ask for a client site on the same one you use so you can look at the output rather than the promise.

The second marker is honesty about geography. Local results are influenced by proximity to the searcher, so a single office cannot cover an entire metro no matter how good the pages are, and an agency that says otherwise is either inexperienced or hoping you will not check. Google's own guidance on hiring an SEO is blunt about the sales tactics that should worry you, and unconditional ranking guarantees appear on that list.

What moves the price

Three things drive the monthly figure more than anything else: how many pages are being written and by whom, whether the technical work on the listings feed is included or quoted separately, and how many agents or offices are covered. A retainer that covers one office and four content pages a month sits in a very different bracket from one that covers a fifteen agent brokerage with individual bio pages and community guides for each farm area.

Watch for the two structures that make comparison impossible. The first is a retainer with no stated deliverable count, which cannot be priced against anything. The second is a low headline fee with content billed per piece, which reads cheap in the proposal and lands well above the alternative once you count the pages you actually need. Ask both candidates to restate their offer as a fixed monthly fee with a named number of pages and a named technical scope, and the comparison usually resolves itself.

Questions people actually ask

Can an agency get my brokerage above the national portals?

Not for generic inventory searches, and anyone who promises it should be struck off your list. The portals have decades of links and inventory depth. What a local brokerage can win are neighbourhood research queries, agent name searches, seller intent queries and long tail community questions, which is where the money in this niche actually sits.

Should I hire a real estate specialist or a strong local generalist?

It depends on your site. If your listings run through a common IDX platform and your pages are already crawlable, a strong local generalist can do the job. If your feed is the problem, a specialist who has already shipped on your platform saves you paying for their learning curve.

How long before results show?

For neighbourhood and agent pages on a site with existing authority, movement in three to four months is reasonable. On a new domain, or where the listings feed has to be rebuilt first, six to nine months before meaningful lead volume is the honest range. Ask each candidate to state their own expectation in writing so you can hold it up later.

What should the contract say about ownership?

That you own the domain, the site, the written content and the Google Business Profile, and that they are transferred or handed over on request at any time. If a candidate hesitates on any of those four, that hesitation is the answer to the question.

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