Industries / Real estate
SEO for estate agents and realtors is mostly about three templates: listing pages, area guides and agent pages, built so search engines can read them and buyers can trust them. On the 56 agency websites we checked in the UK, US, Australia and Dubai, listings were usually crawlable, but nearly half of listing pages largely repeated their photo descriptions and a quarter had no summary.
GetBorvis / Organic visibilityA property agency's website is unusual: hundreds of listing pages that appear, sell and disappear, sitting next to a handful of pages that stay true for years, such as your area guides, your agents and your valuation page. For a single listing you are usually competing with the big property portals. Where an agency can stand out is the local knowledge the portals do not have.
Google also has no special search feature for property listings. Its structured data gallery covers vacation rentals, local businesses and products, but not homes for sale or to let. Listing markup can still help search engines understand a page. It will not turn your listings into rich results.
Fact Checked against Google's structured data search gallery, 12 October 2026.
| On the website | Result |
|---|---|
| Property pages linked from the homepage or sitemap | 46 of 56 (82%) |
| Of those, property pages listed in the sitemap | 42 of 46 (91%) |
| Property pages with listing structured data | 39 of 87 sampled (45%) |
| Property pages with no structured data at all | 18 of 87 (21%) |
| Property pages with the price in the page text | 59 of 87 (68%) |
| Property pages with no meta description | 22 of 87 (25%) |
| Property pages where most photo descriptions are repeats | 41 of 85 (48%) |
| Homepage with no structured data | 18 of 56 (32%) |
| Area or neighbourhood guides | 41 of 56 (73%) |
| A valuation or appraisal page linked from the homepage | 35 of 56 (62%) |
| robots.txt naming any AI crawler | 6 of 53 (11%) |
Ours Agency websites returned by web searches on 12 October 2026 for estate agents and real estate agencies in London, Manchester, Bristol, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Austin, Miami, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Dubai. Portals, directories and brokerages recruiting agents were left out. 70 sites, 56 answered our checker: 20 in the UK, 16 in Australia, 13 in the US and 7 in Dubai. We read the homepage, robots.txt, sitemap and up to two listing pages per site, chosen at random.
On 48% of listing pages, the photo descriptions were largely repeats: fewer than 6 in 10 were different from each other. Google uses alt text, along with the page, to understand what an image shows. Describe each photo: "Kitchen with island and garden doors", then the address once in the page itself. Fix it in the listing template and every future listing is fixed too.
A quarter of listing pages had no meta description, so search engines write their own from whatever is on the page. Build one into the template from the listing's own facts: type, bedrooms, area and the one feature that sells it. No made-up superlatives.
73% of agencies had some kind of area guide, which is where an agency can say something the portals cannot. The strongest guides are specific: recent sales, schools, transport times, what buyers in that street ask about. Link each listing to its area guide, and each guide to the agents who cover it.
In Dubai, 3 of 7 agencies had language versions marked up for search engines and 3 offered WhatsApp. Across the other 49 agencies, WhatsApp appeared on just one. If you sell to overseas buyers, a page in their language and a messaging link in the format WhatsApp documents are cheap to add.
Pick one rule per type of listing and put it in writing, so the site does not end up with thousands of expired pages that each do something different. Our article on what to do with old pages applies the same logic to a whole website.
On a property site, most problems live in a few templates: the listing page, the area page and the agent page. Fixing a template fixes every page built from it, so that is where we start. Your team or your web provider makes the changes. We specify them and check they worked.
Send your website and the areas you most want to be known for. We will reply with how your listing and area pages compare with the agencies we checked.
…it was worth gold!!Founder of Notum Learn, a SaaS company we audited