A Step-by-Step SEO Audit Framework Built for Real Estate Agents

An SEO audit for a real estate website is not the same as a generic website audit. The issues that matter most for agents — IDX duplicate content, local pack visibility, neighborhood page thin content, and GBP profile completeness — are different from what a standard e-commerce or SaaS site faces.

A complete real estate SEO audit covers six diagnostic areas:

1. Technical health: Crawlability, indexing, Core Web Vitals, mobile usability, and HTTPS status.
2. Google Business Profile signals: Category accuracy, photo completeness, review count, and GBP-to-website NAP consistency.
3. On-page content: Title tags, meta descriptions, header structure, and keyword targeting on service pages and neighborhood guides.
4. IDX and listing pages: Whether search-engine-generated listing pages are indexed, how duplicate content is handled, and whether structured data is implemented correctly.
5. Backlink profile: Domain authority distribution, toxic link exposure, and whether any local citation sources list incorrect contact information.
6. Competitor gap analysis: Which keywords your closest competitors rank for that your site does not address.

Work through these in order. Technical issues create a ceiling — no amount of great content will rank well if Google can't properly crawl and index your pages. Fix the foundation first, then assess everything else.

This guide is designed for agents who want to run a meaningful self-assessment. Where a task requires more than basic familiarity with Google Search Console or a crawl tool, we flag it clearly so you know when a professional review adds value.

Open Google Search Console before anything else. If your site isn't verified, that's your first finding — you have been flying blind on crawl errors, indexing status, and manual actions.

Indexing and crawl errors

Navigate to Index > Pages in Search Console. Look at the ratio of indexed pages to discovered pages. If Google has discovered significantly more pages than it has indexed, investigate why. Common causes on real estate sites:

• IDX listing pages being blocked by robots.txt or noindex tags (sometimes intentional, sometimes not)
• Redirect chains left over from a site migration
• Duplicate pages created by URL parameter variations from IDX search filters

Core Web Vitals

Check the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console. For real estate sites, Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is the most common failure — listing pages with large, unoptimized property photos load slowly and drag rankings on mobile. PageSpeed Insights (free, no login required) gives you a page-level breakdown with specific improvement suggestions.

Mobile usability

More than half of property searches happen on mobile devices, according to industry research. The Mobile Usability report in Search Console flags tap-target issues, font size violations, and viewport configuration problems. Any errors here are a priority fix.

HTTPS and security

Confirm your site loads on HTTPS and that HTTP URLs redirect correctly to the secure version. Mixed content warnings — where a secure page loads insecure assets — can trigger browser warnings that erode trust with prospective clients visiting your site.

Time budget for this layer: one to two hours using free tools.

For most real estate agents, the Google Business Profile (GBP) is the single highest-use local SEO asset — and it is frequently misconfigured or neglected.

GBP completeness check

Log into your GBP dashboard and verify the following:

• Primary category: Should be "Real Estate Agent" (or "Real Estate Agency" for brokerages). Incorrect categories — such as "Property Management Company" when that's not your primary service — dilute relevance signals.
• Service areas: Are the neighborhoods and cities you actively farm listed? GBP allows up to 20 service areas.
• Hours and contact information: Must exactly match what appears on your website. Mismatches between GBP and your site's contact page are a common local ranking suppressor.
• Photos: Recent listing photos, headshots, and office photos all signal an active profile. Profiles with no photos in the past 90 days appear stale to Google's local algorithm.
• Review count and recency: Industry benchmarks suggest that profiles with a consistent cadence of recent reviews outperform those with older, static review counts — even when the older total is higher.

NAP consistency audit

NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone. Run your business name and address through a tool like Moz Local or BrightLocal to surface citations where your information is inconsistent. Pay particular attention to older Realtor.com profiles, Zillow agent pages, and chamber of commerce listings — these are common sources of stale data.

Local keyword gap

Search for "[your city] real estate agent" and "homes for sale in [your neighborhood]" in an incognito window. Note which Map Pack listings appear and compare their GBP profiles to yours. Where are they stronger? Review count, category accuracy, and photo recency are the most visible differentiators.

Real estate sites have a content problem that most other industries don't face: IDX plugins automatically generate hundreds or thousands of listing pages, and without the right configuration, those pages can actively harm your SEO.

IDX duplicate content check

The MLS data powering your IDX feed is the same data powering every other agent's IDX feed in your market. If your site publishes those listing pages without modification, you have thin, duplicate content at scale. Check how your IDX vendor handles this:

• Are listing pages set to noindex by default (directing link equity to your search pages instead)?
• Does your IDX vendor add canonical tags pointing to the MLS source?
• Do your IDX property pages include any original content — neighborhood context, school information, market commentary — or are they purely data-feed output?

There is no single correct answer here. Some agents noindex all listing pages and drive traffic through neighborhood guides instead. Others invest in original content layers on listing pages. The important thing is that you have made a deliberate choice, not stumbled into the default.

Service page and neighborhood guide audit

Review your core service pages and any neighborhood or community guides you have published. For each page, check:

• Does the title tag include the primary keyword naturally? (e.g., "Homes for Sale in [Neighborhood] | [Your Name]")
• Is the meta description written to earn the click, not just stuff keywords?
• Is the page longer than 300 words of original, useful content — or is it mostly boilerplate?
• Does the page link internally to related neighborhood guides or your IDX search results?

In our experience working with agent sites, neighborhood guides are consistently underinvested. A 200-word page about a neighborhood you farm is not competitive against a 1,200-word guide that covers schools, market trends, commute times, and local amenities.

Use this scorecard to get a rough health rating. Score each area on a 1–5 scale, then add your total. This is a directional tool, not a substitute for a full technical audit — results vary significantly by market and site history.

Scoring guide

• 5 — No issues found: Area is fully configured and performing as expected.
• 3 — Partial issues: Some items in this area need attention but core function is intact.
• 1 — Critical issues: This area has problems likely suppressing rankings right now.

The six dimensions

1. Technical health — Indexing clean, Core Web Vitals passing, mobile usable, HTTPS correct.
2. Google Business Profile — Correct category, complete service areas, recent photos, active reviews.
3. NAP consistency — Name, address, and phone match across your website and all major citations.
4. Content quality — Neighborhood guides and service pages are substantive, original, and keyword-targeted.
5. IDX configuration — Listing pages are handled with a deliberate indexing strategy, not left at default.
6. Backlink and competitor gap — You have local citations, some inbound links, and have identified keyword gaps vs. competitors.

Interpreting your score

• 24–30: Strong foundation. Focus on content expansion and competitor gap closure.
• 15–23: Multiple opportunities present. Prioritize technical and local issues before content investment.
• 6–14: Significant issues likely suppressing rankings. A professional audit will surface what self-assessment misses at this level.

Benchmarks vary by market competition and site history. Use this as a starting point for prioritization, not a definitive grade.

Most agents can run the surface-level checks in this guide without any technical background. Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, and an incognito browser search get you most of the way through layers one through three.

But there are specific situations where self-assessment reaches its limits:

Hire a professional if any of these apply

• Manual action notice in Search Console: This means Google has penalized your site for a policy violation. Recovery requires understanding exactly what triggered the action and submitting a reconsideration request — getting this wrong extends the penalty.
• Significant traffic drop with no obvious cause: A sudden decline of 30% or more in organic traffic can be caused by algorithm updates, crawl budget issues, a botched redirect after a site migration, or a competitor acquiring links at scale. Diagnosing which requires log file access and a crawl tool most agents don't have set up.
• Site migration (new platform, new domain, or new URL structure): Migrations are the leading cause of permanent ranking loss. If you're moving from one IDX vendor to another, redesigning your site, or changing domains, professional oversight prevents avoidable traffic loss.
• Consistently ranking on page 2 or 3 for high-value terms despite producing content: This typically signals a domain authority gap that requires a deliberate link acquisition strategy — not more content.

Reasonable self-audit cadence

A quarterly self-check using Search Console and a GBP review takes about two hours and catches the most common drift issues — pages falling out of index, GBP information going stale, and Core Web Vitals regressions after site updates. An annual professional technical audit makes sense for most active agents who are investing in SEO as a primary lead source.

If you want a second set of eyes on what you've found, get a professional SEO audit for your real estate site — we review the same six layers covered here, plus log file data and a full competitor keyword gap analysis.