Real Estate Brokerage SEO Case Study

7 months, 418% session growth for a 600+ agent NYC brokerage.

SEO Yodha partnered with Keller Williams NYC — the New York City master franchise of Keller Williams, with more than 600 agents across residential, new development, commercial and luxury — to win the search terms that decide where a New Yorker starts an apartment search, in the most contested real estate market in the country.
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Sessions
4,126 → 21,384
0 %
Total users
3,284 → 16,742
+ 0 %
Clicks from Google
2,846 → 14,327
0 %
Average position
24.7 → 8.6
0 %
The client

About KWYNC

Keller Williams NYC is a full-service luxury brokerage representing clients across residential sales and leasing, new development, commercial and retail — and it holds the New York City master franchise for Keller Williams. The office was formed in 2011 with downtown and uptown locations, then relaunched as a single market centre in July 2020 under new ownership, and now works from 360 Madison Avenue with a collaborative team of more than 600 agents.
The brokerage earns constant coverage from the outlets New Yorkers actually read on housing — the New York Times, Curbed, The Real Deal, New York Post, Brick Underground, Mansion Global. Its agents are quoted on pricing, bidding wars and market direction almost weekly.
Residential sales
Leasing & rentals
New development
Commercial & retail
Luxury
Relocation
International referrals
Home valuation
Neighbourhood guides
Agent recruitment
LOCATIONS – 360 Madison Avenue, New York, NY — serving Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the wider NYC market
Services delivered – Technical SEO · Local SEO · Content · Digital PR & link building · GA4 measurement
Timeframe – 7-month comparison — first month of engagement against the seventh month
Scale – 600+ agents · NYC master franchise of Keller Williams · one market centre since 2020
Scope of work

6 problems between a top NYC brokerage and page one

New York real estate search is dominated by portals with nine-figure marketing budgets and by brokerages that have been optimising for a decade. Six specific problems stood in the way.
Competition

Portals own the first screen

StreetEasy, Zillow and Realtor.com, plus the largest NYC brokerages, hold nearly every commercial term a buyer types. For a brokerage site, ranking on "apartments for sale nyc" means displacing companies whose entire product is that search result.

Visibility

Position 24.7 — the bottom of page three

The site averaged position 24.7 across its ranking terms, drawing 2,846 clicks from 41,682 impressions. Google knew the brand existed; it was simply never placing it where a search that leads to a $2m transaction gets clicked.

Index health

Listings that appear, sell, and vanish

An IDX-fed brokerage site generates thousands of URLs that go live and then expire as properties close. Without deliberate handling, that produces index bloat, soft 404s and duplicate listing content shared with every other RLS-fed site in the city.

Geography

New Yorkers search by neighbourhood, not by city

Real demand arrives as Chelsea, Dumbo, Cobble Hill, Astoria, Brooklyn Heights, Bushwick. The neighbourhood layer existed but wasn't built to rank, so the site competed only on citywide head terms where the portals are strongest.

Brand structure

One franchise name, hundreds of competing sites

"Keller Williams" is a national brand shared by market centres, teams and 600 individual agents — many with their own sites and profiles. Left unmanaged, that internal competition splits authority instead of concentrating it on the market centre.

Measurement

Traffic counted, intent not

GA4 was recording activity but not the actions that matter: home valuation submissions, saved searches, agent contact requests, listing enquiries. Without those defined as events, there was no way to tell which rankings produced pipeline.

Scope of work

The 6-phase build, in the order it had to happen

On an IDX-driven site, sequence is everything. Content published before the indexation rules were fixed would have been buried under expired listing URLs; neighbourhood pages built before the keyword map would have competed with the search hub they were meant to feed.
01 — Assessment

Keyword research & intent mapping

Built a four-tier map — transactional ("apartments for sale nyc," "manhattan apartments for sale"), brokerage ("real estate brokers nyc," "nyc real estate agencies"), neighbourhood ("chelsea apartments for sale") and building-level — then gave every term one owning page so the search hub, neighbourhood guides and agent pages stopped competing.

02 — Diagnosis

Technical SEO & index control

Set indexation rules for IDX search results and filters, defined handling for sold and expired listings so they stop bleeding crawl budget, fixed canonicals across duplicated feed content, improved Core Web Vitals on media-heavy templates, and deployed RealEstateAgent, Organization, FAQ and Review schema.

03 — AAlignment

On-page optimisation across the money pages

Rewrote titles, meta descriptions, headings and copy across the buy, sell, rental, commercial, luxury and relocation hubs, and the home valuation flow — targeting how New Yorkers phrase the search rather than how a brokerage names its divisions.

04 — Mobilisation

Neighbourhood & local SEO

Rebuilt the neighbourhood guides as genuine ranking assets with market context, inventory and internal links into live listings; optimised the Google Business Profile for the Madison Avenue office; corrected citations; and standardised 600 agent profiles so they support the market centre instead of cannibalising it.

05 — Strengthening

Market content & digital PR

Turned the brokerage's existing press footprint — NYT, Curbed, The Real Deal, Brick Underground, Mansion Global — into an authority programme, and ran market-report and buyer-guide content mapped to each stage of an NYC purchase, wired back to the hubs and neighbourhood pages it supports.

06 — Maintenance

Measurement, tracking & iteration

Configured GA4 around real lead actions — valuation submissions, saved searches, listing enquiries, agent contacts, call taps — then reviewed Search Console and GA4 monthly to push budget toward the terms producing pipeline and cut the ones producing traffic alone.

Results — 7-month comparison

6 metrics, 7 months, every one up

Google’s own Search Console data and the client’s GA4 property tell the same story: more terms ranking, ranking dramatically higher, and roughly five times the traffic arriving as a result.

Sessions

21,384
+418.3%

Clicks from Google

14,327
+403.3%

Search impressions

214,536
+414.7%

Average position

8.6
++16.1%

×5

Five times the audience — and a 16-position jump in average rank

Seven months in, KWNYC draws 21,384 sessions from 16,742 users, against 4,126 sessions from 3,284 users at the start — 17,258 additional sessions from New Yorkers searching for apartments, brokers and market guidance. New users climbed from 2,917 to 14,863, so the growth is new audience rather than the same visitors returning. Average position moved from 24.7 to 8.6: the difference between page three, where nobody looks, and the first screen, where NYC transactions begin.
GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLEBEFOREAFTERCHANGE
Clicks 2,84614,327+403.3%
Impressions41,682214,536+414.7%
Average position 24.78.6+16.1 positions
Total users 3,28416,742+409.9%
Sessions 4,126 21,384+418.3%
Event count 18,64296,517+417.5%

GA4 — sessions 4,126 → 21,384

Search Console — clicks & impressions

Average position — 24.7 → 8.6

Google rankings

1.1k high-intent NYC keywords at position #1

These are the terms a New York buyer types before they know which brokerage they’ll call. Seven months in, KWNYC holds the top position on all eight.

KEYWORDSVOLUMEBEFOREAFTER
nyc real estate2900NA#1
new york manhattan flat for sale2400NA#1
nyc apartments for sale2400NA#1
real estate brokers nyc2400NA#1
apartments for sale nyc1900NA#1
manhattan apartments for sale1900NA#1
new apartments for sale nyc1300NA#1
nyc real estate agencies1300NA#1

Key Results

Successfully ranked #1 on Google

Rank #1

7 months, 8 #1 rankings,1 market where a single search can be worth a seven-figure sale

Real estate SEO isn't won on volume; it's won on the handful of searches a buyer runs in the week they decide to move. In New York those searches are contested by national portals — which is exactly why owning them is worth so much.

Beat the portals on their own terms We target the head terms brokerages are told to avoid, then support them with the neighbourhood and building-level pages portals can't personalise.

IDX handled properly Indexation rules for listing search, filters and expired properties, so live inventory earns rankings instead of drowning the site in dead URLs.

Agents as an asset, not a leak Hundreds of agent profiles structured to reinforce the brokerage's authority rather than compete with it for the same brand searches.

Measured monthly Search Console and GA4 reviewed every month, with events tied to valuations, saved searches and enquiries — the actions that become listings and sales.

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