Estate agents and developers
The buyer of a million-euro second home starts on Google from another country entirely, eighteen months before they sign anything.
The cycle is long and it starts in another country
Nobody buys a second home on their first visit to a website. They research areas, compare prices, read about taxes and how buying works as a foreigner. If you're the agency that answered those questions while they weren't ready to buy, you're the one they call when they are. That's content, not advertising.
Area pages are the highest-returning asset
"Immobilien [area] kaufen", "property for sale in [area]", "buy a house in [area]" are extremely high-intent searches with far more reachable competition than the generic national terms. One page per area, with genuine average prices, the character of the place, who buys there and what you have listed, is what ranks and what converts.
German first
German, Austrian and Swiss buyers tend to carry the highest ticket in the second-home market, and organic search in German has the least serious competition. The big portals dominate English; well-executed German is still reachable for an agency with content of its own.
Common questions
My listings change constantly. Does that hurt SEO?
It does if it isn't managed. What matters is that area and property-type pages are stable and permanent, and that sold listings redirect properly instead of leaving hundreds of error pages behind.
Are we competing against Idealista and Fotocasa?
Not head-on, and you don't need to. They win generic high-volume searches; a local agency wins on specific areas, niches and the buyer's own language, which is where the people who actually buy are.
How long until it brings transactions?
Traffic moves in three to six months. Transactions come later, because the second-home buying cycle is long. This is a twelve-to-eighteen-month investment, not a quarterly one.
Keep reading
- Search engine optimisationRanking first on Google isn't luck and it isn't a bigger budget. It's architecture, content and patience, applied in the language each customer is actually searching in.
- Google AdsAds buy you time while SEO builds it. Run well, they're the fastest way to learn which words actually bring money. Run badly, they're a subscription to Google.
- Web design and developmentA website isn't a brochure. It's the salesperson that works while you sleep, and most of the ones we audit are built as though nobody would ever open them on a phone.
- International and multilingual SEOThree language versions of a site either reinforce each other or quietly cannibalise each other. There is no third outcome, and the difference is a few lines of markup plus a lot of research.
- Content and keyword strategyPublishing more is not a strategy. Most sites already have too many pages and too few that answer a question somebody is actually asking.