There are twelve things every seo for real estate program should have shipped in the first ninety days. If any of them are missing, revenue is leaking. Use this as an audit for your current agency, an interview sheet for prospective ones, or a build plan if you are running the work in-house.
Foundation (items 1–4)
1. Documented offer and ICP for the real estate vertical — written down, not implied. 2. Fully instrumented tracking with a real conversion definition (a signed customer or a qualified lead, not a page view). 3. A single source of truth for reporting that finance would accept. 4. A written 90-day scope you can hand to a new team member.
These four items sound obvious. In our audits of real estate accounts, at least two of them are missing on more than half of engagements. Fix them first — every other item on the list gets easier when the foundation is solid.
Acquisition (items 5–8)
5. Seo landing pages built around the specific intent your best real estate customer searches with. 6. A content or campaign structure that maps to that intent, not to internal org charts. 7. A negatives / disavow / exclusions program that runs monthly. 8. A geo and schedule strategy tuned to when your leads actually close.
Most seo for real estate programs skip item 7. That single omission wastes 15–30% of spend or index budget across the accounts we audit. It is boring, but it compounds.
Compounding (items 9–12)
9. A weekly experimentation cadence with kill criteria written before the test starts. 10. A monthly strategy review that finance attends. 11. A written playbook the next team member could follow to reproduce the current results. 12. A retention or reactivation motion for prior real estate customers, so acquisition compounds instead of leaking.
Items 9 through 12 are what separate an agency you renew from an agency you fire. If your current program cannot check off ten of these twelve, that is your quarterly work plan — in priority order.
How to score your current program
Print the list. Mark each item Green (shipped and maintained), Amber (partial or stale), or Red (missing). For seo for real estate accounts, a healthy program has at most two Ambers and zero Reds inside the first ninety days.
If you score four or more Reds, the fastest path forward is usually a paid discovery — either internally with a senior owner, or with an agency willing to quote against the specific gaps. Retainer expansion without a diagnostic almost always underperforms.
Turning the checklist into a plan
Take the two highest-impact Red items and schedule them for the next sprint. Put the Ambers in the following sprint. Do not try to move everything at once — seo for real estate compounds when you ship one boring fix a week, not when you try a full rebuild.
If you would like a second opinion on your scoring, we run free 30-minute strategy calls. Bring the checklist and we will walk through it with you.
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