Real Estate SEO and Search Strategies to Adopt (and to Avoid) in 2026
Now, more than ever, SEO and search are constantly changing and adapting, and that means to stay modern and effective, your SEO and search strategy should be changing and adapting as well.
While there will always be core fundamentals in SEO that work, there are changes and new techniques happening all the time, some of which are worth investing in, while others are best left behind.
As you plan your overall marketing strategy for 2026, here are some techniques you may want to build into your overall SEO strategy to keep it modern, consistent, and effective – in addition to the core fundamentals that you’re probably already doing:
Adopt: Producing People-First, High-Quality, Helpful Content That Exceeds EEAT
A successful, high-quality content strategy is one of the most important parts of a successful SEO strategy. Without high-quality, helpful content, your chances of seeing success in your SEO strategy are a lot lower; this is especially true as we head into 2026.
Every search engine’s primary objective is pretty much the same: to provide the best possible experience and search results for the searcher, and while there are a lot of different ranking factors that Google (and by default, other search engines) uses to determine that, focusing on writing high-quality, helpful content that truly provides value is arguably the most important one.
So what qualifies as high-quality, helpful content?
It’s well-written, well-constructed, well-thought-out content that has value to the person reading it. It’s content that informs the person and answers whatever question brought them to your piece of content in the first place. It’s content that is well-formatted and stylized so that it’s enjoyable to read. It’s content that solves a problem for them and that they see as being helpful.
But most importantly, it’s also content that meets Google’s definition of EEAT (which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness – you can learn more about it right here).
That means if you’re quickly generating content with AI, copy and pasting it to your website, and clicking publish, you aren’t doing you, your target audience, or even the general internet any favors at all; and you also won’t be producing anything that helps your SEO strategy or overall content strategy either, and in a lot of cases, you might actually be hurting it.
In 2026, more than ever, an investment in a content strategy focused on high-quality content is an investment in your overall SEO and search strategy.
★ Want to learn more about building a high-quality content strategy that performs well in search? Have a look at these posts:
- Creating a People-Powered, People-First Content Strategy
- Creating an Evergreen Real Estate Content Strategy
- Does Using AI-Generated Content Negatively Affect Your SEO Strategy?
- Optimizing Your Content for Humans (And Not Just for Search Engines)
- Writing Successful Real Estate Content that Converts
Adopt: Planning (but Not Over-Planning) for AI Search
There’s no doubt about it: creating an effective SEO strategy in 2026 means ensuring you, your brand, and your business can be found in AI search results and LLMs (like ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc). And while with all of the changes in search this past year, that might seem obvious, but it’s also important that you don’t over plan for being found in AI search results, and stop thinking about how you’re being found in traditional search results (and Google in general).
And that’s because traditional search results are still important now, and they’ll still be important far into 2026.
A successful SEO strategy is all about balance, and if you go too far in one direction, you risk losing what you’ve built in another, so it’s important to make sure your SEO strategy is well-rounded and considers all of the different ways your target audience searches online, and making sure you’re being found in multiple different ways.
★ Want to learn more about planning for AI search, and beyond? Have a look at these posts:
- Building a Successful SEO Strategy for AI Search Results
- Building an Answers Engine Optimization (AEO) Strategy for AI
Avoid: Forgetting About Google Search (You Shouldn’t)
Leading up to 2025, a lot of people thought that LLM search would take over how people search completely and that Google would be left behind, even becoming obsolete – and so, a lot of people went all in on planning for LLMs completely, and forgot all about Google, Google AI Overviews, and Google’s monstrous and loyal user base and seemingly infinite resources.
Depending on when you look it up, you’ll find that Google still controls about 90% of search, and averages anywhere from 10 to 15 billion searches per day (and continually growing year-over-year).
Obviously, you should be planning for LLM search as part of your overall search strategy, but you shouldn’t be focusing on it entirely. Into 2026, it’s likely that marketers will come to the realization that LLM searches only make up a small percentage of overall searches (less than 10%), and if your strategy is focused on it entirely, you’ll be missing out on a lot of traffic and a lot of potential leads.
And because Google has been around for so long, people trust it more, but it’s also a lot more reliable when it comes to search results, as LLMs often tend to simply make things up and/or cite quality sources. Google knows that, and even actively worked to make things difficult for LLMs by removing the ‘& num=100’ parameter from search results that they relied on (you can learn more about that right here), which leads to lower quality results in LLM search results.
Why does that matter? Because LLMs leverage a lot of Google’s search data and rankings, which means they’re all intertwined.
In 2026, it’s likely that optimizing for LLM searches is likely to even out a bit and become less of the wild west, and people will realize that steadily optimizing for Google will mean steadily optimizing for LLMS.
So, while you should cover your bases and work towards building a well-rounded search strategy that includes multiple different ways people search, when it comes to SEO, don’t forget that Google is still the leader and will likely continue to grow as a trusted and reliable source for information well into 2026.
★ Want to learn more about planning a well-rounded search strategy that performs in LLMs and traditional search engines? Have a look at these posts:
- Building a Real Estate Online Presence Strategy to Get Found in LLMs (like ChatGPT)
- The Basics of Building an Organic, Inbound Real Estate Marketing Strategy
- Planning a Successful Real Estate Off-Page SEO Strategy
- Building a Well-Rounded Search Strategy Using Both Organic and Paid Sources
Avoid: Employing Black Hat LLMO Techniques
With the rise of LLMs and AI search, black hat SEO is also on the rise. If you’re not sure what black hat SEO is, it’s anything done specifically for SEO reasons, explicitly to manipulate search engines, that’s seen as overly aggressive or morally wrong – things like keyword stuffing, hidden links and text, inflated low-quality backlinks, etc.
In the early days of the internet, when Google was still figuring out how to rank content, those techniques seemed to work, but over time, they stopped working as Google improved and learned how people were trying to manipulate their search results.
Since using LLMs to search (and LLMs in general) are still relatively new, they’re not as experienced or sophisticated as Google when it comes to returning high-quality results, and because of that, they’re still fairly susceptible to manipulation from black hat SEO techniques, which can be tempting if you’re trying to rank in AI search.
At the end of the day, some of these techniques might work, but your results will only be temporary, and once you’re found out, your website will be penalized – possibly forever, depending on how aggressive the techniques you use are. And even more than that, while it might get you results in LLMs and AI search results, it will certainly hurt your strategy with Google.
Basically, if something is easy to do and brings you near immediate results, it’s probably considered black hat. The fact is, building long-term SEO success isn’t easy, and takes time and continuous refinement – but it’s worth the effort.
★ Want to learn more about building an effective SEO strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- How Long Does it Take to Build a Successful Real Estate SEO Strategy?
- Best Practices When Rebuilding an SEO Successful Real Estate Website
- How to Do Keyword Research for Your Real Estate SEO Strategy
- The Three Components of a Successful Real Estate SEO Strategy
- Why Building Trust is a Key Part of a Successful SEO Strategy
SEO is Never Finished
The key to a successful SEO strategy is to understand that it’s never finished. SEO is a constantly moving target, but it’s also made up of core fundamentals. By ensuring your core SEO strategy is solid, and building in new strategies and techniques if they make sense to, you’ll have a solid SEO strategy in place that returns on your investment time and time again.
After all, continued investment in your SEO strategy is continued investment in your marketing strategy.
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.
