Believe it or not, $1,500/month for high-quality SEO work isn’t expensive in today’s landscape. The reality is that most of your top competitors are likely already spending double or triple this amount, especially when it comes to backlink acquisition. Even the majority of my long-time SEO clients are spending between $2,500 and $4,000 per month, and I continue to be one of the best values in real estate SEO you’ll find. For real estate SEO work done the right way, $1,500/month should be considered an extremely attractive offering. 

No. While anyone can simply “write content,” there is nuance and strategy to content development as it relates to SEO and ultimately driving relevant traffic and eventually organic leads. Further, publishing bad content with poor optimization can also be counterproductive to our efforts and eventually hurt SEO performance, which is why I only work with clients who let me be the sole person or vendor working inside their content management system (CMS) for as long as I’m your SEO partner. Simply put, admins and assistants don’t know SEO. Despite having the “ability,” real estate agents and brokers don’t have an assistant handle the negotiation of a complicated deal, and that logic applies to my business and what I do as well. 

• Topic research based on each individual market 
• [Paid-for] high-quality, royalty-free stock photos 
• Basic graphic design for preview / header image
• Content writing, internal linking, and publishing
• Proper on-page SEO

Note: If you’ve already published what I consider bad or low-quality blog content, I’ll likely recommend or require we delete it from your website entirely. The same goes for landing page content as well. 

Given most of your websites are fairly new, almost any quality backlink will be beneficial. But I will always try to target backlink and promotional partners with a Domain Rating (DR) 30 to 70+, based on ahrefs ratings. You can learn more about what to expect from blogging and backlink acquisition work on my Why Us page. 

I recommend continuing the IDX landing page build out process if we haven’t exhausted your entire MLS coverage area and [appropriate] data fields. Given many of you are still applying resources to a wide-variety of marketing and business initiatives, the build out process is still a very important step and easily the most cost-effective. Waiting until the build out process is “complete” also allows you to plan ahead for what is essentially a stronger financial commitment and investment in your website. 

Real estate SEO is a VERY competitive marketing space, meaning if dominating search results only required creating basic IDX landing pages, everyone would do it. But because dozens of agent, brokerage, and national portal websites are all vying for the same top search rankings in each individual market, it’s fundamentally impossible for everyone rank well simply by doing [fill in the blank task]. Sustainable results require a TON of work, doing things the “right way,” partnering with reliable and trustworthy SEO professionals with a proven track record, and staying consistent with an approach and strategy that has also demonstrated success in other competitive markets. 

There is no easy answer to this question. Every market poses unique challenges and every website is at a different stage in its development, resulting in varying timelines for each individual client. My SEO Results page details real examples of what my clients have experienced, and listed below are two very recent data points: 

• Nick Nastos (nick@chicagospropertyshop.com) – Client for 9+ years and counting. Over 600 new organic leads last month (April ’24) in a “down” Chicago market.  
• Jeremy Olsher (jeremy.olsher@compass.com) – Started SEO in May 2023, traffic at that point totaled 1.3K users for the month. One year later, we’re at 6.1K users over the last 30 days (April ’24). 

Disclaimer: Each of these 2 clients are at the $2,500/month investment level but also provide both short term and long term examples of what is possible. It is worth noting, however, that Jeremy’s website was already on an established domain that was generating over 1,000 users per month when I started SEO work. Newer domains with much less existing search engine authority likely won’t see similar increases in this short of a timespan. 

Finally, while it’s both irresponsible and dishonest for anyone working in SEO to guarantee a certain level of results or eventual performance,  what I can say is that if you’re patient and we’re consistent in our SEO efforts, positive gains in organic traffic and leads will come eventually. But when that happens or what that looks like is impossible for anyone to project accurately.