SEO for commercial real estate firms, where volume is beside the point

The portals own listing search and that is not a winnable fight

Availability searches resolve to the major listing platforms, and a brokerage site competing there is spending against an outcome it cannot reach.

Anybody looking for space searches the portals, and the portals rank because that is their entire business. A brokerage listing page is competing with a platform holding every listing in the market.

Firms nonetheless spend effort optimizing individual listing pages, which produces a large volume of thin, expiring content on the site and very little traffic.

The listings still need to exist on your site, for the people who arrive by other routes and for the owners who want to see their property presented. They are not a search strategy.

Where the site can win is everything the portal does not do: why a submarket is moving, what a lease is actually trading at against asking, what a change of use involves, and what a specific kind of tenant needs.

The practical rule is to stop measuring listing pages by search performance and start measuring them by whether they serve the people you send to them. That is a different job and they are usually good at it.

Market knowledge is the one asset that cannot be syndicated

Everything else on a brokerage site exists elsewhere, and what you know about your own submarkets does not.

Listings are syndicated, service descriptions are interchangeable, and firm history is not something anybody searches. The genuinely scarce material is the read on the market that comes from doing deals in it.

That means what is actually happening: which submarkets are absorbing space and which are not, where concessions have moved, what buildings are being repositioned, what a class of tenant is currently able to get.

Publishing it feels uncomfortable because it is the thing brokers trade on. The counter is that a general read does not give anything away, and being the firm whose read people check is worth more than the information withheld.

Only publish figures you can source, whether from your own transactions or from data you have the right to use. Numbers are the whole credibility of this content and an unsupported one is worse than none.

Regularity matters more than depth. A quarterly note that reliably appears is a habit people form. An occasional long report is read once and forgotten.

Three service lines share one website and confuse each other

Tenant representation, landlord representation and investment sales serve different people with opposing interests.

A tenant looking for space, an owner looking to lease one, and an investor buying an asset are three audiences with different vocabulary, different timelines and occasionally opposite objectives.

Most brokerage sites present all three as a service list, which leaves each visitor to work out which parts are for them. Many of them do not bother.

The structure that works gives each line its own section written in its own language. A tenant rep section is about the search, the process and what a company should know before signing. An investment section is about product types, underwriting and market conditions.

It also matters for who is presented. The people who do tenant work and the people who do investment sales are usually different, and the visitor wants to reach the right one.

There is a genuine tension to be honest about. A firm representing both landlords and tenants has to be clear about how that works, and a website that obscures it invites the question at a worse moment.

Confidentiality caps what you can publish, and there is a workable version

The proof that would persuade is usually covered by a non-disclosure agreement, which is why this industry's content is so thin.

Deal terms are frequently confidential. Clients are often private about their holdings. The specific results that would make the strongest case are the ones you are not able to describe.

That constraint is real and it is not total. What can usually be published is the shape of the work rather than the particulars: what a process involves, what tends to be negotiable, what the timeline looks like, what goes wrong.

Aggregate and anonymized material is the other route. Describing a class of transaction, or what has been happening across a set of deals, without identifying any of them.

Get permission where you can. A client willing to be named is worth asking, and some are, particularly where publicity serves them too.

What is not acceptable is inventing the specifics or implying involvement in transactions you did not do. This is a small industry where that gets noticed by exactly the people you want to work with.

The audience is small enough that traffic is the wrong measure

The number of people who can transact in a given submarket is countable, which changes what success looks like.

In a typical market the set of owners, investors, tenant decision makers and other brokers who matter runs to a few hundred. Reaching all of them is a genuinely achievable goal and it will never look impressive in an analytics report.

A page read by forty people, of whom six control real estate decisions, is worth more than a page read by four thousand strangers. Standard reporting cannot express that.

So the measures worth watching are different: whether the right names appear, whether people cite the content back to you in meetings, whether inbound inquiries are the kind of asset you want to work on.

It also justifies content that would be indefensible elsewhere. A detailed piece about one submarket's industrial supply is not going to produce volume and may produce a specific conversation worth a year's income.

The corollary is patience. This channel supports rather than generates, and judging it on lead counts in a business where one transaction can carry a year is the fastest way to abandon something that was working.

Advertising has to identify the brokerage, not only the person

Brokerage is licensed and advertising rules generally require the firm to appear, which reaches marketing material as well as listings.

Requirements vary by state and commonly include that advertising identify the licensed brokerage rather than only the individual agent, along with rules about how a licensee may describe themselves.

This reaches more than listing sheets. Personal broker websites, social profiles, email signatures and paid ads can all count as advertising depending on the jurisdiction.

It matters most where brokers build a personal brand, which is common and generally sensible in this industry. The presentation has to work for the individual and still satisfy the rule.

Team and brand names carry their own restrictions in a number of states, including how they may be styled relative to the brokerage.

Worth confirming with your own broker of record and counsel rather than assuming a footer covers it. The obligation is the licensee's and the specifics are state law.

Submarkets are the grain, and they are local by definition

The structure above holds anywhere. Everything that makes this content valuable is specific to a submarket.

A downtown tower and a suburban flex park are different products with different tenants and different economics, and content pitched at a whole metro speaks to neither.

That is why we publish at the market level rather than nationally for the substance, and it is the same reason a brokerage's own content should be written submarket by submarket.

If your metro is covered, that page is the more useful read. If not, the structure above is where to start, and we are happy to work through your submarkets with you.