How to Create an AI-optimized Real Estate SEO Strategy to Rank High in Competitive Markets
AI IN SEOREAL ESTATE SEO
Agnes A. Gaddis
4/22/202538 min read
Generative AI is a game changer for real estate marketing, especially when it comes to personalized content creation. Right now, a lot of real estate agents are using AI to create property descriptions and marketing materials that speak directly to specific buyer profiles.
How this works is: you feed the AI tool with information on your ideal buyer, property details, and market insights. The AI quickly analyzes this data and personalizes the content for the right type of buyer.
Obviously, by harnessing the power of AI, real estate businesses can now create more effective marketing strategies, improve customer engagement, and ultimately drive more sales. AI is being used for much more, including communicating with tenants, identifying investment opportunities faster, analyzing offers, and improving building designs.
Using gen AI in real estate is no longer just a futuristic idea – it's happening now, and it's delivering real, measurable benefits. In fact, McKinsey reports that real estate companies that optimized some of their strategies with AI have seen more than 10% increase in net operating income. That’s a pretty significant boost. And it’s concrete evidence that investing in AI can pay off in a big way.
Using AI tools in your business isn’t just about staying competitive. It’s about streamlining operations, improving customer experiences, and making smarter business decisions. All of these help boost your bottom line.
In this guide, you’ll see exactly how to leverage AI to improve your real estate SEO strategy, rank higher on search engines and take your website’s traffic to the next level. We'll provide actionable real estate SEO tips to help you optimize your content and attract the right visitors—those who are likely to become clients.
Table of Contents
What is Real Estate SEO?
You know how a lot of agents throw up a website and hope for the best? That doesn’t work anymore. If you own a real estate website, you have to be strategic and intentional about how you both create and optimize content to rank high on search engines.
But SEO is not just about ranking high; it’s about attracting the right visitors - those who are likely to become clients. This is the “why” behind all SEO efforts. So it’s not just a technical task you outsource to someone on Upwork. It’s a crucial part of a successful real estate business strategy.
Real estate SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is all about making sure your website shows up when potential clients are searching for real estate services online. The goal is to draw in potential buyers and sellers (while they are actively searching), ultimately leading to more business.
The problem is SEO has gotten more complex, especially now that search engines like Google now rely on AI to decide which websites should rank higher (that is, which websites are most relevant and helpful). Constant algorithm changes by search engines also add to the complexity. With AI now playing a crucial role in evaluating and ranking content, it's clear that our approach to SEO in 2025 also needs to be more sophisticated.
In short, the world of SEO has changed. But the good news is that SEO, which used to be something only big companies with huge budgets could do, is now much more accessible. So while it has gotten more complex and task-heavy, there’s now an abundance of tools that can turn anyone into an SEO pro in no time.
Even with limited resources, as a real estate professional, you can create great content and do a lot of SEO tasks yourself. And whenever you come across technical hold-ups, you can selectively outsource to experts offering specialized real estate SEO services.
But, and this is key, you have to understand that SEO takes time. SEO is a long-term strategy that requires patience, consistency, and effort. You need to have realistic expectations. You should be committed to creating high-quality content and optimizing your website for at least six months to a year to get substantial results. How long you’ll have to wait depends on two things: keyword selection and market competitiveness. The takeaway is, when you’re doing SEO, don’t expect overnight results.
This is very different from PPC advertising, which might give you a quick boost but doesn't last. The good news is that effective SEO not only gets you seen online but also makes you look like a trustworthy expert in your market. Plus, you can reuse the content you create for SEO in other marketing efforts.
Key components of a successful real estate SEO strategy
Keyword research
Remember we said SEO is not just about getting traffic, but getting the right traffic? Well, that’s where real estate keyword research comes into play. Keyword research isn’t just a technical SEO task; it’s a strategic activity that forms the foundation of a successful real estate SEO strategy. If you’re looking to attract more people who are interested in what your website offers, then you should be looking at improving the quality and relevance of the keywords your website targets.
Essentially, that means if you’re a real estate investor targeting sellers in a particular ZIP code, you’d have a helpful and in-depth enough piece of content that targets the keyword “sell my house in [ZIP code]” and keywords related to that. What keywords do is that they help search engines decipher the content of your website. So a user searching for “sell my house in [ZIP code]” can be shown your content.
Keyword research is putting yourself in your potential clients’ shoes and identifying what they search for online when looking for the services you offer. You should do this process before creating any piece of content on your website. If you do a good job of real estate keyword research, you only have to ensure your website meets the needs of people who are searching for those keywords. This is what ultimately leads to higher search engine rankings.
But once you’ve found these keywords, you have to use them strategically in your website content. Generally, the best places to use keywords are in page titles, headers, URLs, meta tags, image alt text, and within the content itself. But you want to avoid keyword stuffing and only use keywords contextually to build trust with both users and search engines.
A successful real estate SEO strategy requires a nuanced understanding of different keyword types and how they relate to user intent. There are three main types of keywords in real estate: generic, local and hyperlocal.
Generic keywords (e.g., how to buy a home) have high search volume but low conversion rates. Local keywords (e.g. “buy a home in San Antonio”) indicate that there’s a higher probability that the searcher is looking to buy a home in San Antonio. Hyperlocal keywords (e.g. 2 bed apartments for sale in Williamsburg, NY) will draw in people who are further along on the buyer’s journey. The downside is that these keywords have the lowest search volume. Effective real estate keyword research will help you balance these types.
But generally, long-tail keywords (phrases with three or more words) have higher conversion rates than broad keywords. So if as a real estate professional, I want to attract serious buyers and sellers, I can't just rely on broad, generic keywords. Instead, I need to prioritize creating content around long-tail keywords (i.e. local and hyperlocal keywords). Essentially, I need to think like a customer who's ready to sell or make a move, and tailor my keyword strategy accordingly.
By combining effective real estate keyword research with on-page SEO for real estate and utilizing real estate SEO services when needed, you can enhance your website's visibility and attract more potential clients.
On-page optimization
It’s not just about having a website. You have to actively optimize each page in it so that search engines can understand what the site offers and show it to the right people. This is what on-page SEO for real estate is about. It ensures your pages are both visible and appealing to potential clients.
On-page optimization involves a lot of detailed work that, when done correctly, can significantly improve how your website performs in search results and how users interact with it. It’s about getting the basics right. That includes optimizing content, ensuring your site is technically sound, and prioritizing user experience.
If you want your website to rank well in search results, you need to regularly update it with valuable information that your target audience is looking for. You also have to pay attention to technical details, like making sure the site loads quickly and works seamlessly on mobile devices, as this will ensure a positive user experience and make it easier for search engines to crawl and index your site’s pages.
After search engines display your content in their results, one of the crucial metrics you’d need to track is your click-through rate. Little things like meta descriptions and header tags can make a big difference in how people click on your website and engage with your content.
By crafting compelling meta descriptions, you can entice more users to click on your link from the search results pages. And by using header tags (H1,H2,H3) effectively, you can organize your content in a way that makes it easy for both users and search engines to understand.
Also, you shouldn't overlook image optimization. Properly optimizing images by compressing them, using descriptive file names and alt text, and implementing lazy loading techniques is a vital task that will not just help improve page load times, but also provide context for search engines. By focusing on these aspects of on-page SEO for real estate, you can enhance your website's performance and improve your online presence.
Content marketing
If you want to drive traffic to your website from the search engines, you need to create high-quality, personalized and localized content. These three criteria get to the heart of what makes real estate content marketing effective. It must be high-quality (actually valuable), personalized (connecting with your specific audience in a meaningful way) and localized (targeting local or hyper-local keywords that convert).
In 2025, if you want your real estate content marketing to succeed, you need a strategy that goes beyond just posting regularly. You need to be smart about it. You want to repurpose content. By experimenting and converting the same content into different formats (e.g., videos, guides, podcasts, infographics), and distributing them through the right channels, you can effectively reach more of your target audience and generate qualified leads.
Get your content out there on various channels, using a mix of owned (your blog, email lists), earned (social media shares, media mentions), and paid (ads). But most importantly, you have to understand who you're talking to. What are their concerns? What are they looking for? If you're targeting first-time homebuyers, your content will look a lot different than if you're targeting retirees looking to downsize.
The point is, you need to be the go-to source of information for your area (for your target audience). That's how you build trust and establish yourself as a leader in your market.
So you can’t just create any content. You could mix in motivational or food content once in a while but the goal of your content marketing should be to create more of the right content that positions you as an expert in your local market. This is the key element of a successful real estate SEO strategy.
Back up your content with solid, local data from reliable sources like Redfin, the National Association of Realtors, local real estate associations, your local MLS, and more. When you combine publicly available data with unique data and insights from yourself and your local team(s), you're not just creating content; you're building a reputation as a knowledgeable and trustworthy real estate expert.
Link building
Talking about credibility, backlinks are a signal to search engines that you're a credible source. And in the competitive world of real estate, credibility is everything!
They are like endorsements for your website from other websites. As a real estate agent, imagine getting a shoutout from a major real estate publication or your local news. That's going to boost your credibility, right? Backlinks do the same thing for your website. Obviously, the more authoritative and relevant these endorsers are, the more significant the impact of their links on your rankings, and potentially traffic.
Real estate link building is an essential part of creating a solid real estate SEO strategy, and one where you can quickly get the edge as it’s usually ignored by your competitors. While on-page SEO for real estate focuses on optimizing your website's content and structure, real estate link building (off-page SEO) helps establish your authority across the web.
You want to get listed in local business and relevant real estate directories, maintaining consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) citations across these directories. You should also leverage platforms like HARO (Help A Reporter Out) to provide your valuable expertise to journalists and potentially earn backlinks.
While backlinks are important, the way you get them matters just as much. Google is smart, and it's cracking down on shady tactics like PBNs (Private Blog Networks) or paying for backlinks. Right now, there are a lot of pay-to-guest-post sites that would do more harm than good for your backlink profile and your rankings. These tactics are considered black-hat SEO and could lead to a drop in rankings or de-indexing of your site.
You should also be wary of link building services that focus on link insertion rather than quality guest posting. Think of it like this: you can build a solid reputation through hard work and honest dealings, or you can try to cheat your way to the top.
Real estate link building is about earning links, not buying them. The latter might seem tempting, but it's ultimately going to backfire. So if you're considering using real estate SEO services for link building, ensure they employ ethical practices.
With that said, writing guest posts on relevant, authoritative websites is still a sure-fire way to improve your website’s authority. Guest posting on reputable websites that are relevant to your niche and your local community is a great strategy, as long as you’re providing real value to their audience. Remember, not all backlinks are created equal. So prioritize quality over quantity.
Local SEO
If you're in real estate, you absolutely must prioritize local SEO. Think about it: when people are searching for a home or a real estate agent, they're almost always searching in a specific location. They're not just looking for "a house"; they're looking for "a house in [city/neighborhood]".
That's why your online presence needs to scream, "I'm the go-to expert in this area!" Your online strategy as a real estate investor or agent needs to be laser-focused on your local market, and local SEO for real estate is the most direct path to achieving this.
You want to dominate the Local Pack in Google's search results. This is the map and the list of businesses that appear at the very top when you make location-based searches.
To be placed there, you need a well-maintained Google Business Profile. I'd treat my GBP like gold if I were a real estate agent or investor - making sure every detail is accurate, using relevant keywords, adding high-quality images, posting regular updates, and actively seeking reviews. Optimizing your GBP is the cornerstone of local SEO for real estate.
Optimizing for local search also entails ensuring your NAP details are consistent. This means ensuring your business name, address, and phone number are the same everywhere - on your website and anywhere else your website is listed.
While we mentioned this before, local SEO is also about localized content. It’s important to ensure that the bulk of your website content is directly relevant to your local market.
The bottom line is, if you want to succeed in real estate, you need to be easily found by people searching in your area. Local SEO for real estate is the key to making that happen.
A powerful tactic for dominating local search is creating neighborhood pages or market pages. This means you’ll create dedicated pages for each city or neighborhood you operate in.
You can also do this based on property types like condos or waterfront homes, e.g. targeting keywords like “condos in Miami Beach” or “Miami Beach Condos under 200k”.
The idea is simple. Someone searching for “condos in Miami Beach” is a much hotter lead than someone searching for “Florida real estate”. By creating a dedicated page for "condos in Miami Beach," you're not only matching that specific search query, but you're also demonstrating your expertise in that particular niche. This is how you attract the right kind of clients – the ones who are ready to buy, sell, rent or invest.
Challenges Faced by Real Estate Businesses when Implementing SEO
Many Realtors and real estate investors get meager results from real estate SEO because of the following reasons:
1. Highly competitive keywords
The real estate industry is highly saturated and many businesses are competing for top rankings on the same keywords. Keywords like “homes for sale [in city]” are almost impossible to rank for, given that you’re competing with platforms like Redfin and Zillow and other more established real estate agencies. This means that if you're a smaller or newer player, you're going to have a hard time breaking through. It's not impossible, but it requires a smart strategy.
One of the reasons many Realtors and investors fail at SEO is because they just throw their hat in the ring for the most obvious keywords. You don't have to try to compete with the big players in your industry for broad, generic keywords. Think of it like this: instead of trying to be a big fish in a huge, overcrowded pond, you need to become a big fish in a smaller, more manageable pond.
Solution: You need to find your niche, target less competitive long-tail keywords, and focus on building a strong local presence. So, instead of just "homes for sale," I might target "luxury homes in Los Angeles" or "affordable apartments in downtown Denver." These are still valuable keywords, but they're more specific, which means less competition.
The second part of the solution is just as important: creating high-quality, targeted and localized content. This is what will attract those specific audiences and establish you as an authority in your market and in your niche.
2. Duplicate content issues
Duplicate content is a widespread problem in real estate SEO, and it’s not just about copying content. It’s often a consequence of a standard industry practice - listing syndication.
The very nature of listing syndication means that the same property information is going to show up on multiple websites. That's a problem for search engines, as they can struggle to know which version is the "original" or the one they should prioritize. While listing syndications do not lead to penalties, your site’s listings might not get as much traffic as it’s competing with other more established sites.
Apart from syndicated listings, which to some extent, is out of your control, using the same descriptions or titles on your site, or copying content from other sites (e.g. your MLS, franchise, or brokerage website) without proper attribution will get you in hot water, too.
This becomes a problem when your site is full of duplicate content. You might get penalized (i.e. you get a big drop in rankings), making it harder for people to find you.
Solution: Make sure your property listings have unique descriptions, even if the basic information is the same (if you can, do this for your syndicated listings too). And when copying from other sites, add proper attribution. Also, you need to learn about and be able to use canonical tags. These are like little signals you send to search engines to tell them which version of a page is the main one, the one you want them to prioritize.
3. Poor website structure and navigation
A good website structure doesn’t just make your site easy for people to use, it also makes it easy for search engines to understand and index your site.
Imagine someone landing on my site and getting completely lost because the navigation is a mess. They're going to get frustrated and leave, right? That's a lost lead. And guess what? Search engines pick up on that too. They see people bouncing off my site quickly, and they interpret that as a sign that my website isn't providing a good experience. As a result, they're going to drop my site in rankings.
Unfortunately, this problem of unclear navigation is something I find very common with real estate sites. Moreover, things like broken links, slow loading times, and outdated sitemaps might seem minor, but they can seriously hinder your site's performance. If search engines can't crawl and index your pages correctly, it doesn't matter how great your content is – it won't be seen.
Solution: You need to fix the basic technical issues like broken links, slow load times, and constantly update your sitemap in Google Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. If you can’t do these yourself, just hire an expert.
Then work on your site’s navigation. If I were building a real estate website, I wouldn't just want people to land on my homepage and get stuck there. I'd want them to explore other important pages, like my listings, neighborhood guides, and blog posts. The point is, important pages should be easy to access from your home page.
Aside from that, you should also have a solid internal linking strategy. Internal links are a strategic way to boost both your user experience and SEO by showing users and search engines how your content pieces connect with each other and which pages are most important. Search engines consider pages with more links more important.
AI in Real Estate SEO
A major change is happening in the real estate industry, and AI is the primary driver. It is reshaping various aspects of real estate marketing, including how we approach SEO.
Gone are the days when you had to manually tweak websites and hope for the best. The best AI SEO tools now offer a more efficient and data-driven way to improve your online visibility. With these tools, you can quickly optimize your website’s content according to current SEO best practices, and analyze target audiences, competitors, and trends. AI SEO tools also simplify the process of creating things like title tags and meta descriptions.
By identifying patterns from large datasets using technologies like machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing, these tools help you make (and implement) SEO tweaks faster.
AI is not replacing humans (at least not yet in creative industries), but rather taking over tedious, repetitive tasks that used to eat up a lot of time - things like keyword research and analytics. AI tools make your life easier as a real estate marketer by quickly spotting keyword gaps and opportunities to improve your rankings and traffic.
Below, we’ll explore how to use AI tools for keyword research, on-page optimization, link building, and more, giving you practical real estate SEO tips and best practices for each use case.
AI-Powered Keyword Research for Real Estate
AI tools streamline the keyword research process. Tools like SEO.AI and Junia are some of the best AI SEO tools for keyword research. These tools are equipped with a number of keyword research modules to help you find the best keywords. Note that keyword research nowadays isn’t just about finding the right keywords, but understanding where you stand in relation to competitors and where you can improve.
Compared to run-of-the-mill keyword research tools, these AI-optimized keyword research tools are created to help you focus on less competitive, highly relevant long-tail keywords.
And apart from the fact that you can quickly use ChatGPT to quickly analyze your competitors’ SEO strategies, you can use SEO.AI’s competitor keyword research tool and similar tools to see what your competitors are doing. These tools can make your real estate SEO strategy more efficient and strategic.
How AI can enhance keyword research
Identifying long-tail keywords
Long-tail keywords reflect how we actually search online and are more likely to bring in the right kind of visitors – the ones ready to engage and convert. AI tools like SEO.AI's long-tail keyword generator make it easier to find these types of keywords. Just input a seed keyword, select your country, and you’ll be provided with a list of long-tail keywords as well as their search volume and ranking difficulty.
You should understand that effective keyword research prioritizes precision and relevance and isn’t just about finding terms to rank for. These AI tools offer a shortcut to finding those very niche, specific keywords that are less competitive and likely to attract quality traffic.
You can also do keyword research on tools like Perplexity.ai or labs.perplexity.ai that can browse the web, using a prompt like this one:
“Give me the top 10 keywords this page ranks for (or could rank for): [page link or competitor page link]”
The downside with this is you’d have to manually check the MSV (monthly search volume) and difficulty of each suggested keyword via tools like Keyword Planner or Ahrefs.
Analyzing search intent
Another aspect of keyword research that people rarely focus on is user intent research. Knowing this allows you to create content that matches what people are looking for, which can lead to better results from content marketing.
Instead of manually having to search Google, AI tools can quickly help you figure out what’s going on with each keyword. Is the searcher looking for information (informational keywords), trying to find a specific website or page (navigational), or ready to buy something (commercial or transactional keywords).
Again, using any AI tool that has real-time web browsing capabilities, just input your list of keywords after this prompt:
“Group these keywords into clusters based on their semantic similarity and user intent. By user intent, I mean group the keywords into informational (is the searcher looking for information?), navigational (is the searcher trying to find a specific website or page?), or commercial (are they ready to buy something or use a service?). Here are the keywords: [paste in your list]
And if I wanted to use the pillar-cluster strategy for my internal linking strategy, the second part of the results is very useful.
When it comes to user intent, you still have to play detective and do some manual research though. While these tools can group keywords by looking at what’s ranking high and what Google is showing in its search results, you have to manually look at the types and formats of content that’s ranking for your chosen keywords. For example, are people looking for articles, videos or product listings?
Overall, using AI for search intent analysis makes the process much faster and more accurate, which ultimately helps us create better, more relevant content.
Optimizing On-Page SEO with AI
AI is a powerful ally for content optimization. Tools like Semrush's SEO Writing Assistant can actually grade your writing based on SEO, originality, readability, and tone of voice, and tell you how to make it better. Semrush’s Copilot can also help you pinpoint content that has declined in performance, and give you tips to refine and improve it. This is like having a personal SEO expert available 24/7.
Some AI SEO tools can even suggest internal links within a website. Overall, AI makes the process of on-page search engine optimization more efficient.
Plus, use alt text to make your site more accessible to people who use screen readers and help search engines understand and rank your images. Descriptive and keyword-rich file names also help search engines decipher the relevance of your images. You want to use file names that, where possible, include your target keywords. Think “SEO-image-optimization-Red-Ketchup-tool” instead of “IMG_785432.jpg”.
When it comes to videos, you need to focus on using the right keywords in the titles, descriptions, and tags so that they show up in search results.
A neat trick for faster loading websites is “lazy loading”. These are HTML tag changes that tell browsers to only load images and videos when they’re actually visible on the screen. So you don’t want to use this for images and videos above the fold (i.e. any content that should be immediately visible when a page loads).
Doing this yourself is a bit technical and might require the help of a developer. And you should only use it when you have a lot of images (40+) or embedded videos on a page. Otherwise, it’s not necessary (doing it wrong can negatively affect your site's rankings).
Moreover, some web building platforms like Wix, WordPress 5.5 (and above), HubSpot CMS, Hostinger Web Builder, and Webflow, already come with lazy loading for images. You can learn more about lazy loading and other image optimization techniques here.
4. Optimized page titles
Page titles or SEO titles play a dual role for your pages - improving search rankings and attracting users. They are the first point of contact anyone browsing the SERPs (search engine results pages) has with your website. They also play a big role in helping search engines understand the content of a page and how relevant it is for specific searches. So, you need to spend time on them.
The rule of thumb for page titles is that they have to include relevant keywords, especially at the beginning. This also makes your title appealing to users searching for that keyword. For example, if someone were searching for “Dallas real estate investment guide”. Having this front and center in my SEO title denotes to both the user and search engines that my page is one of the most relevant pages on that topic.
The core reason for optimizing page titles is visibility. Longer page titles don’t work in your favor. That’s because if your title gets cut off in search results, people might not understand what your page is about and might not click on it. So keep your SEO titles concise (between 50-60 characters).
Lastly, you can include your brand name at the end to build brand recognition. For example, “Homes for Sale in Los Angeles | Real Estate Agency Name". Do this only if it fits within the character limit and this inclusion doesn’t come at the expense of clarity. Your goal with SEO titles isn’t really brand recognition. It’s to make sure the titles accurately reflect the content and entice users to click through from the search results.
5. Headings and subheadings
Both readers and search engines want content that has a logical structure. Organizing your content with headings helps them understand its layout. Having a clear hierarchy shows how different parts of your content relate to each other. To create this hierarchical structure, you need to use headings (H1, H2, H3, etc.).
H1 Heading Tag: Use H1 for the main title of the page. This title should include the primary keyword, and should set the stage for the entire page.
H2 and H3 Heading Tags: Then use H2 and H3 tags to break down the content into subheadings or smaller, more manageable sections. For instance, if your H1 is “Luxury Homes for Sale in Miami Beach”, you could have an H2 subhead like “Top Neighborhoods”. Under the H2, you could have H3 sub-headings like “South Beach” or Miami Downtown.
Headings connect directly to user experience. It’s not as much about pleasing the search engine algorithms as it’s about making it easy for people to read and navigate your content. And when you get good points on user experience, dwell time on your page increases. This signals to search engines that your page is valuable and relevant, boosting your SEO rankings.
So don’t sacrifice readability for the sake of stuffing in more keywords in your headings. Over-optimizing can actually hurt your rankings. Your priority needs to be creating headings that are clear, concise, and actually help users.
6. Internal linking
Internal links help search engines find and index pages on your site more efficiently. And by linking from high-authority pages to low-authority ones, you can strategically boost the authority and search rankings of your less prominent pages.
You can use a tool like Semrush to identify your best-performing pages, and then link from these to relevant pages that aren’t ranking very well. For example, linking from a high ranking blog post on “Top Neighborhoods in New York City” to a page on “Luxury Apartments in Manhattan” will help the latter gain more authority. This is the idea behind the topic cluster strategy.
Anchor texts (i.e. the texts from which linking occurs) are a vital part of an internal linking strategy. You have to choose them carefully, making sure your anchor text accurately describes the destination page (for users) and includes relevant keywords where appropriate (for search engines).
You should also regularly review your site’s internal links to find new opportunities and ensure all your important pages are easily discoverable by both search engines and potential clients. An audit would also help you identify orphan pages (for example, listing pages or blog posts with solid content that have no internal links pointing to them).
And while leveraging AI tools like Junia for internal linking can be useful, you need to be cautious and manually assess each link. Make sure that the AI-generated links are actually relevant and helpful to readers.
Elements of on-page SEO for real estate websites
1. Targeted location-specific keywords
As a real estate professional, we’ve mentioned that you want to prioritize using targeted, location-specific keywords. But it’s not just using location-specific keywords but also creating content that meets local search intent by providing valuable local information. That means if it’s a neighborhood guide, it should talk about school districts, amenities, or community events in the neighborhood.
Don’t try to cast a wide net, but be super-focused on the areas you serve. This approach doesn’t just help you attract qualified leads, it positions you as an authority on those areas, which consequently improves your ranking in local search results.
2. Detailed, unique content
Google prioritizes content quality when deciding which websites to rank higher in search results. It’s like the basic foundation for high rankings on Google.
What that means is that if I want my real estate website to be successful, I absolutely cannot cut corners on content. I need to produce unique, accurate, and detailed information that genuinely helps my audience. I can’t keep producing generic or AI-generated fluff and expect any reasonable results from real estate content marketing.
And how does Google know what content is high quality? Its AI has been trained with years of data to be able to spot content that’s relevant to a searcher’s query within seconds.
Wherever the AI misses the mark, human raters will give scores to each content piece based on experience (depiction of the author’s experience in the content), expertise (qualification of the author), authoritativeness (site authority or domain authority), and trustworthiness (site trustworthiness - brand value, content accuracy, site security and content freshness). This is how they ensure that users find the most valuable and reliable information.
So if as an experienced real estate investor in Dallas, I create a page on Dallas local market trends or Dallas property investment advice, my page would probably score high on expertise. If the website uses HTTPS, the domain has a number of good links pointing to it, I share personal takeaways or insights, my content is accurate and offers real value (zero or minimal AI fluff), and the content is refreshed from time to time, then I’d be likely to rank high over time.
If I wanted to go further and solidify my authority as a comprehensive resource on Dallas property investing, I could organize my content into logical clusters. That is, for example, creating trends content on different markets in Dallas, then inter-linking to them from one another - the page on Fort-Worth links to the page on Frisco, and so on.
Once that is done, the “Dallas local market trends” page now becomes a hub, with links to each of the sub-markets. This is just an example of how you can make your website the go-to resource for a specific niche or market.
3. High-quality, optimized images and videos
You need to balance image quality with file size to ensure your real estate website loads quickly and provides a good user experience. On real estate sites, you’re likely dealing with a lot of photos. The problem is that large, high-resolution images slow down your website. This affects your SEO rankings.
While as a real estate professional, you want to have high-quality pictures and videos of your properties, you also want to ensure they are optimized for the web. What do we mean by this?
First, consider the image format. JPEGs offer a good balance between quality and file size. They are widely compatible with a number of platforms and are excellent for showcasing property photos. PNGs are ideal for high-quality images where detail is crucial. They also offer lossless compression (where you can significantly reduce the file size without sacrificing any important detail). Yet, when you have a number of PNG images on a page, that can slow down page loading times.
The best image format for the Web is WebP. This combines both the benefits of PNG and JPEGs. That is, you get high-quality, clear images and smaller file sizes.
The second thing you should do is resize your images to desktop resolution (or whatever resolution is ideal for your use case), then compress them to minimize website bandwidth usage and ensure fast page load times. Note that desktop resolution (the best resolution for web images) is 1920 x 1080. You should try out ILoveIMG’s tool for bulk image compression. To do bulk resizing of images to screen/desktop resolution or whatever custom size, use RedKetchup’s tool. But you can always just outsource this task too.
AI-powered tools for on-page optimization
Frase - Automated meta tag generation
Using AI-generated meta descriptions can save a lot of time, especially whenever you’re trying to publish multiple pages or posts at the same time. But it also comes with a risk - if your meta description sounds automated, that can lead to decreased rankings. So while you can use tools like Frase to automate the process, you need to edit and personalize the output.
Frase AI’s free meta description generator helps you create meta descriptions automatically, generating multiple variants within seconds. You can then review each variant and select the one that best reflects your content.
All you have to do is input your title, keyword, and choose your desired level of creativity. That is, how creative do you want the output to be? Then the AI gets to work and provides suggested meta descriptions. Another great option you can try is Ahref’s free meta description generator.
Again, you have to understand that the ultimate goal of meta descriptions is to improve user engagement. And if your description sounds automated, rather than entice users, you might repel them. That’ll lead to decreased rankings.
Alli AI - Content optimization suggestions
Alli AI is designed to automate complex on-page SEO tasks, allowing you to focus on strategic planning and content creation. This tool is somewhat pricey, starting at $299 per month, but it allows you to automate the repeatable on-page SEO optimization tasks that will cost you money (on hiring a full-time SEO) or time.
On-page SEO can be a real grind, with all those detailed tasks that need to be done. Tools like Alli AI can handle the heavy-lifting for you. This is especially important for enterprise or brokerage websites.
The Alli AI platform comes with a Live Editor, where you can identify and quickly rectify issues and create automated rules for on-page SEO. This includes rules like automated schema generation for new pages or posts and proactive SEO monitoring.
It also offers automated recommendations. You can approve, edit, change, or unapprove each recommendation directly from a centralized dashboard.
It’s easy to integrate Alli AI with your website (as it works with most major CMS platforms). Once your website is integrated, any changes you make in the Alli AI editor instantly reflect on your website.
All you have to do is input your title, keyword, and choose your desired level of creativity. That is, how creative do you want the output to be? Then the AI gets to work and provides suggested meta descriptions. Another great option you can try is Ahref’s free meta description generator.
Again, you have to understand that the ultimate goal of meta descriptions is to improve user engagement. And if your description sounds automated, rather than entice users, you might repel them. That’ll lead to decreased rankings.
Alttext.ai - Image recognition and alt-text generation
Alttext.ai automates the creation of image alt texts. Writing alt text for every image can be incredibly time-consuming, especially for large websites. Using computer vision technology, this tool can accurately analyze your images and generate relevant alt text. That frees up a significant amount of time for content managers.
This tool integrates easily with popular systems like WordPress, major ecommerce platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce, and headless CMS systems like Contentful. It also has an API as well as pre-built connectors on Zapier, Pabbly and SureTriggers. The point is, you can smoothly integrate it with all major web platforms. Its browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox also mean you can access the tool directly from these web browsers.
Alttext.ai supports bulk processing and can generate alt texts in over 130 languages, making it a versatile solution for all types of websites. You can also create alt texts with Ahrefs’ free AI image alt text generator. But this doesn’t support bulk image alt text generation.
AI-Enhanced Real Estate Content Marketing
AI tools make it easier to create effective, data-driven content. With AI, you can generate content ideas, write rough drafts, edit content, and personalize your content strategy based on user engagement.
But one of the best uses of AI, especially when it comes to real estate content marketing, is analyzing local market trends and statistics to create expert-level content. For example, you could use AI to analyze data from sources like the National Association of Realtors, local real estate associations, add in data from other authoritative sources, and then present takeaways for your audience. Doing this consistently will help you build local expertise and trust.
And when it comes to analyzing content results and ROI, you can leverage tools like ChatGPT. You can feed ChatGPT with Google Analytics data or data on engagement across your social media platforms. It will give you insights to help you refine your content strategy and create content that’s truly valuable to your target audience.
AI-powered content creation assistants
Copy AI - Automated content writing assistance
Writer’s block is very popular, even among the best writers. I personally know how frustrating it can be to stare at a blank page. That’s why I'm always looking for ways to make content creation more efficient (without losing quality and depth).
One of the tools I use somewhat frequently is Copy AI. It does help writers overcome that creative block. It uses advanced language models like ChatGPT 4 to generate various types of content or copy, including blog posts, ad copy, and social media updates.
But note that tools like Copy AI work better for advertising copy than for blog content. And in both use cases, you have to devote time to editing. Personally, when it comes to content writing, I prefer to use these tools to create simplified rough drafts, from which I can actually write. They work best as writing assistants, not actual writers.
And if your workflow is such that you actually use tools like Copy.ai to write content, then a human needs to be involved in the process. The content has to be reviewed and refined to make sure it is accurate, high-quality, relevant, and doesn’t sound like AI-generated content.
Wordtune - AI-powered content editing
Wordtune improves the quality of your writing. Combining machine learning and natural language processing (NLP), it analyzes your text and provides smart suggestions to improve it. This tool is incredibly useful for various writing tasks, whether you’re crafting web content, composing emails, or writing reports.
It can help you rewrite or rephrase sentences or paragraphs, adjust your writing tone to be more casual or formal, shorten or expand text, and edit text for clarity, grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
Wordtune is a versatile AI content editing tool that not only enhances your writing with features like creative word suggestions and AI content generation but also integrates seamlessly into your existing workflow.
Whether you’re writing emails in Gmail, collaborating on documents in Google Docs, or even chatting on Slack, Wordtune is right there to assist you. It also has a Chrome extension. The tool supports translations from various languages into English, and includes a text and video summarizer.
Personyze - Personalized content recommendations
You can enhance user engagement by using AI-driven personalization tools like Personyze. By analyzing a wide range of data points, including personal data, real-time behavior, demographics, geo-location, past transactions, and CRM data, Personyze can predict what each visitor wants to see.
It creates a unique profile for each visitor, combining their individual data with insights from similar users (crowd wisdom). This allows Personyze to recommend products or content that are contextually relevant to the content a visitor is consuming, or to suggest items that others with similar interests have purchased. So this is essentially more useful for ecommerce businesses.
However, I think it’s a great tool for recommending real estate listings or content too. For example, someone who is checking out articles on foreclosures might be interested in foreclosure listings. And someone who is checking out your site from a particular area would be more interested in articles that pertain to that area.
Personyze is designed to make every visitor's experience feel tailored specifically to them, which could lead to increased engagement, longer site visits, and ultimately, more conversions. With responsive widgets that can be customized and displayed anywhere on a website or embedded into emails and mobile apps, it helps you deliver a consistent, personalized experience across multiple platforms.
Additionally, Personyze allows you to monitor the effectiveness of your campaigns through detailed analytics and optimize them using A/B testing to ensure that your personalization efforts resonate with your audience and drive results.
Leveraging AI for Local SEO in Real Estate
By now, you should already know how important having a Google Business Profile is if you want your real estate business to show up in local search results. With AI, the process of managing and optimizing your Google Business Profile is now streamlined.
Tools like Semrush’s Listing Management tool make it easy to update business information, select the right categories, add images, audit your GBP account for issues, and track where you or your competitors rank for specific local keywords.
AI-driven solutions for local SEO
Automated citation management
One of the big issues in local SEO is inaccurate citations. Inconsistent business information such as misspelled business names, incorrect addresses, or wrong phone numbers across different listings can confuse both potential customers and search engines, hurting your rankings.
Automated citation management tools provide a comprehensive solution for managing online listings, from auditing and correcting to distributing and monitoring. Tools like Semrush’s Listing Management, Whitespark, and Moz Local automate the entire process of citation or listing management, reducing errors. These tools not only find you new local citation opportunities, they automatically detect and help correct errors in existing listings.
Automated local citation tools also help you gain strategic insights into your competition, including monitoring their citations. By understanding how your competitors are ranking for local keywords and where they are listed, you can develop more effective SEO strategies that help you stand out in the local market.
Review monitoring and response
By responding to reviews, you’re not only showing clients that you care but also sending positive signals to Google’s algorithm. This is a vital part of local SEO that’s easy to ignore. Reviews and how well you respond to them have a direct impact on your local search rankings.
But responding to reviews is usually the last thing on your mind when you have a number of more important to-dos. This is where AI tools like Local Falcon’s AI Reviews Analysis tool come in. This tool can automatically analyze hundreds or thousands of GBP reviews, extracting the key information and sentiment from each. Once you have this information, you can quickly craft contextual responses.
The tool also spots trends and gives you general insights to help you improve your customer service strategy and your overall online reputation. You can also use it to compare your review sentiment to the competition (i.e. how do customers generally feel about your business vs the competition?)
These AI-powered review analysis tools go beyond simply monitoring reviews; they provide actionable insights into sentiment, highlighting your business’ strengths and weaknesses. By comparing your business's review sentiment with that of competitors, you can identify market gaps and areas where you can improve.
AI tools like Synup can even help you automate review responses across multiple platforms, making your review management process more efficient.
Local keyword optimization
We’ve talked a lot about local keywords. But the point is, by analyzing data from various sources, AI tools can help you understand what your local audience searches for, what their intent is, and how competitive different keywords are.
Once you know these keywords, you can use them in your Google My Business profile, and other local listings to improve your visibility in local search results. You can include local keywords in your business description, service names, and posts. This will help you reach more people.
Building High-Quality Backlinks with AI Insights
Building backlinks is a time-consuming process, and knowing where to focus your efforts is crucial. Thanks to AI tools that can sift through massive amounts of information quickly, it’s easy to find the right backlink opportunities for your website.
AI-powered link building tools can identify the most relevant and beneficial backlink opportunities for your website, assess these opportunities based on relevance and authority, and even streamline your outreach efforts. This allows you to prioritize your efforts, target the right people, and ultimately build a stronger backlink profile that would have a significant impact on your search engine rankings.
AI-driven link building
Linkee - Identifying and analyzing link opportunities
Linkee uses machine learning to find websites that are relevant to your niche by analyzing the contextual relevance between your keywords and the domains or pages of potential link prospects.
The tool allows you to filter websites based on various criteria such as Domain Authority (DA), spam score, word count, and language. It also includes deduplication so you can skip websites that you’ve reached out to before. Apart from that, it can detect and remove Private Blog Networks (PBNs), broken links, and non-secure websites, giving you a clean list of prospects.
The tool has everything you need for finding and reaching out to guest posting and niche edit prospects. It even includes an email finder to gather email addresses from across the web quickly. However, I would recommend using another email tool as most of the emails it finds are generic email addresses like sales@xyz.com.
But once you’ve found your emails, you can connect your mail provider and manage your outreach with Linkee. The platform includes everything you need to send personalized emails, schedule email follow-ups, and keep track of your campaigns.
Personalizing outreach emails
The problem with most guest post outreach emails is that they all sound the same. Almost everyone follows the same templates. Tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT can dive into LinkedIn profiles, uncovering key details you can use to personalize your intro emails. These tools can help you craft emails that hit home, addressing exactly what your prospects care about.
Measuring and Analyzing SEO Performance
To assess how well your real estate SEO strategy is working, you should track key performance indicators like organic traffic, keyword ranking (which keywords are driving traffic?), SERP visibility (how many keywords are ranking on the first page in search results?), click-through rate, bounce rate, domain authority score, backlinks count, time spent on page (how are users engaging with your content?), and conversion rate. Without tracking these KPIs, you’re essentially flying blind.
Data-driven decision making is essential for effective SEO, and the above metrics provide all the data you need. You can use Google Analytics and Semrush's Position Tracking tool to monitor these KPIs.
Conclusion
Remember that AI is a tool, and like any tool, it can be misused. As a real estate investor or agent, AI tools make it easy to optimize your website for local keywords, customize elements like title tags and meta descriptions, and create schema markups.
But you also need to be aware of the potential pitfalls of using AI tools, such as hallucinations (factual inaccuracies when working with facts) and the temptation to churn out low-quality AI content just because it takes ten minutes to get it done.
Human oversight is essential to ensure that your AI-powered real estate SEO strategy is both effective and ethical. I personally believe that maintaining high standards and ethical practices is crucial for long-term business growth.
With that said, when you plan to use AI tools for real estate SEO optimization, you should carefully consider the costs and benefits of investing in these tools. Generally though, the long-term gains in efficiency and improved search rankings can outweigh the initial investment.
And with advancements in AI technology, I believe SEO will continue to evolve. But I don’t think Google is going to lose its dominance in the near-term. In fact, it’s one of the companies driving the growth of the AI industry. So SEO isn’t dying (at least not for now). But we might see some big changes.
You should stick to the fundamentals, keep yourself informed about the latest trends in AI and SEO, and proactively make changes to your real estate SEO strategy when needed. If you do this, you’ll have a competitive edge and maintain a thriving digital presence in your real estate market. Want a free real estate SEO game plan customized for you?
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is the Most Effective SEO Tactic in 2025?
While technical aspects of SEO like keyword research, on-page optimization, and backlinks remain important, the heart of a winning SEO strategy lies in providing real value to the user.
So the most effective SEO tactic in 2025 is prioritizing creating content that truly addresses what people are searching for and doing so in a way that’s either different from or superior to what’s already out there. The core strategy for SEO success in 2025 continues to be putting the user first and delivering exceptional content that meets search intent.
2. How is SEO Used in Real Estate?
SEO in real estate isn’t just about getting seen; it’s about getting recognized as a market leader. So SEO does two things for real estate websites: it brings in traffic and it establishes credibility.
You want to gain the trust of potential clients who are looking for knowledgeable experts to guide them in their real estate endeavors. Real estate SEO practices like creating high quality content, optimizing your website and content for local search, creating location-specific pages, and maintaining an updated Google Business Profile help you showcase your expertise and your understanding of the local market.
3. How Much Does Real Estate SEO Cost?
SEO costs can vary widely depending on factors like market competitiveness, the complexity of the website, content creation needs, and local SEO requirements. Because real estate is such a location-specific and competitive field, effective SEO often requires a substantial investment.
For small real estate businesses, the costs range from $750 to $2000 per month. However, if you operate in a highly competitive area or have a medium to large company, you might need to budget more, potentially between $2,000 and $7,000 or more per month.
4. Can I Do SEO Myself?
Yes, you can handle SEO on your own if you are willing to spend time learning the ropes and if you aren’t interested in cutting corners, but implementing effective strategies. You can use SEO tools to help with your DIY efforts and make the process easier. You can start with these free SEO tools from SEO.ai and Ahrefs.
However, as your business grows or if you encounter more complex SEO challenges, you should consider getting help from experts or an agency to support your DIY efforts.
5. Is SEO Still Relevant in 2025?
While SEO is still incredibly important in 2025, it is evolving rapidly. You need to continue to prioritize SEO in 2025, but you also need to diversify your traffic sources. This means you should incorporate other marketing strategies like video, paid search, social media, and email marketing alongside SEO.
Also, SEO isn’t just about optimizing for Google anymore. Marketers now need to think about how to optimize for AI answer engines like Perplexity and ChatGPT. This has given birth to a new SEO offshoot called Answer Engine Optimization. That is, optimizing content to appear in AI-generated answers. The point is, SEO is changing and to stay ahead, you should keep abreast of the changes.
Agnes Gaddis has been an SEO expert and SEO content creator for over 9 years, across real estate, finance and marketing with publications on websites like Inman, Bankrate, GetResponse, Mention, SparkRental, Rentals.com, Credit.com, among others. Right now, she writes confident content for real estate investing companies and platforms. You can connect with her on X (@alanagaddis)
