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Real estate SEO company
A Real Estate SEO Company That Does Not Pretend You Can Beat Zillow
Moha is a real estate SEO company for agents, teams and brokerages. We start from the thing most agencies will not say out loud: the portals have already won the listing searches, and the money is in the searches they cannot serve. We also keep your neighbourhood content inside the Fair Housing Act, which is where the best performing pages in this industry get people into trouble.
Free, and no call required. We check what your IDX feed is doing to your index while we are there.
Built around the portals · Fair Housing aware · Reporting on enquiries, not sessions
The thing nobody tells you first
You are not going to outrank the portals, and that is fine
Every other trade we work with can win its main search term. You cannot. The portals hold the listing searches with budgets, backlinks and inventory no individual agent or brokerage will ever match, and an agency that sells you a plan to beat them on "homes for sale" is selling you a year of nothing.
Where the openings actually are
Three places, and all three are things a portal structurally cannot do. Knowing a neighbourhood well enough to write about it honestly. Being a person with a name, a track record and reviews. And answering the transactional questions that sit either side of a listing, which is where the seller is and where the commission is.
A portal has a page for every address in the country and nothing to say about any of them. You can say what the parking is like on that street, which blocks flood, how the school catchment actually works and what a house like that sold for last spring. That is the asset, and it is the only one in this industry that cannot be bought.
And the search engine knows the difference
This is not wishful thinking about Google being fair. Search results for "homes for sale in X" and for "what is it like to live in X" look nothing alike, because the second question needs an answer rather than an inventory. Chasing the first is where budgets die. Owning the second is ordinary search engine optimization, done where the competition is thin.
If an agency promises to rank you for your city plus "homes for sale", ask what it plans to do about the portals sitting above you with a hundred thousand referring domains.
There is no good answer. The plan that works routes around them instead.
Where a buyer or seller finds you
Three ways somebody ends up on your page instead of a portal
Each one needs a different kind of content and a different part of the site, and almost every agent website we audit is built for only the first of them.
Looking for a person, not a house
Somebody ready to list runs a realtor near me search, or searches your name because a neighbour mentioned you. This runs through the Map Pack on Google Maps and through reviews. Google ranks that block on relevance, distance and prominence, and unlike the listing searches, the portals are not in it.
Researching an area before a move
Months before anybody contacts an agent, people read about where they might live. These are the highest value pages you can own, they rank in the organic search results, and they are also the ones that have to be written with the Fair Housing Act open beside you.
AI Overviews and ChatGPT
Assistants now answer the research questions outright: what an area is like, what the process involves, what things cost. Google states there are no special requirements to appear in AI Overviews. Genuinely local writing is quotable. A syndicated IDX page is not.
What a real estate SEO company should actually do each month
Our SEO services for real estate agents are aimed at the searches the portals cannot take: neighbourhood content, seller intent pages, the Google Business Profile, IDX and technical work, reviews, your personal brand, link building, AI search, Fair Housing review and reporting on enquiries.
The first month is usually spent undoing damage rather than adding anything, because the typical agent site carries thousands of syndicated listing pages that are quietly costing it the index.
IDX feeds and the duplicate content they create
This is the technical problem unique to your industry and the one most agent sites are losing to. An IDX feed drops thousands of listing pages onto your domain, and those exact pages sit on hundreds of other agents' sites at the same time, because everybody is pulling the same feed.
Google sees near duplicate content at scale, and the usual outcome is that it stops trusting the whole section and sometimes the site around it. The fix is canonical and indexing rules applied deliberately: decide which listing pages genuinely deserve to be indexed, which should carry a canonical elsewhere, and which should not be in the index at all.
Neighbourhood guides worth reading
The highest value pages an agent can own, and the hardest to fake. A guide that lists the amenities from a Wikipedia page ranks for nothing. One that explains what the commute is actually like, which streets flood, how the school assignment works, what the HOA covers and what a house like that went for last spring is a page no portal can write.
A content strategy built on pages like that produces organic traffic from people who are months away from moving and have not spoken to anybody yet, which is the cheapest listing lead there is. Every one of them goes through a Fair Housing review before it publishes, because this is exactly the content where a well meant sentence about who lives somewhere becomes a legal problem. The section below explains where the line sits.
Seller intent content, where the commission is
Buyers are served by the portals. Sellers are not, and a listing side enquiry is worth more to you than a buyer enquiry in almost every market. Yet most agent sites are built entirely for buyers.
So we build the seller side properly: what a home is worth and what moves that number, what preparing a house actually involves, what the fees are, how long things take locally, and what happens if it does not sell. These pages convert at a rate buyer content does not come close to.
Keyword research that skips the unwinnable
A real estate SEO strategy is half decisions about what not to chase. The listing terms in your city are already lost, and a plan that includes them is a plan that spends your budget proving it. What is left is a long list of specific, local, answerable queries that nobody with a national domain can serve.
We map those against your farm area, so the pages get built where you actually want listings rather than where the volume happens to be. One primary query per page, with overlap checks so your own neighbourhood pages never compete with each other.
Google Business Profile and your personal brand
In this industry the brand is a person, which makes the profile unusually important and unusually fragile. Agents move brokerages, and a profile set up under the old brokerage's name with the old office address takes the reviews with it when you go. Google's rules for agent profiles are set out in full under real estate local SEO.
We set it up in a way that survives a move, keep the categories and service areas honest, and make sure your name, your brokerage and your licence details agree across the site, the profile and every directory. That consistency is also what makes an assistant describe you correctly, and it is the part of how local SEO actually works that agents skip most often.
Reviews, and the ones that mention the street
Reviews decide which agent somebody calls and they move the Map Pack. In this trade they do something extra: a review that names the neighbourhood is a relevance signal for exactly the area you are farming.
Requests go out after closing, by text as well as email, and we reply to every one in your voice. What we will not do is write them for you or suggest wording that makes a client sound like a template, which is both obvious to readers and against every platform's rules.
Technical SEO for a site that is mostly feed
Core Web Vitals, mobile rendering, crawl budget, internal linking, sitemaps and structured data. On an agent site the crawl budget question is the sharp one, because thousands of low value listing pages can soak up everything Google is willing to spend on your domain before it reaches the content you wrote.
So the technical work and the IDX work are really the same job. Fix what gets crawled and what gets indexed, and the neighbourhood pages you are paying for start getting the attention they deserve. On top of that sits the ordinary split, the on-page SEO that makes each page worth ranking and the off-page SEO that gives the domain enough weight to hold a position.
Link building from places that exist locally
Citations first so the details agree: your name, your brokerage, your licence number where your state requires it, the office address, across every directory Google checks. Agents change brokerage often enough that this is usually the single most out of date thing about their online presence.
Then backlinks from real local sources: the chamber, community organisations and events you sponsor, local press when you have something worth saying, and the schools and charities you already support. We do not buy links or use networks.
AI search optimization for AI Overviews and ChatGPT
Buyers and sellers now ask assistants what an area is like, what a process costs and how long it takes. Moha is an AI powered agency, so this is inside the retainer rather than beside it, and nothing about it involves submitting your site anywhere.
Content marketing works differently here for the same reason: what gets quoted is local specificity from a site whose details are consistent, which is precisely what a neighbourhood guide written from knowledge provides and a syndicated listing page does not. One of our quoted by Google's AI answers on exactly that discipline.
Reporting on enquiries, split by side
Sessions are a particularly misleading number here, because an IDX feed can produce a great deal of traffic that will never contact you. The number that matters is enquiries, and which side of the transaction they came from.
So we report calls, form fills and valuation requests split by buyer and seller intent and by neighbourhood, with the conversion rate of each page underneath as the explanation for where the leads moved. Anything not working is named rather than averaged away.
Work you can check
Results you can verify
Ask whoever is pitching you which tool produced the figure and what dates it covers. Our case studies name both.
Getting a client quoted inside Google's AI answers
The AI visibility write upThe market you are in
165,585 real estate offices, and most of them have the same website
The Census Bureau counts 165,585 offices of real estate agents and brokers employing 416,530 people, which makes it the second largest professional category in the country behind law firms. The number of people holding a licence is far larger again.
Which sounds worse than it is
Most of that competition is not competing with you in search. The standard agent website is a template from a vendor, with the same layout, the same stock copy and the same IDX feed as several thousand others, and a handful of neighbourhood pages that were written once and never touched.
That is a low bar, and it is why this is one of the cheaper professional categories to win in. The whole market for real estate SEO services sits at a difficulty of between 22 and 38, which is below law firms, and the content that beats a template costs nothing except knowing the area.
The real competition is the portals and the vendors
Above you are the portals, which you route around. Beside you are website vendors selling the same template to your competitors. Neither of them can write about your streets, and that is the whole opening.
Only in this industry
The content that performs best is the content most likely to break the law
Neighbourhood guides are the single most valuable thing an agent can publish, and they are also where the Fair Housing Act bites hardest, because describing a place slides into describing the people in it without anybody intending it. A real estate SEO company that has not read the statute is a liability.
What the statute actually says
Under 42 U.S. Code 3604(c) it is unlawful to make, print or publish any notice, statement or advertisement with respect to the sale or rental of a dwelling that indicates any preference, limitation or discrimination based on seven characteristics, or an intention to make one.
Note what that covers. Not just a listing: any notice, statement or advertisement about the sale or rental of a dwelling. A neighbourhood guide published to attract buyers is an advertisement, and the test is whether it indicates a preference rather than whether you meant one.
Describing who lives somewhere rather than what is there. "Great for families" speaks to familial status. "Walking distance to St Mary's" indicates religion in a way that "houses of worship nearby" does not. Describing an area as safe, exclusive or up and coming has been read as speaking about its residents.
This is how we write your pages. It is not legal advice, and your broker and counsel govern. Many states and cities add protected characteristics on top of the federal seven.
And the word list everybody quotes does not exist any more
Search for Fair Housing advertising guidance and you will find dozens of agencies and boards circulating a list of banned words. That list comes from a 1989 HUD memorandum which was withdrawn and never replaced. There is no official list on hud.gov today.
What replaced it is harder and fairer: the whole advertisement is read in context rather than scanned for trigger words. Which means a page can clear any word list and still indicate a preference, and a page can use a word from the old list perfectly lawfully. "Master bedroom" and "desirable neighbourhood" are not unlawful. "No children" is, in any phrasing.
So we do not run your copy against a list. We read it the way the test reads it: does this page describe the property and the place, or does it describe who belongs there.
Describe the property and the area. Never the current, former or desired residents. If a sentence would change meaning depending on who is reading it, it comes out.
Brokerage and licence disclosure
Lawyers work under a close parallel, which our page for law firms sets out. Separately from Fair Housing, almost every state requires an agent's advertising to identify the brokerage, and many require the licence number. A website is advertising, and so is a Google Business Profile, which is where this most often gets missed after somebody changes firm.
We put the brokerage name and the licence details where your state requires them, on the site and in the profile, and we re check them when you move rather than leaving three years of citations pointing at a firm you have left.
Agents move brokerages far more often than other professionals change firm, and the online footprint almost never keeps up. Stale citations are the most common avoidable problem we find on an agent audit.
Why agents choose Moha as their real estate SEO agency
Most agencies in this space sell a template site and a promise about listing searches they cannot keep. We start by telling you which terms are not available, fix what the IDX feed is doing to your index, and build the pages the portals cannot. Behind that are real estate SEO experts rather than a reseller, and your strategist is an SEO consultant who learns your farm area instead of an account manager forwarding a report.
We tell you what is unwinnable
Before you spend anything, not after a year of chasing the portals.
Fair Housing reviewed
Every neighbourhood page read against the statute before it publishes, not scanned against a withdrawn word list.
IDX handled properly
Index and canonical rules decided deliberately, so your own content is what Google spends its crawl on.
Seller side built
The side of the transaction most agent sites ignore and most commissions come from.
Survives a brokerage move
Profile, citations and licence details set up so a change of firm does not cost you your reviews.
Leave when you like
Long enough at the start to judge the work fairly, and no notice period holding you after that.
How it works
Our real estate SEO process
The feed first, because it is usually the thing holding everything else down. Then the pages the portals cannot take, then the authority that keeps them.
Audit, feed and farm area
Your site, your IDX feed and what it has done to your index, the profile, the reviews, your licence and brokerage details, and which areas you actually want listings in. The findings are yours either way.
Fix the foundations
Index and canonical rules for the feed, crawl budget reclaimed, technical faults cleared, profile and citations brought up to date with your current brokerage, call tracking in place.
The pages that are open
Neighbourhood guides for your farm area, written from your knowledge and read against the Fair Housing test, plus the seller intent content and a review flow running after every closing.
Authority and reach
Local links, more areas as the first ones hold, the content kept current rather than left to age, and the personal brand work that makes your name a search term in its own right.
Real estate SEO pricing
What real estate SEO costs with Moha
Choosing the best SEO company for real estate work usually comes down to whether they will tell you what is unwinnable. Ours is one flat monthly figure, quoted once the free audit is done, with no charge per enquiry and no share of a commission. What moves the number is how many areas are in scope and whether the seller side is included. Nothing is subcontracted.
For a single agent farming a handful of neighbourhoods.
- One core service
- Feed and technical fix
- Done for you execution
- Reporting by area and side
- Dedicated strategist
For a team running buyer and seller content at once.
- Three services, kept in step
- Both sides of the transaction
- Work prioritised ahead of other accounts
- Reporting by area and side
- Dedicated strategist
For brokerages and multi office groups. Where the brokerage is a franchise, the governance questions in our franchise SEO page apply on top of everything here.
- Every channel you need, synced
- Agent and office level coverage
- Reporting by office, agent and area
- Dedicated strategist and named account team
Will SEO pay for itself for your business?
At these numbers, SEO returns four dollars of commission for every dollar spent.
Replying to reviews, from Google itself
In an industry where the brand is a person, the review profile is most of the brand, and the replies are read as closely as the reviews. Google's help channel covers finding and answering them. Writing a reply that is warm without discussing anybody's circumstances is the part we take off your desk.
Questions
Real estate SEO questions agents ask
Taken from what agents post in Google's Business Profile help community, on the Local Search Forum and in agent groups, plus the phrasings people type into a search box. Several are about whether SEO for real estate agents is worth doing at all when the portals sit above everything.
How much does real estate SEO cost?
Launch is $3,000 a month and Growth $4,800, with brokerages quoted individually. The best real estate SEO company for you is rarely the cheapest, and it is never the one promising the listing terms; a top real estate SEO company will tell you which searches are closed before you spend anything. Measure it against a commission rather than against the invoice: at a $7,000 average after the split, two transactions a year already covers a year of Launch, and the pages keep working after the spend stops.
Can we outrank Zillow for homes for sale in our city?
No, and any agency that says otherwise is taking your money. The portals have inventory, domain strength and link profiles that no individual agent or brokerage will match, and the listing searches are the one thing they are built to win. The useful question is which searches they cannot serve, and the answer is everything that requires knowing a place rather than listing it.
Is our IDX feed hurting us?
Usually, yes, and it is the first thing we check. The feed puts thousands of pages on your site that also sit on hundreds of other agents' sites, so Google sees duplicate content at scale. The common results are that the listing section stops being trusted and that your crawl budget is spent there instead of on the content you paid to have written. The fix is deciding deliberately what gets indexed and what carries a canonical elsewhere.
Can we say a neighbourhood is great for families?
No. Familial status is one of the seven characteristics named in 42 U.S.C. 3604(c), and "great for families" indicates a preference on it. The safe version describes the property and the place rather than who should live there: the park, the school catchment, the lot sizes, the commute. It is also better copy, because it tells the reader something.
Is there an official list of banned Fair Housing words?
Not any more, which surprises most people. The list everybody circulates comes from a 1989 HUD memorandum that was withdrawn and never replaced, and there is nothing official on hud.gov today. HUD reads the whole advertisement in context instead. So a page can pass every word list and still indicate a preference, which is why we read copy against the test rather than running it through a filter.
What should we write about if not listings?
The things only somebody who works the area can write. What a specific neighbourhood is actually like to live in, how the school assignment works, what the HOA covers, what the commute really takes at eight in the morning. Then the seller side: what a home is worth and what moves it, what preparing to sell involves, what the fees and timelines are locally. That second group is where the commissions are and almost nobody builds it.
How long does real estate SEO take to work?
Technical and feed fixes often show within weeks, because they are usually releasing something that was being held back. Neighbourhood pages typically take three to six months, faster than most industries because the competition is template sites. The personal brand searches build slowest and last longest.
What happens to our SEO if we change brokerage?
It survives if it was set up to. The risk is a Business Profile created under the brokerage's name and address, which can take your reviews with it, and citations across dozens of directories still naming the old firm. We set things up so a move is an update rather than a restart, and if you are already mid move we fix the footprint before building anything new.
Should the brokerage or the agent own the website?
Whoever intends to keep it. If you are building a personal brand, the domain, the analytics and the Business Profile should be in an account you control, with the brokerage credited as your state requires. If the brokerage is funding it, be clear with yourself that you are building their asset. This is worth settling before anything is written rather than when you leave.
Do reviews matter as much as people say?
More, in this industry than most, because the purchase is a person and the review profile is most of what a stranger can judge. They also move the Map Pack. What matters is a steady flow rather than a pile from one busy year, and replies on all of them, including the ones you would rather not answer.
Will you get us into AI Overviews and ChatGPT?
It is not something anyone can sell you, because there is no submission and no switch. Google's documentation puts the requirement at being indexed, snippet eligible and genuinely useful. In this industry that rewards local specificity, because an assistant answering what an area is like needs a source that actually says something. A syndicated listing page gives it nothing.
Do you guarantee first page rankings?
No, and in this industry a guarantee usually means a term nobody searches. Google decides, and Map Pack results reorder for every searcher depending on where they are. What we will put in writing is the work, and the report counts enquiries by side and by area.
We are a brokerage with forty agents. How does this work?
At brokerage level the structure matters more than the content. Decide what lives on the brokerage site and what lives on an agent's own, so the two are not competing for the same neighbourhood terms, and set the profile ownership rules before agents create their own. Then the brokerage builds the authority that lifts everyone and the agents build the personal brands. Done the other way round it produces forty sites fighting each other.
Our market is a small town. Is there enough search?
Usually yes, and the portal problem is smaller there, because the national sites have thinner coverage of small markets and far less local detail. The volumes are lower and so is the resistance. The audit tells you the real numbers for your area before you commit, and if it is genuinely too thin we will say so rather than sell you a plan anyway.
Can you work with our existing website vendor?
Usually, and the honest answer depends on what the platform lets us change. Several of the big agent website vendors do not allow control over indexing rules, canonicals or page structure, which are exactly the things that need fixing. We check during the audit and tell you plainly whether the platform is the limit, rather than billing you for twelve months of working around it.
Free audit
Work with a real estate SEO company that starts with what is unwinnable
Send the website over and you will get back what your IDX feed is doing to your index, which searches are not available at any budget, and the neighbourhoods we would build first. If you want paid search while the organic work matures, that is our paid search while the pages mature.
No call required.
Photographs via Openverse: a suburban street by Tatters, CC BY, Squire Watkins Inn by w_lemay, CC0, and a villa at Klampenborg by seier+seier, CC BY.