5 Scenarios in Which SEO for Real Estate is Not Viable

Intro

As a real estate professional, you may consider using SEO to enhance your marketing strategy.

However, before you waste time and money and start losing your hair a few months from now, you may also want to consider scenarios in which SEO may not be a viable option for your real estate business.

Various factors can limit the effectiveness of SEO, thus making it a nonviable option.

Considering the five scenarios I will discuss in this article, you can decide whether SEO is right for your real estate business.

By doing that, you avoid wasting your time and money on something that you shouldn't have started in the first place.

While I will focus on the real estate industry, the principles stay the same, so you can carry them over to others.

(Photo by Greg Willson on Unsplash)

Why Considering Scenarios in Which SEO May Not Be Viable

I am sure you have heard the saying, "When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

This happens when you rely on one tool or method to solve every problem, even when it may not be the best solution.

Since Ranktracker is a tool, especially for SEO, writing about when you shouldn't use SEO is a bit weird.

However, I find it also essential to know when not pursuing a particular method is better than pursuing it.

You want to find yourself in a position where you put time, effort, and money into a marketing method over many months and then realize that you shouldn't have done it in

the first place because you didn't get the results you expected.

Scenario 1: A Limited Online Presence

This is kind of common sense, but if you don't have or can't have a decent online presence, SEO may not be a viable method.

Why?

SEO relies heavily on the availability and quality of online content.

So if your website is a bit thin with just a few pages or a lack of regular blog posts, search engines like Google may consider it irrelevant or not valuable enough to give it some love and rank you.

As a real estate pro, you may not have the budget, time, and/or knowledge to put in the work to get a decent online presence.

Suppose this is something you can't change in the foreseeable future. In that case, SEO is likely not a viable marketing channel for you.

Scenario 2: Competition is Like David vs. Goliath

When you find yourself in a highly competitive real estate market, many similar players likely fight over getting the same clients and properties.

So it's even more essential for real estate pros to stand out.

Look at how high some Google Ads bids go for particular real estate keywords.

When you see these high costs per click, you are easily tempted to try the SEO way and rank organically.

However, since real estate is often a highly competitive market, ranking highly in search engine results pages (SERPs) for the same and other popular real estate search queries is harder.

Why does this happen?

There are often already established players in the market investing in SEO for a long time and having a strong online presence.

But not all is lost. Even in a highly competitive market, a real estate pro can still find some cracks and leverage SEO.

You can still target long-tail search queries, focus on local SEO, and produce quality content.

However, suppose this is impossible because even the cracks are taken, or the real estate pro hasn't the time and budget. In that case, SEO likely is again not a viable option.

Scenario 3: Lack of Relevant Content Due to Lacking Skills

Imagine several real estate pros would have been in a self-imposed lockdown and media fast for the last 15 years.

In this case, they will be surprised that just having a good backlink profile but shallow and irrelevant website content doesn't cut it anymore.

Today backlinks are just one of the many ranking signals Google uses in its algorithm.

Producing relevant and quality content is vital to a successful SEO strategy that can make or break an online presence.

So SEO for real estate becomes likely, not viable if, for some reason, a real estate pro doesn't achieve producing relevant content to target the right audience.

And the latter requires knowing the target audience's needs, wants, and pains.

This scenario, therefore, refers to the real estate pro's or outsourced service provider's skill set in creating a good real estate marketing and SEO strategy, which usually includes gathering knowledge about the target audience.

The latter also includes crafting a customer journey.

(Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash)

Scenario 4: Limited Budgets (Including "Sweat Equity)

If I had to pick the most crucial scenarios making SEO for real estate not viable, it would be a limited budget (including "sweat equity") followed by scenario 3 (lack of relevant content due to lacking skills) and scenario 5 (coming soon).

A limited budget is an age-old struggle of any business (including real estate).

A limited budget for SEO will limit the resources you need since SEO takes time and effort. It's not a short-term marketing channel.

On the contrary, you must produce quality real estate content over a long time until you (may) see results if you did most things right.

It will also limit real estate pros from competing in a highly competitive market.

Businesses with larger budgets will have an advantage in this case (e.g., they may hire a team of writers).

However, even if real estate pros have a low or no budget, they can still use their "sweat equity" and produce their content themselves.

In this case, they need to invest a significant amount of daily hours over a long time.

Should both (limited budgets and also no daily time) be the case, real estate SEO may not be a viable option.

Scenario 5: Wanting to Reach Short-Term Goals With SEO

Since you're reading Ranktracker's blog, I am sure you know already that SEO is a long-term strategy that requires time, patience, and consistency.

It's not the magic bullet delivering instant results.

In the beginnings of Google and SEO, it may have come close to it, but those days are over.

Here is the deal. Some real estate pros want to reach a particular monetary goal (e.g., net commissions, a certain amount of monthly deals) within a few months.

Wanting to do this often comes from a lack of knowledge about the constraints of SEO.

In that case, it would be bad advice to suggest using SEO to achieve them, at least if they really need to achieve their goals within a few months.

If it were a less competitive real estate niche and the particular real estate pro had some serious experience with SEO under the hood, a large budget, and would use an aged domain (without some toxic link history), SEO could be kind of viable.

To stay safe, I still wouldn't suggest it and rather go down the paid ads route (e.g., Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, etc.).