A Step-by-Step SEO Audit Framework Built for Real Estate Agent Websites

This audit guide is written for real estate agents and team leads who want to understand what is actually happening on their website before spending money on SEO campaigns or content creation.

You do not need to be a developer to complete most of these checks. Several steps use free tools like Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, and your browser's built-in inspection features. For the more technical sections — particularly IDX configuration and crawl analysis — you may need to loop in whoever manages your website platform.

This guide is most useful if you fall into one of these situations:

• You have an agent website that has been live for more than six months but generates little or no organic traffic
• You recently migrated platforms (for example, from a custom site to a franchise template) and rankings dropped
• You are about to hire an SEO provider and want to understand your baseline before signing a contract
• You have a neighborhood or city pages strategy in place but those pages are not showing up in search results

This is not a comprehensive enterprise SEO audit. It is a focused diagnostic for the specific patterns that appear most often on real estate agent sites — IDX conflicts, thin [calculating listing value](/resources/real-estate-agent/real-estate-agent-seo-roi) listing content, under-built local pages, and overlooked technical issues that are straightforward to fix once identified.

IDX (Internet Data Exchange) feeds are the core of most agent websites — they pull live listing data from the MLS and display it on your site. The problem is that most IDX configurations are set up to serve buyers, not search engines. This creates a structural tension that quietly costs agents organic visibility.

Start your audit here. Open Google Search Console, go to Coverage or Pages, and look at how many pages Google has indexed versus how many pages your site has. A large gap — especially if your site shows thousands of IDX listing pages in your sitemap but only hundreds are indexed — is a signal that something is blocking or limiting crawl.

Key things to check in your IDX configuration:

• Robots.txt rules: Some IDX providers add a blanket Disallow for their subdirectory (for example, /idx/). This tells Google not to crawl those pages at all.
• Noindex tags: Many IDX services apply a noindex meta tag to listing pages by default. This means pages can be crawled but will never appear in search results.
• Subdomain vs. subdirectory setup: If your IDX loads on a separate subdomain (for example, search.yourdomain.com), those pages do not pass authority back to your main domain. A subdirectory setup (yourdomain.com/listings/) is preferable for SEO, though not all IDX platforms support this.
• Canonical tags: Some IDX feeds syndicate the same listings to dozens of agent sites. Without a canonical tag pointing to your version, Google may choose a competing site's version as the authoritative one.

Check your IDX provider's documentation or contact their support to confirm what indexation settings are in place. In our experience working with agent sites, the default setting for most major IDX platforms prioritizes feed reliability over search indexation — so you often have to opt into SEO-friendly settings explicitly.

Even when listing pages are technically allowed to be indexed, they often fail to rank because the content on them is identical to dozens of other sites pulling from the same MLS feed.

The MLS listing description — the text block a seller's agent writes to describe the property — gets syndicated to Zillow, Realtor.com, every buyer agent site in the area, and your website simultaneously. Google sees this as duplicate content. It will typically pick one source to rank (usually Zillow or Realtor.com, given their domain authority) and suppress the rest.

How to diagnose duplicate listing content:

1. Copy a sentence from a listing description on your site
2. Paste it in quotes into Google search: "exact sentence here"
3. Count how many other sites return that exact phrase

If you see five or more results, your listing pages are competing on content they cannot win.

What to do about it:

You have a few practical options, and the right one depends on how your IDX is configured:

• Add original commentary above or below each listing: Some IDX platforms allow you to inject custom content fields. Adding a short paragraph about the neighborhood, school district, or commute context makes the page meaningfully different.
• Use noindex on individual listing pages and focus SEO equity on search results pages: Many agents find more ranking success from their neighborhood search pages (for example, /homes-for-sale-in-westside-neighborhood/) than from individual listing detail pages.
• Build a listing content strategy around sold properties: Sold listing pages can be converted to neighborhood market update content once the listing expires — this creates durable, original content from a data source you already have.

There is no single correct approach here. The goal is to make sure your site is not investing crawl budget on pages that Google will never rank.

Neighborhood and city pages are where most agent sites have the clearest opportunity — and the most consistent execution gap. These pages target searches like "homes for sale in [neighborhood]" or "[city] real estate agent," which represent high-intent queries from buyers and sellers actively in the market.

Pull up every neighborhood and city page on your site. For each one, ask three questions:

• Does this page have at least 300–500 words of original content? A page with just a title, a one-sentence blurb, and an IDX search widget is not a content page — it is a placeholder. Google treats it that way.
• Does the content reflect specific, local knowledge? Sentences like "[Neighborhood] is a great place to live" do not demonstrate expertise. Specific details about school zoning, walkability, typical price per square foot, or the kinds of buyers who tend to move there do.
• Is the page targeting a query anyone actually searches? Use Google Search Console's Performance report to see if the page has received any impressions. If a page has been live for more than six months and has zero impressions, either the target keyword has no search volume or the page has a technical issue preventing it from being seen.

A common pattern: agents build 20 neighborhood pages at launch, all with the same templated 150-word description swapped out for each location. These pages rarely rank because they offer no reason for Google to prefer them over a larger portal or a competitor with more detailed content.

The fix is not to build more pages — it is to make fewer pages earn their position by being genuinely more useful than what already ranks for that neighborhood query.

Technical SEO issues on real estate sites tend to cluster around a few recurring patterns. None of these require deep developer knowledge to diagnose — most can be checked in under 30 minutes using free tools.

Page Speed and Core Web Vitals

Run your homepage and two or three listing or neighborhood pages through PageSpeed Insights. Pay attention to the mobile score — most home searches start on mobile, and Google uses mobile-first indexing. A score below 50 on mobile usually indicates images are not compressed, JavaScript is blocking render, or your IDX widget is loading slowly. Franchise and template-based agent sites often score poorly here because the underlying platform was not built with performance as a priority.

Mobile Usability

In Google Search Console, check the Mobile Usability report under Experience. Common issues include text too small to read, clickable elements too close together, and content wider than the screen. These are not cosmetic problems — Google's ranking systems use mobile usability signals.

Crawl Errors and Broken Links

Use a free crawl tool like Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs) or Sitebulb to identify broken internal links, redirect chains, and pages returning 404 errors. Expired listings that were once indexed and now return a 404 waste crawl budget and lose any links those pages had accumulated. Redirect them to the relevant neighborhood search page instead.

HTTPS and Security

Confirm your site loads on HTTPS and that there are no mixed content warnings (HTTP resources loading on an HTTPS page). Most modern platforms handle this automatically, but sites that were migrated from older setups sometimes have lingering issues.

Structured Data

Real estate sites benefit from RealEstateListing and LocalBusiness schema markup. Use Google's Rich Results Test to check whether your pages have structured data implemented and whether it validates without errors.

Most of the diagnostic steps in this guide are things any agent can do independently. The decisions about what to do with what you find are where it becomes more nuanced.

Some fixes are straightforward: updating page titles, adding content to thin neighborhood pages, compressing images. If your site is on a platform like WordPress with an SEO plugin installed, you can make many on-page changes without touching code.

Other fixes require platform-level access or developer involvement: changing IDX configuration settings, adjusting robots.txt, implementing schema markup, or resolving Core Web Vitals issues caused by theme or plugin conflicts. If your audit surfaces these issues and you are on a franchise-provided template site, you may have limited ability to act on them without either upgrading your platform or working through the franchisor's support channel.

A useful rule of thumb: if your audit identifies issues in three or more of the areas covered in this guide — IDX conflicts, duplicate listing content, thin neighborhood pages, and technical errors — and you do not have time to address them systematically, the return on professional help is likely to be positive. The cost of SEO services for agent sites varies by market and scope, but the more relevant question is what a single additional closed transaction per quarter is worth to your business, and whether improved organic visibility could realistically produce that.

If you want an outside perspective on what your audit findings mean and which issues to prioritize, a professional real estate SEO audit and services engagement can help you separate the high-impact fixes from the noise.