SEO audit for real estate sites: listings that come and go
Your inventory changes weekly. Your URL structure shouldn't.
Property sites have a problem few others do: most of the content is temporary. Listings arrive from a feed, live for a few weeks and disappear, taking their links and rankings with them — while the area and guide pages that could rank for years get built last.
This is what an audit of a property site looks for, with the churn as the starting point rather than an afterthought.
What goes wrong on Real estate sites
Sold listings that simply vanish
A listing that 404s throws away every link and every ranking it accumulated. Keeping the page with an honest "sold" state, or redirecting it to the area page, keeps the value and gives the visitor somewhere to go.
Feed descriptions shared with every other portal
IDX and portal feeds give every agent the same words for the same property. Whoever has the most authority wins that listing, which is usually the portal, not the agent.
Search result pages in the index
?bedrooms=3&price_max= combinations generate an unlimited crawl space of near-identical result pages. A handful of curated ones — "3-bed houses in X" — deserve real landing pages; the rest should not be crawlable.
Area pages that are just a listing grid
The pages with lasting search demand are about the area, not the inventory: schools, transport, what a street costs, what it was five years ago. Those keep ranking after the listings turn over.
Galleries and maps in the critical path
Twenty photos at full resolution and an embedded map script are what a property page is for, and they are also why it takes eight seconds on a phone. Lazy-load everything below the first image and load the map on interaction.
Agent and branch pages left as stubs
Every agent gets a page with a headshot and a phone number, and every branch gets one with an address. Dozens of near-empty URLs, indexable by default, competing with the pages that matter. They are worth writing properly or keeping out of the index.
The same property listed twice
A property that comes through two feeds, or is relisted after a price change, ends up at two URLs with the same photos and description. Whichever one Google keeps, the links and traffic split between them first.
What an AuditOpti crawl looks for
- Expired and sold listings: how many 404, and which had links pointing at them
- Duplicate descriptions shared across feed-driven listings
- Crawlable search and filter URLs
- Area and guide pages: depth, internal links, and whether they exist at all
- Mobile Core Web Vitals on a listing page with its gallery
- Structured data for listings, agents and the business itself
Check part of it right now, free
These read a live page and tell you what a search engine sees. No signup, no email.
Broken link checker
Every link on the page, followed, with the status code it returns.
SEO score checker
Score one page against the checks that actually move rankings.
Schema markup checker
See the structured data on your page, and whether it is machine-readable at all.
The issues behind this
Each has a full entry in the issue library: what it is, what it costs a business, and step-by-step fixes for WordPress, Shopify, Webflow and custom builds.
4xx pages
Pages returning a not-found or forbidden status code.
Thin content
The page has too little text to be useful.
Duplicate meta descriptions
The same summary text is reused across pages.
Oversized images
Images are far larger than they need to be.
Slow largest contentful paint
The main content takes too long to appear.
Questions
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WordPress
The problems WordPress creates for itself, and the ten minutes it takes to find them.
Crawl the site and see how many expired listings are 404ing with links attached
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