The CRE SEO Investment Framework: What You're Actually Buying and What It Should Cost

Most CRE firms asking about SEO cost get a range and not much else. That range is real — but the reason for the spread matters more than the number itself.

Three variables account for most of the pricing difference between proposals:

• Geographic scope: A single-market firm in Indianapolis competing for industrial tenant rep searches faces a fundamentally different challenge than a regional firm targeting occupiers across five metros. More markets means more content, more local authority signals, and more ongoing optimization work.
• Current authority baseline: A firm with a five-year-old website, some existing content, and moderate domain authority will reach ranking positions faster than one starting with a new domain and no backlink profile. Providers price for the gap that needs closing.
• Service mix required: Technical SEO, content production, Google Business Profile management, link building, and local citation work each add cost. A firm that only needs content and technical fixes costs less to serve than one needing the full stack.

A fourth factor is competition density. Winning for "commercial real estate broker Dallas" requires more sustained effort than ranking for "industrial warehouse leasing Boise." Most providers factor local search competition into their pricing, though not all make this explicit in their proposals.

Understanding these drivers lets you evaluate a proposal intelligently — not just compare monthly retainer numbers side by side. A $2,000/month proposal that excludes link building and covers only one service line will underperform a $3,500/month proposal with full-stack execution in the same market.

Rather than a single price point, think of CRE SEO as three investment tiers, each reflecting a different scope of work and expected outcome timeline.

Entry Tier: $1,500–$2,500/month

This range suits single-market firms with a functioning website and limited competition — think a boutique office or retail broker in a secondary metro. Expect technical SEO maintenance, one or two content pieces per month, basic GBP optimization, and monthly reporting. You're unlikely to dominate highly competitive search terms at this investment, but you can steadily build presence for niche property types or specific submarkets.

Mid Tier: $2,500–$4,500/month

The most common range for regional CRE firms with multiple service lines or multiple submarkets to target. This scope typically includes ongoing technical optimization, four to eight content assets per month, active link-building outreach, citation management, and GBP management across locations. Firms at this tier are generally competing for meaningful deal-influencing search terms: tenant rep, investment sales, specific asset classes by metro.

Growth Tier: $4,500–$6,000+/month

Appropriate for multi-market firms, national platforms, or CRE companies targeting multiple asset classes simultaneously. At this level, content production scales significantly, link acquisition becomes more strategic, and reporting integrates into business development tracking rather than just traffic metrics.

One caveat: these ranges reflect full-service retainers. Project-based work — an SEO audit, a content sprint, or a one-time technical fix — is priced differently and is often where firms start before committing to ongoing engagement.

A monthly retainer isn't a single service — it's a bundle of work streams that each require specialized time. Understanding the breakdown helps you evaluate whether a proposal is appropriately scoped or cut in ways that will limit results.

Technical SEO (typically 15–25% of retainer)

This covers crawl health, site speed, schema markup, mobile usability, and indexation. Most CRE websites have legacy technical debt — outdated page structures, duplicate property listing pages, thin service pages — that suppresses rankings before any content or links can do their job. Early in an engagement, technical work is front-loaded.

Content Production (typically 35–50% of retainer)

This is where most of the visible work happens: service pages, market reports, property type guides, submarket explainers, FAQ content. In commercial real estate, buyers and tenants often research for months before contacting a broker. Content that shows up during that research phase builds brand familiarity and generates inbound inquiries. Quality matters more than volume — one detailed industrial market guide outperforms ten thin blog posts.

Link Authority Building (typically 20–30% of retainer)

This is the most misunderstood cost line. Earning links from commercial real estate publications, local business journals, and industry associations requires real outreach effort. It's slow, it compounds, and it's difficult to fake at scale. Be skeptical of proposals that omit this or price it as an optional add-on.

Reporting and Strategy (typically 10–15% of retainer)

Monthly performance review, keyword movement tracking, pipeline attribution discussion, and strategy adjustment. In CRE, this layer is important because the KPIs you care about — inquiries, deal-stage conversations — don't map neatly to standard SEO dashboards without deliberate setup.

Commercial real estate SEO is not a short-cycle investment. The mechanics of how Google evaluates content authority, backlink profiles, and local relevance signals mean that meaningful ranking improvement typically takes four to six months — and that's in a well-executed campaign starting from a reasonable baseline.

Most reputable providers structure engagements as:

• 6-month initial commitments — enough time to complete technical work, build foundational content, and begin seeing early ranking movement
• 12-month agreements — appropriate when a firm is entering a competitive market or needs significant content development from scratch
• Month-to-month — available but not ideal; providers managing month-to-month accounts often prioritize quick wins over compounding strategy, which limits results

Watch for these contract terms that signal misaligned incentives:

• Guarantees of specific ranking positions — no ethical provider can promise page-one placement for competitive terms
• Lock-in with no performance benchmarks — if the contract has no milestone checkpoints, you have no off-ramp if work quality is poor
• Ownership clauses on content — make sure content produced during the engagement belongs to your firm, not the agency
• Bundled link packages with high counts and low transparency — fifty links per month at low cost typically means low-quality directories that can harm rather than help rankings

A well-structured CRE SEO engagement should include a 90-day performance review with documented deliverables against an agreed-upon scope. If a provider can't articulate what they'll deliver in the first 90 days and how that maps to your goals, that's a clearer signal than any pricing number.

The most common mistake CRE firms make with SEO budget decisions is evaluating cost against immediate returns. SEO doesn't work that way — and commercial real estate deal cycles make this particularly important to understand.

In our experience working with commercial real estate firms, the timeline typically breaks down like this:

• Months 1–2: Technical fixes, foundational content, baseline establishment. No ranking movement yet — this is infrastructure work.
• Months 3–4: Early keyword rankings appear for lower-competition terms. GBP visibility improves. Organic traffic begins to move.
• Months 5–6: Target keywords move into page-one territory for some terms. First organic inquiries attributable to SEO begin appearing.
• Months 7–12: Compounding returns. Content published in months two and three starts earning links and traffic. Rankings stabilize and expand.

The ROI math in CRE is straightforward but requires honest deal economics. If your average tenant rep commission on a mid-size deal is $45,000–$90,000, a single deal influenced by organic search can cover six to twelve months of retainer cost. The question isn't whether SEO pays — it's whether your firm has the patience and operational follow-through to capture the inbound inquiries it generates.

For budget allocation guidance: firms that spread thin budgets across too many channels typically see marginal results everywhere. In our experience, a focused $3,000–$4,000/month SEO engagement outperforms $1,500/month split across SEO and paid search for most mid-size CRE firms. Concentration beats diversification at early investment stages.

If you want to see how these numbers translate into pipeline projections for your specific market and firm size, get a tailored CRE SEO investment proposal based on your actual deal economics.

These are the questions we hear most often from CRE principals evaluating SEO investment. Straight answers, not sales responses.

"Can't I just do this with my internal marketing coordinator?"

Possibly, if your coordinator has hands-on SEO experience, not just content writing skills. CRE SEO requires technical knowledge (crawl analysis, schema, Core Web Vitals), link-building relationships, and keyword strategy experience. Most in-house marketing hires at CRE firms are strong at presentations and social — different skill set. The comparison page comparing agency versus in-house CRE SEO covers this in detail.

"We tried SEO before and it didn't work."

Usually this means the previous engagement was under-scoped, too short, or focused on the wrong keywords. "Commercial real estate" as a keyword target almost never makes sense for a regional firm — you want asset-class and submarket specificity. Before writing off SEO, it's worth understanding what was actually executed before.

"$3,000 a month seems like a lot for content and keywords."

It is a lot if you're measuring against traffic. It's a different calculation if one organic inquiry converts to a $60,000 commission. The framing matters. SEO is a business development channel, not a marketing expense — and that distinction changes how you evaluate the number.

"How do I know it's working?"

Clear reporting milestones matter more than promises. You should see documented keyword movement by month three, traffic growth by month four, and attributable inquiry volume by months five to six. If a provider can't define what success looks like at each stage, that's a scoping problem before it's a results problem.