SEO for Real Estate That Actually Works  (With Real Results from Eric Engelbert)

If you've been part of the real estate world for any decent amount of time, you've probably heard a dozen “SEO hacks.” Most of them overpromise results, but end up requiring a crazy amount of time with little to show for. 

Lucky for you, on our latest /RealEstate episode we sat down with Eric Engelbert, who runs ocrealestate.com, and who has a simpler take on SEO for real estate. 

What's more: he has actual proof to back up his advice.

“I’m a regular dude. I didn’t go to college for tech or computers. I’m learning on the fly,” Eric mentions early on. Cue breath of relief for those of us struggling to understand the Google algorithm.

Eric launched his site about nine years ago. He stuck with his chosen domain, and started building from there. 

And while his headline is "there's no special sauce– just consistent work.", we're going to break down for you exactly what you should consistently be working at, so you're not spinning your wheels trying to make your pages rank. 

So let's get started.

To catch the full episode on SEO for Real Estate with Eric, be sure to check it out on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Why SEO for Real Estate is Still Crucial Today

Before he moves on to breaking down his actual strategy, Eric shows us a snapshot of his Orange County Housing report page on Google Analytics.

This page is pulling tens of thousands of impressions every 90 says for prime search terms like “Orange County housing market,” with lots of clicks and a solid CTR as well. He’s even seeing “Orange County real estate” impressions (huge keywords typically owned by industry giants like Zillow).

Now, if you're reading this article we assume you know organic traffic matters.

But you might not know just how much it matters, even today. Industry-wide, organic drives more traffic than any other digital channel; BrightEdge has long measured it at roughly half of all visits (with their latest stat placing it at 53% of visits). 

If you’re an agent or a small team, this number is an opportunity. 

Now you might be thinking: "sure, it would be good to rank well for organic results – but I'll never outrank Zillow or Realtor.com".

Good news – you don't have to.

According to NAR’s 2023 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, 89% of buyers purchased through a real estate agent or broker — not a portal.

So your job isn't necessarily to outrank the big guys. It is, however, to be high above enough on search results that consumers find you after scrolling past these major portals.

But you won’t get there with generic pages that look like everyone else’s. Here’s what Eric’s approach reveals about SEO for real estate:

1) Pick A Lane, and Stay There

Eric’s stayed on the same Real Geeks domain since the start: “I just started with Real Geeks and stayed with Real Geeks… I’m just so happy I never changed because… I think that helped my domain authority.”

Swapping platforms and domains every year resets trust and rewrites your to-do list. Plant your flag and grow roots. Google rewards stability, history, and a body of work that builds over time.

Domain age doesn't directly impact your rankings, no. But naturally, the longer you stay in one domain, the more time you have to acquire links, build new pages, and update your content – all of which are actual ranking factors for Google.

2) Publish Something Useful on A Schedule (Weekly is Great)

His cornerstone is the Orange County Housing Report: “I write this housing report every week and it’s been like I’ve been doing it for years.”

It ships every Monday. It’s not flashy. It’s fresh, local, and consistent – and that’s the point. His viewers expect it, and Google rewards the new updated content.

Eric also keeps the past weeks' reports on the same page so it becomes a “super blog”: “Having all this data on one page is like this giant blog about Orange County real estate.” That single destination benefits from internal links, external links, and user behavior signals over time.

What goes in the report?

·  Short narrative on what changed that week

·  Local numbers (inventory, DOM, etc.)

·  A quick tie-back to the national picture (only to contrast it)

Eric makes a critical point about local vs. national: “Where I live in Orange County, things are very different here than what’s happening nationally.” Your buyers and sellers want to know about their specific neighborhood, not a national average.

Cultivating this hyper-local audience gives you an incredible advantage over big players who are servicing everyone.

3) Give Google Real Text (Not Screenshots)

Eric learned this the hard way. Early versions of his content used pretty, image-based tables.

Then he realized: “Right – Google can’t crawl that.” So he rebuilt the grids as HTML tables so the data was machine-readable, and immediately more findable. (Google’s technical guidance aligns with this: crawlers need text, not text baked into images, if you want that information to rank or appear in rich results. Source: Google for Developers)

He also attaches a short paragraph under each table so the page answers searcher questions in plain language (great for snippets and Google's “People also ask” section).

4) Long-tail Beats Broad Keywords (Especially Against Big Portals)

Like we mentioned before, you don't need to try and outrank Zillow or Realtor. Eric doesn't even try to do it for “Orange County real estate.” Instead, he goes deeper:

·  City → neighborhood → micro-needs (he builds specific pages for each neighborhood in his region, sometimes going as far as certain streets in the neighborhood).

·  He optimizes pages for specific buyer needs, like “single level”, “three bed, two bath”, “Spanish style homes”

·  He even creates lifestyle hooks like “ocean view homes under a million dollars”

Free tools like AnswerThePublic were a huge resource for him to see what people were typing. And from there, he kept iterating and going further. Over time, he built lots of these specific pages and connected them to polygon searches in Real Geeks system so the results match the promise.

5) Listings First, Content Second

This SEO tip might be subtle but it's huge for conversions. “Consumers don’t care about my opinion… They just want to see the houses. So, put the houses on the top… Put your little opinion… down there.” says Eric.

When you put listings at the top of your page, your page satisfies the visitor's intent the second it loads, and Google still gets content to crawl under the listings, where you can be as detailed as you want while optimizing for the long-tail keywords we mentioned in our last point.

6) Google Search Console as Your Compass

Google Search Console is your free dashboard for all things organic traffic. You can select the option for the system to send you monthly emails on your website's performance on search traffic.

Eric checks this email religiously every month and digs into the queries and pages that are rising: “I’ll go and focus on those pages and make sure I’m updating those pages that are already ranking… then they rank even more.” 

That’s the virtuous cycle you want to be on—improve what’s already working before you start something brand new.

7) Don’t Overthink “Perfect”

Yes, in an ideal world you're working on your site for at least one hour every day. This allows your content to stay fresh, your website to keep growing, and Google to really, really like you.

But even Eric admits that in the beginning: “I did everything incorrectly. I had to go back through and redo everything… Perfect is not [the goal]… it’s evolving all the time and getting better.” 

So write, check the data, and refine. Some weeks when you have a bit more time, try to create as many blogs and pages as you can, so that on weeks where life happens you can rest assured that your SEO is still working in your favor. Just make sure you keep coming back, because this is a lifelong (but exponentially rewarding) marketing channel.

8) Create Once, Distribute Everywhere (Lightly)

Creating a blog or a neighborhood report is the first step.

Next, you want to make sure you share it everywhere. Eric posts his report, links it on his social channels, and sometimes spins related blog posts (like one about the Irvine golf course story that unexpectedly went viral!). Of course, going viral isn't the point. The point is to give people a reason to return to your site and keep Google seeing your site as alive.

To take a page from Greg Harrelson's book, another idea is to record a video of you breaking down the weekly report and send it to your email list. This way everyone in your database can come back to it, and knows that they have that resource available to them every single week to see market trends.

TL;DR Eric's Advice On SEO for Real Estate 

·  A constantly updated page that ranks for “Orange County Housing Report” (often in position #1) and battles big players for broad terms is a great strategy to build a local and loyal audience.

·  Building an SEO machine allows you to generate organic leads without any ad spend. “I’ve had 130 leads in the last 30 days. Those are all organic. I have no paid traffic at the moment.” says Eric.

·  This strategy also helps you stay on top of your game. As Eric puts it, “I probably know about the housing market in Orange County… I’m in the top 1%… just for knowledge.”

So if you're serious about developing this channel of high-quality, hyper-localized free leads, steal Eric's strategy:

1.  Pick one domain and commit.

2.  Publish a weekly local market update (same URL).

3.  Convert any image-based charts/tables to HTML.

4.  Build long-tail inventory pages tied to real searches.

5.  Listings at the top, commentary below.

6.  Spend one hour a week inside Search Console—improve what’s rising.

7.  Be patient. As Eric puts it, “Work hard at it for 20 years”. (It won't take you 20 years to see results. But the key to success is knowing that it's a long game)

Organic is still where the leverage lives. That BrightEdge stat (organic ≈ half of digital traffic) isn’t a tech myth – it’s what your future clients are already doing every day. Meet them there, consistently.