SEO for real estate is the closest you get to a city-centre office on the Internet.

With a streamlined SEO setup, leads roll in like clockwork – you just open up your email inbox or CRM and find your calendar full of qualified, interested clients.  

The best part about SEO for real estate websites?  Once set up, it’s pretty much free. 

But easy now, partner.

The good news is the majority of small or localised real estate agencies have no SEO strategy at all. The bad news is that major property portals do.

An example.

You have a real estate business in Barcelona, and you want the #1 Google spot to get 5,040 hits from people typing in ‘buy property in Barcelona’ each month. Well, so does Pepe, the Head of SEO at leading Spanish property portal Idealista. You think you can beat him?

OK.

Pepe has been Head of SEO at Idealista for 15 years (it says so on LinkedIN). There’s a whole department under him. He’s got the budget. So… good luck!

I’m playing. 

But I’m preparing you for the reality of selling houses via SEO for real estate in Spain when you’re up against the Idealistas, Zillows, Right Moves of this world. How do we beat them?

I’ve got real examples of people beating them everyday, all here below.

TL;DR – with local SEO & content strategies you can be getting leads next week, then scale with confidence.

How to Sell Houses with Real Estate SEO

According to the National Association of Realtors in the USA, 97% of all buyers turn to the Internet while looking for a house – and 44% of all buyers start searching for their next property online.

Here’s the catch: the average page ranking at the top of Google is three years old.

That Idealista page ranking number 1 for ‘buy property in Barcelona’?

It has 68 quality websites backlinking to that exact page (if you don’t know what a backlink is, it’s nothing fancy, just a hyperlink that points to your domain or a specific webpage on your website). 

Backlinks are arguably the number one ranking factor that will get you at the top of Google Search.

Backlinks aren’t something you can get overnight – hence, the average top page on Google is three years old.

But SEO for real estate is not just about getting your website pages ranking in the top three spots for ‘buy property in [insert your desired region/ city/ town]’. If you start thinking about SEO strategy as closing a sale via your website, you can start selling more houses within weeks. 

Case study – real estate SEO sees 120% increase in conversions 

Inside four months, a estate client in a major Spanish city saw a 120% increase in website conversions (users who filled out a contact form to visit a featured property). 

Organic traffic from long-form blog content steeped in SEO strategy grew 1,027% and made up half of the extra conversions, but the second-largest source of conversions came from a secret weapon you can set up in minutes – Google Business Profile (we’ll cover this in Step One below). The remaining conversions came from a social media content strategy – with the majority of leads coming from Facebook. 

Don’t understand conversions? Relax, we’ll cover these in Step Eight. 

What you’ll get from reading this

SEO is more than search engine optimisation.

Done well, SEO for real estate puts copywriting that converts in every possible tentacle of your online business – from a one-sentence value proposition at the top of your homepage to the 2,000-word blogposts that attract customers from the farthest reaches of Google.

A comprehensive SEO strategy for real estate is a lot to explain.

In this blogpost, I’ve broken it down into 10 steps in order of increasing investment of time – and increasing benefit. Step One to Step Five you can do yourself almost instantly. (If you’ve yet to implement any SEO for your real estate business in Spain, little in Step One to Step Five should cost you any money.)

Step Six to Step Ten cost you more time (and money – but I’ll be breaking down costs and telling you how to track any expenditure).

We’re only arriving at an SEO strategy at Step Ten. 

Why?

Because if you haven’t the time understand what real estate SEO looks like, it’ll be harder for you to measure success.

(Bear in mind that 90.63% of content that gets no traffic from Google – and the average website conversion rate in real estate is 0.62%. )

If you really just need someone to do it for you – then contact me for real estate copywriting support.

Otherwise, Step Four and Step Five will teach you to track your SEO efforts with free software you can understand today.

In Step Eight, we’ll analyse how some real estate websites have a conversion rate of 10% or even 21.57% – that means one in five online visitors want to talk to you.

If that’s the kind of SEO for real estate you’d like to see, then the next 25 minutes will give you the best ROI on your precious time today.

Ready?

Let’s learn how to sell more houses in Spain with real estate SEO.

NOTE: I say Spain because I am familiar with the market and have useful case studies to hand – the concepts can be implemented in real estate agencies in any country. 

Step One – Google Business Profile for Real Estate

Nationwide real estate portals have one piece of SEO they can never beat you on.

“Did Pepe slip up?” you ask.

Of course not.

It’s just his office is in the Municipality of Madrid – and not in the remaining 8,130 municipalities across Spain. 

Real world example
Anyone searching ‘property for sale Marbella’ or similar will be met with an Idealista page which scoops up around 1,120 hits per month.

But the average 4,400 monthly searches for ‘real estate Marbella’ will be met with something different – Google Business Profile search results showing three estate agents with a Marbella address.

These businesses are even shown on a Google Maps snippet, with office opening times, information such as ‘online appointments’ and five-star reviews.

Welcome to the world of local SEO. 

An estimated 46% of searches on Google have a local intent – so if you have a real estate office, local SEO is your quickest route to gaining new traffic. 

Here’s what Bright Local found after reviewing the Google Business Profile traffic of 45,000 local businesses of which 2,976 were real estate agencies:

• 500 impressions per month is the average among real estate agency Google Business Profiles
• 86% of impressions come from general Google searches
• 16% of impressions come from a user actually typing in the business’ name
• 24 actions per month is the average among real estate agency Google Business Profiles
• 17 website clicks, 4 calls and 3 Google Maps is the average action spread
• 49% of all businesses get more than 1,000 impressions per month 
• 16% of all businesses get more than 100 calls per month

The average 24 actions from 500 monthly views makes for a conversion rate of 5%.

That means, if your real estate agency office is in Marbella – which gets 4,400 searches a month for ‘real estate Marbella’ – you could be stealing 220 actions from Idealista with a Google Business Porfile that takes minutes to set up.

Setting up your Google Business Profile

Not got a Google Business Profile?

Follow the 17-step slideshow below to get your business on Google Maps (we’ll go through optimisation below).

You might find your business is already listed, in which case you can start the process by clicking on a Google Maps pin to claim it and verify your ownership.

There’s a lot at stake when creating a Google Business Profile for your real estate agency. 

Just three Google Business Profiles appear in Google Search results where there’s local intent.

Trouble is, Google’s official page on How to improve your local ranking says the ranking algorithm is ‘confidential’ to make ranking as fair as possible for everyone.

You also can’t pay for better ranking.

The latest State of Local SEO report from Moz surveyed over 150 SEO experts and used their experience to identify the nine top ranking factors. 

Let’s go through these factors in turn (starting with the most important):

1. Google Business Profile elements. Google only goes so far as telling you to make your business information ‘accurate, complete and engaging’. So do it. Make sure your business name, address and phone (NAP for short) matches exactly the business NAP you have on your website. It may seem trivial, but Bright Local found that 93% of consumers are ‘frustrated’ by incorrect information online and 22% of consumers visited a wrong business location due to inaccurate information. 
   
   Fill in as much information on your Google Business Profile as possible: name, address, phone number, opening hours (inc. on holidays), website URL, business category, secondary business categories, business description, photographs and products (if applicable).
   
   More interesting stats – ConstantContact found that 49% of small businesses never update their business listings and information online, and 50% have seen inaccurate information online.
   
   Bonus – you might set up a unique number for call tracking and analysing Google Business Profile leads. If you do this, add both the tracking number and your regular business number for NAP consistency.
   
2. Google Reviews. Google is the top review site on the web – and 63.6% users say they will check Google Reviews (when a Google Business Profile pops up in Search or Maps) before visiting a business.
   
   It’s obvious Google will rank you higher the more five-star Google Reviews your real estate business picks up. It’s less obvious Google will rank you higher the more you respond to each and every Google Review – especially negative reviews. See the graphic from Wordstream below on top Google Reviews ranking factors.
   
3. Proximity of searcher to the place of business.
   
4. Physical address in the city/town of search.
   
5. Consistency of citations. In SEO for real estate terms, this will be the consistency of your NAP in property portals, directories and other platforms.
   
6. On-page SEO elements. We’ll cover keyword research in Step Two and Step Eight is for SEO housekeeping.
   
7. Local listing engagement. The amount of actions-per-view users take on your Google Business Profile.
   
8. Organic user behaviour. How users engage with your website – how much time they spend on your website, how many times they click on your website, bounce rate, etc.
   
9. Quality/ authority of backlinks to the domain. Backlinks play a big part in both Google Business Profile and Google Search ranking. Quality backlinks should come automatically the more you invest in the quality of your real estate services, your website content, your blog content and your SEO game – but we’ll cover some quick wins for real estate backlinks in Step Ten.

Step Two – Keyword Research for Real Estate

The first understanding for most real estate agencies is that SEO = keywords. 

It’s both true and untrue.

As we’ve seen, you could spend hours embedding the keyword ‘buy property in [insert locality]’ into the page titles, SEO titles, meta descriptions, H1s (main headings), H2s and H3s, image titles, image captions, alt text and website copy only to find your URLs ranking on page 8 of Google Search a year later. 

That’s a lot of wasted time, money and faith in SEO. 

Real world example

There’s a valuable YouTube webinar from 15-year SEO practitioner Aaron Franklin in conversation with a real estate agent. The agent had discovered there are 1,300 monthly searches for ‘Metuchen homes for sale’ (Metuchen, New Jersey, USA, was this estate agent’s primary real estate market) and had plastered this keyword across his website.

Aaron Franklin: “What you’re trying to do here is rank for ‘Metuchen homes for sale’ right? But the reality is, if you do a search for ‘Metuchen homes for sale’ – let me just do that – so the first result is Zillow, second result is Realtor.com, third result Trulia, then Redfin… those are all massive companies. It’s gunna take you years to try and take that search traffic away – I don’t even recommend trying to do it. There are way faster ways to get traffic and build your business. I would focus on doing a local SEO strategy and doing long-tail stuff.”

The real estate agent in the video gets upset because he’d spent ‘two days’ doing keyword research and filling his H1 title, SEO title, meta description and website copy with ‘Metuchen homes for sale’. 

The reality is he should be thankful he hadn’t spent three years doing this.

If you want to implement SEO for instant traffic, your keyword research should focus on two things:

1. Local SEO. Instead of implementing keywords like ‘houses for sale in [insert locality]’ into your website, look for keywords that show local intent. For real estate there’s one local SEO keyword that rules them all: ‘real estate agent in [insert locality]’.
   
   Someone types ‘real estate agent near me’ into Google more than 74,000 times a month. This is one of the biggest keywords you – and one of the only ones you have a good shot of beating the national property portals on.
   
   Don’t believe me? Type in ‘real estate agent near me’ and if it’s Idealista claiming spot one instead of a local real estate agency contact me and I’ll write you a free long-form blogpost.
   
2. Long-tail keywords. A long-tail keyword is a longer phrase that typically has fewer monthly searches – and fewer competing websites. While this could be ‘houses for sale in [insert specific neighbourhood within your town or city]’ it’s likely the major property portals are already targeting it. Type it in to Google and see if Idealista or Fotocasa or Kyero are onto it.
   
   You might find a winning long-tail keyword when combining a popular type of property with a specific neighbourhood in your locality – think fincas, villas, duplexes, newbuilds, bank repossessions, rent to buy, penthouse, townhouse, building plots, etc.
   
   For example, where I live in Spain, local real estate agencies fill up the top 10 results on Google for ‘villa with sea view for sale in Javea’. The top result only gets 5 hits per month – but that’s five people who want exactly what 123javeavillas.com are selling.

The most immediate use case for local SEO is making your Google Business Profile rank much higher.

Include local search keywords immediately in both the business description of your Google Business Profile and your website copy and SEO (H1 titles, SEO titles, meta descriptions, website copy, etc.).

Long-tail keywords might be a little trickier to implement. 

Not all long-tail keywords have local intent – so they won’t lead to your Google Business Profile popping up with the Google Maps snippet. Long-tail keywords are not usually for your main H1 titles, SEO titles, website copy and business description in your Google Business Profile.

If you have built your website – or have a web developer or CRM that includes web support – the best thing you can do is build landing pages targeting a series of long-tail keywords most likely to convert into customers. (We cover landing pages in Step Nine.)

You can tailor-make these landing pages to only show property listings for the relevant property type and specific location. 

Long-tail keywords can also bring in traffic from specialised blog content. Many buyers might want to know about property prices in your area, the process to buy a house, the nearest beaches, the best restaurants, landmarks, the cost of living – the list really does go on.

Step Three – Content for Real Estate SEO 

When I started SEO copywriting for a real estate agency in a major city in Spain, the most popular pre-existing blogpost was about a Japanese method for tidying houses.

The blogpost was 398 words long. 

It had provided the best day of traffic from Google Search – but the post hadn’t led a single user to fill out a contact form to view a property in Spain.

If you’re planning to implement SEO for real estate, blog content can be the next best way to bring in new users to your website.

To create content that converts, you’ll need to tailor it towards long-tail keywords that people actually buying houses in your region might want to read. You’ll also want to tailor your content based on the real estate services you offer and the types of houses you sell.

Here are five example blog titles – and the real estate services this blog would be relevant for.

1. Housing Prices in [insert city] in Q2 2022 – real estate in a large city in Spain
2. Spanish Property Guide – What is a Finca? – real estate in a rural part of Spain 
3. How to Calculate ROI on a Property Investment in Spain – luxury private property agent where investors are an ideal client
4. Top 10 Hobbies to Enjoy in Spain – real estate agency where retired expats are an ideal client
5. [Insert town] best residential areas – real estate agency in town popular with foreign expat buyers 

Keyword research comes before content in this 10-step guide to SEO for real estate.

But the truth is that content should always come first.

SEO software (we’ll cover this in Step Six) can tell you what the most popular keywords are – but they can’t tell you who your ideal client is and what they’d like to read.

Only you, the real estate agent or business owner, has this information. 

When my real estate client in a major city identified their core neighbourhoods – and after discovering these were the areas where the local property market was booming – I was able to create a tailor-made blogpost about citywide housing price trends.

The blog included custom infographics and paid-for stock images that appealed to well-informed ideal clients buying in these upmarket areas.

Finally, the conted hinged around a long-tail keyword with 390 monthly searches and no Idealista page in sight. 

The resulting long-form content became the top performing blogpost for within a week of launching on Google – and created a 350% boost in contact form submissions from Google / Organic searches in three months of going live vs previous three months.

Real world example 

I had a client in 2022 who wanted to build a totally separate website, which would generate leads for his real estate business.

So we created 20+ blogs that targeted popular keywords and answered everything you could want to know about the Spanish town where his real estate agency operated. This kind of strategy is called a ‘digital mayor’ strategy – because you become the go-to resource for everything about the town.

Nine months in, we won a backlink from one of the world’s top 100 domains. For free! And the article that linked to us was advertising buying property in the town. What could have cost €50,000 upwards ending up costing less than 1/10 of that, plus the client has guaranteed traffic and lead generation for the next 5+ years now the blogs are ranking higher than ever.

Step Four – Google Analytics 

An estimated 3.2 billion people used the Google Chrome browser throughout 2021.

Google also dominates the back-end of websites, with the free Google Analytics software used by 74% of the 10,000 most popular websites in the world. 

Did I mention it was free?

Oh, I did. 

Just checking.

If you’re starting out with SEO for real estate, Google Analytics will be your go-to tool from now until even after you decide to invest in pricy SEO software (see Step Six). 

The set-up process is straight-forward without having any knowledge of HTML coding, but each website builder will have a different method.

Find links to guides for the following most popular web-building platforms for real estate:

• WordPress
• Webflow
• Wix
• Squarespace
• Placester
• (If you’re using a specific real estate CRM platform that offers website creation, and it’s not on this list, leave a comment so I can improve this blog)

If you’re installing Google Analytics from 2022 onwards, your best bet is to use Google Analytics 4 (GA4). 

Here’s a list of the three most useful tabs under Reports the main menu and what you’ll use them for:

• Acquisition – In this tab, you can find the Acquisition overview which tells you how many users have visited your website over a customisable time period. The Acquisition overview also generates reports on where how these users arrived at your website: direct means there was no data or the user typed your URL direct into the browser; organic search means they clicked through from Google Search; organic social means they clicked through from social media; referral means they clicked on a backlink on a separate website which led to yours.
  
  You can find more details about how users arrived and engaged with your website in User acquisition and Traffic acquisition tabs.
  
  Acquisition is key to figure out where the majority of your website traffic is coming from. You can identify where you need to improve and spend time and money. Crucially, this helps monitor the success of your real estate SEO efforts.
  
  If you created a Google Business Profile in Step One, you can find analytics of clicks and impressions in the Insights tab of your dashboard there. However, the data is incomplete and best tracked by adding utm parametre to the URL you provide to Google Business Profile (essentially, you create a custom Google-friendly URL which will be easily tracked on Google Search Console as I show you in Step Five). You can build a custom utm parametre in minutes using the in-house Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder. Once you’ve generated your tracking URL you can then add this into the ‘website’ field in your Google Business Profile.
  
• Engagement – In this tab, you can find the Engagement overview which tells you more about how users engaged with your website. This is broken down into: page_view which tells you how many pages were visited; user_engagement which gives an overview of ‘events’ (default events are clicks, first-time visits, page views, scrolls, and session starts); and then there’s a selection of all default events, but you can customise according to your goals (e.g. event tracking for lead generation file downloads, scrolls to a certain area of a page, clicks on a certain button or area, etc.).
  
  Engagement is key to find out which pages and blogposts are receiving the most page views. There’s little point in creating a stunning website with information-rich blogposts and not checking if anyone’s actually reading them
  
  The Engagement tab also includes Conversions. These will be your most valuable metric. Inside GA4 you can easily set up conversions to track how many people filled out an online contact form (e.g. to request viewing a property). Tracking conversions and acquisition is fundamental to understand the success of your marketing and SEO for real estate efforts. I’ll take you through setting up a simple conversion metric in Step Eight.
  
• User – In this tab, the Demographics sub-menu item will tell you what country your website users are in, their towns and cities, their gender split, their interests, their age and their language. The data is not always 100% accurate but can be useful to figure out whether you are targeting the countries of your ideal clients effectively.
  
  In the Tech sub-menu item, you’ll find out what devices (mobile/ desktop/ tablet), what operating system (Android, iOS, etc.), what web browser, what screen resolution users are viewing your website on, and much more. Most likely, more than 50% of users will be visiting your website on mobile devices – so check if your website looks clean and neat on mobile. Better yet, get a developer on it.

Real world example 

Google Analytics helped me to reduce unnecessary Google Ad spend and Organic Search traffic for a real estate client in a major Spanish city.

First of all, I could identify in about 30 seconds flat what the top performing blogposts were on Google Search – and just as quickly figure out the average time spent on that page plus other engagement metrics were poor. The problem? The pre-existing blogpost was about 400-words long and lacked in-depth information as well as other SEO housekeeping errors. Fixing this, the Google rankings and engagement data improved accordingly.

Second of all, I could easily identify that a Google Ads campaign was predominantly bringing in clicks from Nepal, Pakistan and India – countries in which my client did not have their ideal clients. A quick block of these countries, and focus on higher lead converting countries, reduced overall ad spend without affecting the conversion rate.

Step Five – Google Search Console

Google Search Console is the most valuable tool for analysing real estate SEO success. 

But it’s easiest to set up after you have Google Analytics connected to your website.

Follow the steps in the slideshow below to get connect via Google Analytics:

Below are top four tabs you’ll use regarding SEO for real estate:

• Performance – In this tab, you’ll be able to see a line graph of all the clicks, impressions, the click-through-rate (CTR) and the average position of your pages on Google Search results. There’s a lot to look at, but the key variables for you will be QUERIES and PAGES.
  
  QUERIES will tell you what users typed into Google Search, and how many clicks and impressions your website pages and blogposts received as a result.
  
  PAGES will tell you what how many clicks and impressions your website pages and blogposts received in total, depending on the time period you’re looking at
  
  The Performance tab of Google Search Console will tell you whether you’re getting any organic search traffic, and whether you’re getting it for the keywords you identified in Step Two.
  
  If you created a custom tracking URL using utm parameters as discussed in Step Four, you can see how many clicks you got by navigating to the filter buttons > + New  >  Page… > URLs containing > then type in a word or section of the utm parametre you created (e.g. ‘gbp’ or ‘google’ or ‘campaign’) > see the results.
  
  The average click-through-rate for results in position 1 on Google is 43.32%; for position 2 it’s 37.36%; for position 3 it’s 29.9%; for position 4 it’s 19.38%. If your click-through-rate on a page with high impressions is lower than these, think about improving your SEO title and meta description.
  
  If the average position for a page or blogpost is greater than 10 (i.e. not on page one of Google) then you have a problem of poor content (see Step Three), poor SEO housekeeping (see Step Seven) or poor domain authority (see Step Ten).
  
  
• URL inspection – This tool, which should direct you to a search bar at the top of Google Search Console, lets you verify whether a page of yours is even indexed on Google Search.
  
  If the result shows a page or blogpost is not on Google, but not due to an error, you can request indexing. This process usually takes a few days.
  
  
• Page experience – In this tab, Google Search Console will flag up any errors or UX issues with your website: core web vitals, mobile usability, HTTPS status. You want all of this to be showing up as ‘good’ or in green colours.
  
  Google – the platform you want to display your SEO for real estate efforts – is literally telling you something is wrong here. Many times this could be a website issue a developer needs to fix, and if you have no web development knowledge at the very least you have a (free) tool here telling you there’s something that needs fixing.
  
  
• Links – This tab will tell you how many hyperlinks exist on other websites which direct users to pages on your website – external links – as well as how many hyperlinks links exist on your website which direct users to pages within your website – internal links.
  
  If you’re a real estate website using MLS databases or actively promoting your listings on property portals in Spain, it’s likely that Idealista or Indomio or Spainhouse.net are there among your Top linking sites.
  
  This tab is useful if you have specific landing pages (see Step Nine) or blogpost content (see Step Three) which you want to rank at the top of Google Search. If you’re not ranking top (backlinks are a key ranking factor) you can install a free Chrome browser extension like SEOquake or Mozbar which, once installed, will show a useful bar below every Google Search result informing you how many backlinks a page has. If you have a higher domain authority (DA) but fewer backlinks (and your content has good Engagement metrics on Google Analytics and a good CTR on Google Search Console) then you need more backlinks to rank in position one on Google. 

Most paid-for SEO software (see Step Six) will need to connect to your Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts to even set them up. 

If you’re serious about improving your SEO for real estate, it’s well worth mastering the basics of these two free tools in order to troubleshoot problems and have proof of your real estate SEO successes. 

Real world example 

An adventure tourism business published a series of blogs about the best hidden beaches to a local Facebook group in the town where I live in Spain.

The content was outstanding – well over 2,000 words, and they even had a list (with in-house pictures) of all the fish species you could spot at the different beaches. There was just one problem: none of these incredible blogs were even on Google Search. When I reached out to the business owner to check their SEO strategy, they did not believe what I was saying.

The immediate problem was the business owner had not used the URL inspection tool on Google Search Console to check the pages were indexed. During an after-hours visit, we requested indexing for them all and – voila! – a few days later they had their rightful place on page 1 of Google for their relevant targeted keywords. 

Step Six – SEO Software for Real Estate

If you’re just starting out with SEO for real estate, you can do a lot with just Google Analytics and Google Search Console. 

I say this because SEO software can be far more comprehensive – and far more expensive – than what you really need. At the same time, if you want to dominate the real estate SEO game you’re going to need the tools this software provides.

If you’re looking to hire an SEO agency or freelance SEO copywriter like me, you’ll want to reassure yourself they’re using this big-name SEO software. 

I rely on this software every single day.

If I want my SEO copywriting to rank above the competition and deliver for my clients, I need keyword research and competition analysis tools that Google Analytics and Google Search Console just don’t provide.

If the agency or freelance copywriter you’re hiring does not use this software, they’re arguably in the dark along with you.

Here’s an overview of the top four most popular paid-for SEO software platforms:

• Ahrefs – the second largest website crawler after Google
  
  What: Ahrefs is one of the most recommended SEO tools online. Ahrefs can help you get detailed information on your competitors, like backlinks (including which websites are backlinking to them). It will also help you check and fix SEO issues (like broken links) with in-depth site audits so you can make your website as attractive as possible for the Google Search spiders. The keywords explorer tools will help you identify important keywords and build out an SEO strategy for real estate. You can also use the rank tracker to track your ranking progress.
  
  Cost: from €890 annually for Ahrefs Lite (suitable for small businesses) to €8,990 annually for Ahrefs Enterprise (for big enterprises and SEO agencies)
  
• SEMrush – SEO tools used by more than 10 million marketing professionals
  
  What: SEMrush is likely the most data-driven and comprehensive SEO software on the web. You can easily assess your Google rankings, as well as identify ranking opportunities and compare your website to competitors. Site audits will identify any problems you need to resolve, while the On Page SEO Checker will give you strategy ideas, backlink ideas, semantic ideas, content ideas, SEO ideas and SERP features ideas.
  
  Cost: from €1,177 annually for SEMrush Pro (small in-house teams) to €4,417 annually for SEMrush Business (large agencies and enterprises).
  
• Moz Pro – Backed by the largest community of SEO professionals on the planet
  
  What: Moz has one of the oldest (since 2004)  and comprehensive SEO blogs out there (I’ve linked to the Moz Blog them multiple times already in this SEO for real estate blog). Moz Pro can help you with site audits, rank tracking, backlink analysis and keywords research. The SEO Learning Center and Beginner’s Guide to SEO are fundamental resources – and free.
  
  Cost: from €931 annually for Moz Pro STANDARD (SEO basics) to €5,643 annually for Moz Pro PREMIUM (large in-house marketing teams and agencies).
  
• Ubersuggest – Generate thousands of keyword suggestions – one-off payment
  
  What: Developed by SEO and content marketing entrepreneur Neil Patel, Ubersuggest specialises in generating hundreds of keyword ideas, both short and long-tail, for anywhere and in many languages across the world. The paid-for software offers rank tracking, backlink checks, competitor keyword and backlink analysis as well as an SEO audit function for your own website.
  
  Cost: Ubersuggest lets you pay a one-off ‘for life’ sum starting from €290 for Ubersuggest Individual to €990 for Ubersuggest Enterprise/ Agency. 

All of the above SEO software platforms offer free trials and free audits or keyword idea generation. There are also many free SEO software tools on the internet which let you analyse everything from on-site SEO issues, to backlinks, keyword opportunities, competitor website stats, and more. 

One of the top free SEO software platforms out there is the Screaming Frog SEO Spider Website Crawler. You can download it as a desktop application and use it to:

• Find broken links
• Analyse page title & meta data
• Audit redirects
• Discover duplicate content
• Review any pages blocked from Google spiders
• Check and create sitemap.xml files
• Audit hreflang attributes (for multilingual websites)
• Check and visualise your site structure

If you’re considering investing in SEO software for your real estate agency in Spain, you’ll most likely be using it for SEO audits, competitor analysis and keyword research. 

Step Seven – SEO Housekeeping for Real Estate 

Poor SEO housekeeping on a your real estate agency website will scuttle the chances of any SEO copywriting fulfilling the objective at hand.

Here’s an overview of five key areas of SEO housekeeping you need in place for any SEO strategy for real estate to be effective:

• Sitemaps – The first thing you should do after connecting a website to Google Search Console is to submit your sitemap.xml file. Depending on what website building platform, developer or CRM services you’re using, this should already be in place (try typing in www.yourwebsitename.com/sitemap.xml and see if a sitemap page pops up). If you have a sitemap, submit it by going to Index > sitemaps > add a new sitemap > submit.
  
  A sitemap helps Google crawlers or spiders rapidly get an overview of your website’s entire structure and directory of pages and blogposts, and hence index and rank your content. Without a sitemap in place, you would likely need to index each of your pages manually to Google Search Console (plus anytime you make any minor changes).
  
  
• Mobile usability – As more and more people use smartphones to browse the internet, Google is also placing increasing importance on mobile usability for ranking factors. This is evidenced by the dedicated tab for it on Google Search Console, with detailed error warnings like ‘text too small to read’, ‘clickable elements too close together’ and ‘content wider than screen’.
  
  Many times the issue of mobile usability is an issue your website developer, agency or support will need to fix – but you’ll also need to be aware of any issues.
  
  According to the NAR’s Real Estate in a Digital Age, 76% of homebuyers used a mobile or tablet device during their property search in 2021. Millennials used a mobile phone seven times as much as the Silent Generation (70% vs 10%).
  
  
• Broken links – Google Search Console and all the top SEO software platforms will regularly warn you of broken links. This happens when a hyperlink on your website leads to a 404 error page – i.e. the URL does not exist any more, or never has.
  
  Google crawlers will pick up on broken links as they lead to poor UX, and hence will rank your website lower in Search results (Google Search Console will warn you of broken URLS for indexed pages). They’re also annoying for users on your website and could force an exit before a lead is converted.
  
  If external websites are backlinking to URLs that no longer exist on your website, you may need to set up URL redirects to ensure no intended traffic is lost en route.
  
  
• Duplicate titles/ content – It’s common for real estate websites to have a wide range of property listing pages with the same titles, same content and same SEO titles and descriptions. Be aware, because these can seriously hamper your ranking chances as Google crawlers do not know how to distinguish between your site’s pages.
  
  If the issues are on your main website pages (many free SEO tools will inform you of duplicate titles and content) then you should customise these straight away.
  
  Where property listings are concerned, it is actually wiser for real estate websites to block these pages from Google Search altogether using the robots.txt file. This stops the chances for any duplicate content to hamper your ranking, and lets you develop a landing page strategy (more on this in Step Nine).
  
  
• Website loading speed – Google Search Console will also inform you when you website pages have slow loading speeds. Slow speeds obviously frustrate users, and so Google crawlers will no want to rank your website pages higher.
  
  This is usually an issue for website developers to fix, however where SEO for real estate is concerned you could be using extremely high resolutions images and videos which drag your website speed down into the red.
  
  There are many solutions to this, such as using a CRM which generates smaller picture and video sizes onto your website.
  
  
• Site structure – For Google spiders and users to easily flow through your website, you need good site structure.
  
  Poor site structure is like those IKEA megastores where you can’t even find the checkout. Good site structure is like a supermarket, where aisles are labelled by product type and there are checkouts by the door. Site structure is determined by how you build your URLs (i.e. everything after the www.example.com/ bit).
  
  Most real estate agency websites will use a hierarchy structure, with just four to five subdirectories (e.g. www.example.com/properties-for-sale, www.example.com/about, www.example.com/services, www.example.com/contact, www.example.com/blog).
  
  All pages appearing under these subdirectories should be correctly structured to ensure a smooth flow through your real estate agency website.

SEO audits whether free (using software like Screaming Frog) or paid-for (as in Step Six) will identify a wide range of SEO housekeeping issues for you to fix.

But you can start with Google Search Console, which will inform you of the most serious issues.

Step Eight – Conversions for Real Estate Websites  

The most effective way to implement Google Analytics into a wider SEO strategy for real estate is to create and track conversions.

On Idealista’s very own publication conversion page they use an example where the conversion rate (i.e. number of times a browser contacted for a visit / total number of property views) was 0.25%.

Uprealer analysed conversion tracking among 126 real estate companies with more than 50,000 monthly users.

The average conversion rate for real estate agency websites was 0.62%.

The conversion bumped up for the number of contact forms filled out per pageview of a property listing – but only to 1.5%. 

Uprealer’s conclusion was this: the best real estate websites have a conversion rate of 2-3% and the worst have a conversion rate below 0.3%.

There are case studies of real estate websites with a conversion rate of 21.57% – however, the webpage is suspiciously down in 2022 and the webcache page explains conversions were for people requesting a property management consultation.  

Conversion rates were a lot higher for real estate developer websites, averaging 4.3% for pageviews of new build property listings.

The process used to require some back-end website knowledge, using Google Tag Manager containers.

But after Google Analytics 4, conversion tracking is quick and easy for no-coders. 

Below, I will walk you through the four steps to set up conversion tracking for the most widespread action – and most likely to convert into a buyer – for real estate websites. 

Here’s how to set up conversion tracking for online form submission (e.g. a user requesting to view a property listed on your real estate website):

1. Create a ‘thank you’ page. The simplest way to set up conversion tracking for everytime a website user submits an online form is to create a unique page on your website – typically a page that says ‘thank you’ and perhaps ‘one of our agents will be in touch to organise a visit soon’.
   
   The complexity of step one will depend on both your web building platform and the ease with which you can create a new page (or have a developer do this for you). As an example, let’s say you create a page with the subdirectory ‘thank-you’.
   
   Once you’re happy with the wording and design, hit publish.
   
2. Create a new event in Google Analytics 4. Open up Google Analytics and navigate to Configure > Events in the menu.
   
   Hit the ‘Create event’ button and then hit the ‘Create’ button again in the pop-up window. Give a Custom event name. In the screenshot below, I’ve gone for form_submission_conversion (don’t use spaces or uppercase characters).
   
   Under the Matching conditions heading you’ll need to set up two conditions. The first tells Google Analytics we’re configuring a page_view event (event_name equals page_view). The second condition tells Google Analytics to only track data for pages with ‘thank-you’ in the URL (page_location equals thank-you).
   
3. Configure a new conversion in Google Analytics 4. Open up Google Analytics and navigate to Configure > Conversions in the menu.
   
   Hit the ‘New conversion event’ button and fill in the ‘New event name’ field in the resulting pop-up window. This will be the same name as the event you just created – i.e. form_submission_conversion.
   
4. Test it’s working. To check you’ve set the conversion tracking up successfully, navigate to Reports > Real-time in the menu.
   
   Now go to your website and fill out the online form yourself until you are redirected to the ‘thank you’ page. Go back to Google Analytics and you should see this registering as a conversion in real-time.
   
   Later on, you can view all conversions according to the time-frame you wish in the regular Reports snapshot page under Reports. 

Once you start receiving conversion data, you can navigate to Reports > Engagement > Conversions. 

Here, you will be able to get instant analysis of how many conversions you’ve clocked in your desired timeframe, as well from what source (e.g. specific referring URL, Google, bing, baidu, facebook, mailchiimp, etc.) and what medium (e.g. organic search, referral, organic social, email, etc.). 

This information is vital to monitor your real estate SEO efforts and any aspect of your content marketing strategy.

The more you can identify where your best conversion rate is coming from, the more you can invest time and energy into building out your SEO strategy or wider content marketing strategy for your real estate business.

Here’s a few more conversion metrics you might want to track:

• Sign-ups to your real estate newsletter (e.g. for blog content, exclusive listings, service updates, etc.)
• Users who stay on your website over a time threshold, or view more than a specific number of properties in the same session
• Users who click on a button or hyperlink detailing your real estate agency services
• Users who fill out another lead-generating online form (e.g. for mortgage calculators, an area-specific property market report, a .pdf brochure of your real estate services, an auto-generated property valuation, a personalised property valuation, etc.)
• Users who download a document 
• Users who view a video of a property 
• Users who scroll to or click on a contact phone number
• Users who visit a Contact page

Real world example 
When a real estate agency in a major city in Spain contacted me for freelance SEO copywriting services, the first place I turned to was the conversion rate – a low-end 0.36% across the website.

The conversion rate varied quite significantly when looking at conversion by source/medium on Google Analytics:

1.46% for Google Business Profile traffic
0.9% for Facebook traffic
0.44% for direct traffic
0.25% for organic traffic
0.15% for CPC traffic (Google Ads campaign)

With a general trend for low conversion, a developer came in to improve the overall website UX, with custom property listing titles that explained the location and property type (previously the 300+ listings had duplicate titles which just said ‘property for sale’).

Next up was improving the Google Business Profile (it only had a one-sentence description with no keywords) to capitalise on the already high GBP conversion rate. Facebook traffic was improved through a social media campaign which posted a series of photographs of each property with much more detailed information and attractive copy (Facebook traffic increased 643% in a month). 

An SEO strategy for real estate in the particular area in Spain also boosted Google Search traffic 44% in a month to bring record traffic into the brand-new website. 

In the first month following these changes the goal conversion rate jumped to 0.76% across the website – with the conversion rate for Google Business Profile and Organic Search up to over 14%. 

Step Nine – Landing Pages for Real Estate Agency Websites

Landing pages come into their own in an SEO strategy for real estate.

In Step Seven, I mentioned that any web developer worth their salt will block property listings from being indexed by Google. This is to avoid duplicate content – but also, remember, I said in the introduction the average page in position 1 of a popular Google Search result is three years old.

Why would you want to spend time perfecting back-end SEO on a property listing page which – in an ideal world – has a lifespan of just a few weeks?

Furthermore, you’re never going to see a property listing ranking in position 1 when you’re targeting a keyword like ‘property for sale in Marbella’.

As we looked at before, your eager property listing page will be drowned out by major property portals like Idealista – and they’ll be doing it with a landing page. 

Which brings us to the most common type of landing page among real estate websites: a subdirectory that targets a specific location, and includes listings of all your available properties or rentals in that location. 

Though your individual property listing pages may come and go, the location-specific landing page will live on. 

Create landing pages for specific neighbourhoods within the target location of your real estate agency – and you can start winning high-value traffic, albeit in low volumes, that’s likely to lead to conversions.

As we looked at in Step Two, you can identify long-tail keywords that include both specific neighbourhoods and specific property types – and then build a series of landing pages around those. 

Real world example

Though DM Properties in Marbella might not rank in position 1 on Google for ‘property for sale in Marbella’ it does take the top spot for they query ‘frontline beach villas for sale in Marbella’.

How? With a landing page titled exactly ‘Frontline Beach Villas for sale in Marbella’. 

DM Properties is also in position 1 of Google with landing pages for ‘Marbella golden mile property for sale’, ‘guadalmina urbanisation’, ‘la zagaleta villas for sale’, ‘luxury villas marbella for sale’ and more.

Another strategy to create landing pages that rank in position 1 on Google is to create well-written copy explaining the history, landmarks, culture and general overview of a neighbourhood in your target location.

While you may get fewer conversions from users not necessarily in the market for buying houses, greater traffic can mean more backlinks, greater domain authority, and therefore the opportunity to rank your high-converting pages much higher as part of a wider SEO strategy for real estate.

Here are a five more examples of high-converting landing pages for real estate websites:

• Create landing pages that offer (automated or personalised) property valuations in your target real estate market. By giving you their contact information, you can start a conversation with someone thinking about putting their house on the market.
• Create landing pages that offer reports about living in your target real estate location, or a report on the property market in a specific area, and offer users the chance to opt-in for emails concerning the latest properties for sale in that area.
• Create landing pages that offer mortgage calculations for a specific location, and market email content or property listings to users who give consent and their contact details.
• Create landing pages that offer information on specific problems, like how to value your house in a target location, or how to buy a house in a specific jurisdiction, or a buyer’s guide to different types of popular properties (villas, fincas, duplexes, penthouses) and then create call-to-actions for users to get in touch with your real estate agency.
• Create landing pages that detail in-depth case studies of former clients who made a successful property investment, or bought a buy-to-let property, or a rent-to-buy property, and include a call-to-action for users to contact your real estate agency to discuss their situation. 

Step Ten – SEO Strategy for Real Estate

If you’ve read this far, you’re likely in one of two camps:

• You’ve had a lightbulb moment for how you can achieve instant wins concerning SEO for real estate, boost conversions or build a better website
• You’re feeling overwhelmed by the scale of what you need to do

If you’re in camp two, let’s have a statistics timeout. 

The National Association of Realtors found that just 16% of realtors in their network used a blog to effectively capture real estate leads. A bigger 28% relied on MLS sites and databases, while 52% – the biggest proportion – relied on social media (mostly Facebook). 

Though that social media statistic is high, 54% of respondents said they were doing it because they felt it was ‘expected to have a presence on social media’ – i.e. the majority of real estate agencies aren’t taking social media seriously when it comes to the huge potential for lead generation. 

In fact, just 11% said they actually get leads for social media. 

So who knows what they’re using it for?

Further information from the NRA Real Estate in a Digital Age report dropped this bombshell: 31% of real estate agents have no website at all. So if you’re even on the internet, you’re in the top two-thirds of real estate agencies.

If it’s the challenge of backlinks that scares you, SEMrush studied more than 2,000 real estate firms in the USA.

They found that 60% of the backlink profile of real estate agencies was in professional and general directories (30% each). It means that you too can create a strong backlink profile just by listing your business (remember NAP from Step One?) for free on websites like AgentFinderSpain.com.

You could also pay to be listed in directories on website with a high domain authority – in Spain, this could be Expatica or thinkSPAIN for example. 

In essence, nothing about an SEO strategy for real estate in Spain is complex.

It just takes time. 

Here’s a recap of how you can combine everything we’ve discussed in this 10 step guide to SEO for real estate in Spain, by platform:

• Real estate website. Build a website and create your Google Business Profile. Fill out all the information possible and fill the business description and extra services with long-tail keywords for searches with a local intent e.g. ‘real estate agency in Palma de Mallorca’. See Step One and Step Two for help. 

• Real estate landing pages, a real estate blog – or both. So, you want the holy grail of SEO for real estate – automated lead generation?
  
  Decide whether you want to create informational blogs that answer specific pain points in your ideal customer’s property-buying or property-selling journey, or you want to just focus on landing pages that target long-tail keywords by specific neighbourhood and/ or property type. Or both.
  
  Use some free or paid-for SEO software for keyword research, set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console, and keep optimising and improving. See Step Three, Step Four, Step Five and Step Nine for help.
  
  Create online contact forms and set up conversion tracking to identify which of your landing pages and blogposts generate the highest conversion rate. Optimise and improve. 

• Real estate social media. Don’t be the 52% of real estate agents who use social media because they feel they should. Update your followers with your newest listings, and include as many pictures and as much information as you can (with links to a property page where you can convert them).
  
  If you have informational blogposts, share them to your page and to relevant groups or hashtags.
  
  If you want to follow the popular ‘digital mayor’ approach many real estate agencies use, then become a core information source for everything about your target location and use social media for what it was built for – engaging communities with amazing content.
  
• Real estate CPC campaigns. Using your keyword research, you can create Google Ads campaigns targeting high-value search queries with compelling copy. With CPC campaigns you can not only compete with major keywords like ‘buy property in [insert town or city]’ but you can also track the conversion rate of every euro spent.
  
• Master real estate SEO. With all the above in place, you can start aiming for position 1 on Google for extremely high-value search queries. By now, you should know what kinds of blogs and what kinds of landing pages bring you the most conversions. In the SEO for real estate game this is going to mean content of an exceptional quality combined with a streamlined UX experience on a website which exudes professionalism and authority.
  
  Use paid-for SEO software to make sure your website is in mint condition (see Step Six and Step Seven for help). Perform SEO audits regularly. Cut out the errors and sub-par performance ratings. Use ranking tracking tools to create extensive keyword lists and track your performance. When you’re not ranking high enough, improve content, build backlinks, build internal links, refine site structure, better your SEO housekeeping, analyse competitors, build your on-site metrics, don’t give up. Optimise and improve.
  
  Focus your efforts on landing pages that lead to the most conversions. Build your whole SEO for real estate strategy around driving traffic here. Capture those leads, keep them warm, and do what you were doing before you started this whole SEO game – sell some houses in Spain!

I hope you got a lot out of this 10-step guide on SEO for real estate in Spain. Please do contact me with any case studies, points I’ve missed or tips you found most useful. If you want any SEO copywriting support for your real estate agency, I would love to talk to you.