How Long Does it Take to Build a Successful Real Estate SEO Strategy?
There’s no doubt about it – building a successful real estate SEO strategy takes a lot of planning, research, effort and most importantly, time – especially in an industry as competitive as real estate.
No matter how much experience you have or how much effort you’re willing to put into it, it’s highly unlikely you’ll see SEO success immediately.
So when can you expect to see results? How long does it actually take to build a successful SEO strategy? Unfortunately, the answer is: it depends… but there are some factors that might help you narrow it down a bit.
The first step in building a successful SEO strategy is outlining exactly how you define a successful SEO strategy. Whether that’s one single long-term goal or a series of smaller benchmark goals, you can’t see success if you don’t know how you define success.
Generally speaking, the goal of building a successful SEO strategy should be to consistently bring in high-quality leads that are within your target demographic and target audience.
And while you can try to set the number of organic leads to define success to you, as an agent, even just getting one, high-quality, ready-to-transact seller lead from an organic source per month that turns into a transaction is enough, at least to start. After that, the more time, effort, and work you put into it, the more organic leads you’re likely to bring in.
Depending on how you define success, building a successful real estate SEO strategy could take weeks, months, or several years, but there are a few considerations that influence how long it might take to see consistent results:
1. Your Ability and Experience
Obviously, to see SEO success, you need to understand modern SEO and know what you’re doing. If you don’t know anything about creating a successful SEO strategy, you probably aren’t going to be able to build one (at least not without a substantial amount of time and effort).
One of the reasons for that is that SEO is also constantly changing (especially now with the advances in AI search), so you constantly need to be developing your skillset and updating your strategy.
While there’s nothing wrong with learning a new skill, if you’re just starting out, it’s going to take a lot longer for you to see results – and if that’s the case, you’re better off hiring an experienced team that understands how to build SEO success in your specific industry.
★ Want to learn more about building a successful SEO strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- The Three Components of a Successful Real Estate SEO Strategy
- Building a Successful Real Estate Off-Page SEO Strategy
- The Basics of Building an Organic, Inbound Real Estate Marketing Strategy
- How to Do Keyword Research for Your Real Estate SEO Strategy
2. Your Competition
If you’re in a very competitive market where a lot of real estate agents have already heavily invested time and effort into their SEO strategy, then that will play a big role in how long it will take for you to see success with your own SEO strategy.
In a very competitive market, it could take years, especially if your SEO strategy is focused on ranking for highly-competitive, general keywords, like: New York City Real Estate Agent (or any other location based keyword in a competitive market).
And while there’s certainly nothing wrong with having a long-term goal of ranking for those competitive, location based keywords, an easier (and often overlooked but more beneficial) approach is to build your strategy around less competitive, more niche keywords focused on the emotional intent of what your target audience is searching for. If you want to learn more about how to do that, have a look at this post called: Creating a Content Strategy Based On Emotional Search Intent.
★ Want to learn about competition in real estate? Have a look at these posts:
- Understanding Your Competition as a Real Estate Agent
- How To Monitor Your Competition’s Digital Strategy, To Improve Your Own
3. Your Technology
If you have an old, dated, website, you’re going to have a much more difficult time building a successful SEO strategy – especially if your competition has a beautiful, well-built website and a modern digital strategy in place.
If your website is templated and built on a platform that’s proprietary to the company that built your website, it might not even be worth the time and effort it takes to build an SEO strategy. While there are a few reasons for this, the main one is if you ever decide to leave them or make another big change, it can be a lot difficult and a lot more work to do so without damaging all the work you’ve put into your SEO strategy. You often won’t have access to all of the analytics, won’t be able to export content easily, and won’t have the general information you need to make the decisions needed to make it successful.
Building a successful, long-term SEO strategy that generates results means investing in the technology (preferably that you own) to back it up.
★ Is it time for you to build a new real estate website? Have a look at these posts:
- How Do You Know When It’s Time to Rebuild Your Real Estate Website?
- How to Prepare a Real Estate Website Project Brief (To Make Your Own Website Project Successful)
- Renting VS Buying a Real Estate Website: Why a SAAS Platform is the Wrong Choice for Agents
4. Your Market Conditions
While whether the market you’re in is currently good or not doesn’t directly effect your SEO strategy, it can certainly affect the amount of people searching for real estate agents or real estate related topics.
If the market is slow, and less people are performing real estate related searches, depending on what goals you set, it could take you more time to see success.
However, a slower market is often a better opportunity as a lot of agents tend to reduce their marketing spend, so the agents that put more time, effort, and money into building their SEO strategy at that time can often set themselves up for accelerated results once the market improves.
★ Want to learn about marketing in a slower market? Have a look at these posts:
- The Power of Specialization in a Low Listings Market
- What To Do If You Have a Real Estate Lead Generation Problem
- Marketing Focuses for Agents in a Low Inventory Market
5. Your Approach, Effort, and Commitment
A successful SEO strategy is never done. Meaning, you continually need to put work and effort into keeping your strategy successful, and simply put, the more time and effort you put into it, the quicker you’ll see success.
SEO is also constantly changing, and what worked five years ago might not work as effectively now, so you need to ensure you’re staying on top of current trends and techniques to make sure you’re doing what works.
This is especially important now in the age of AI search results, like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and more. While ranking in traditional search results is still important, you also need to be sure you’re pivoting your strategy to take into account AI search results.
★ Want to learn more about displaying in AI search results? Have a look at these posts:
- Building a Successful SEO Strategy for AI Search Results
- Pivoting Your Website Content Strategy to See More Success in AI Search Results
- Building an Answers Engine Optimization (AEO) Strategy for AI
Success Takes Time
Depending on the conditions above, you could see results from your SEO strategy fairly quickly, or, it could take years of research, time, and effort – but either way, building a successful SEO strategy is always worth the effort.
By having an understanding of all of the factors ahead of time, you can plan an SEO strategy that gets the results you want, sooner.
Want to learn more about SEO and get more traffic to your website? Our SEO Strategy Building Guide is a mix of curated content and self-guided workbook that will help provide insight on how you can build and implement a modern SEO and overall search strategy.
