Real Estate SEO Strategies and Techniques to Adopt (and to Avoid) in 2025
SEO is constantly changing and adapting, and that means to stay modern and effective, your SEO 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 2025, 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:
Producing High-Quality, Helpful, People-First Content
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 a 2025.
Much like any alternative search engine, Google’s primary objective is to provide the best possible experience and search results for the searcher; and while there are a lot of different signals Google uses to determine that, focusing on writing high-quality, helpful content that truly provides value can help you meet most of them.
As part of meeting that objective, earlier in 2024, Google completed rolling out their helpful content update into their core search ranking algorithm (you can learn more about that right here), and going forward, those helpful content updates will be continually applied. So, if you’re not creating high-quality, valuable content, your overall search strategy is going to show it.
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’s 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.
In 2025 more than ever, an investment in your (high-quality) content strategy is an investment in your overall marketing strategy.
★ Want to learn more about building a successful content strategy? 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
Building Quality, Not Quantity, Backlinks
Backlinks are an extremely important part of your overall SEO strategy, but it’s not just about the number of backlinks you have. As Google updates its spam detection algorithms, focusing on quality versus quantity is more important than ever (although, it’s always been important).
While Google continually rolls out updates, one of the focuses they focus on in their spam detection updates is on finding low-quality backlinks and penalizing websites that are using them as a way to artificially inflate their number of backlinks.
What makes a low-quality backlink? If you’re buying links for some shady website, just because you think the number of backlinks matters more than their quality, you’re getting low-quality backlinks from those websites, and Google knows it. And while cleaning up a website with a lot of low-quality backlinks is a lot of work, in some cases, it can be next to impossible, and can even go so far as to ruin your domain’s reputation permanently.
High-quality backlinks, from a reputable well-known website, take a lot more effort to get, but it’s an effort that’s worth putting in.
If you’re producing high-quality content, you’re more likely to get high-quality backlinks from reputable websites, often organically, and that will be more important than ever as we go into 2024.
★ Want to know more about backlinks? Have a look at this post called: Why You Need an External Link Building Strategy for Your Real Estate Website.
Writing Better Quality Listings
You’ll probably notice that a common theme for SEO focuses in 2025 is high-quality, well-written, helpful content; nothing beats producing content that solves a problem, that people find valuable, and that people enjoy reading.
But high quality doesn’t just stop at blog posts; it also applies to real estate listings. Just because a listing is yours, doesn’t mean it will display anywhere near the top of search results. Chances are, there are a lot of more reputable, more authoritative websites that rank higher for your own listing than you do, and while that has to do with authority, a lot of it also has to do with quality.
There are a couple of content-related things you can do to improve the search prominence of your listings (provided they’re added manually and not added automatically through an IDX feed or equivalent.
For example, you can:
- Write a Better Description: If you manually add your listings, and you copy/paste the same MLS description, you’re probably not going to rank in search results. That’s because doing so gives your website the exact same information as all of the other more authoritative websites, and doesn’t differentiate you, which is a key way of improving your listing’s position in search results. Also, include as much information as you can that makes the listing more useful.
- Include As Much Useful Information as You Can: If it makes the listing information more useful, add it. That could include downloadable feature sheets, floor plans, a feature sheet, links to schools, etc. The useful information, the better.
- Write a Descriptive, Clickable Meta-Description: If you’re able to custom write the meta-description of your listing, you absolutely should. Not only does it help, again, differentiate you from more authoritative websites, but it also can improve your click-through-rate if it sounds more interesting and people engage with it more as a result (instead of just pulling and displaying the default meta-description text).
★ Want to more about how to improve your listings in search results? Have a look at this post called: Strategies to Get Your Listings to the Top of the Search Results.
Planning for Alternative Searches
While people looking for answers to questions isn’t going away, the way they find those answers is changing.
When it comes to search, there are more options opening up as to where people get information, so working on optimizing your search strategy to cover those options makes a lot of sense going into 2025.
For example, there are more and more upwards trends of people are starting their searches in the AI tools they’re already using, like Google Gemini, Google Generative Search, and OpenAI’s SearchGPT; and there will no doubt be more advancements and adoption of these technologies in the upcoming year.
There’s also an increasing trend of people searching for answers within the social media platforms they’re already in (and where they already get their information), like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook, which you can capitalize on as part of your overall SEO strategy and your content marketing plan as part of a healthy marketing mix.
The more you plan for your content to be found, in the right places, by the right people, for the right reasons, the more you’ll see success.
Planning for Voice-Based Search Optimization
Most people have access to a voice-based search device in some capacity. Whether you say “Alexa”, “Hey Google” or “Hey Siri”, voice-enabled search is all around us and people continue to use it more and more when they’re looking for answers. And because so many people use voice-based search, it makes sense to optimize your content for voice-based search devices.
Plus, with Apple promising big advances in AI with the release of Apple Intelligence (including a built-from-the-ground-up Siri), planning for voice search in 2025 will become more and more relevant.
While it isn’t easy to build a voice-based search strategy, one of the best ways to help position your content for it is by writing answer-based content that starts with who, what, where, why, or how; and ensuring that content is written in a conversational tone.
There’s quite a bit more involved to make it successful of course, but it all starts with having a solid overall SEO strategy in place and producing high-quality, answer-based content, and you’ll be taking the first step towards better positioning your content for voice-enabled search devices.
★ Want to learn more about how to prepare your marketing strategy for the new year? Have a look at this post called: Real Estate Marketing Strategies to Embrace in 2025.
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.
