"Real Estate Agent Near Me" Searches are Declining

For about the past 10 years or so, "near me" has been an important piece of real estate SEO.

Well, BrightLocal just released some interesting data around those searches:

"Near me" searches fell 19% between 2021-2024 -- that's across all industries they were able to study.

There's not much of a discussion about real estate in that report I linked to above, but this chart below shows the slight decline of "real estate agent near me" searches since 2021:

Google Trends shows a similar trend for the same term:

Interesting, no? But it also shouldn't be surprising.

I'd bet that almost all real estate queries peaked during the crazy pandemic years and have declined since. Pretty much every market in the country was busier than normal from 2020-2022, and consumer behavior is almost always reflected in online search activity.

Then there's also the post-pandemic market. I know every market is unique again these days, but we've seen higher interest rates than usual plus historically low sales over the past few years -- and again, consumer behavior impacts online search behavior.

So, I think when you add all that up, it makes perfect sense that "real estate agent near me" searches would be down in this time period.

That doesn't mean you should stop optimizing your website and/or GBP for "near me" searches. Nope, that's not the message here. The message is to be aware of buyer and seller behavior and understand that when fewer of them are in the market, that'll impact your SEO results.

BTW, based on that same research above, when you optimize for "near me" searches, you're likely to be targeting about half of the population: 47% of searchers say they "always" or "often" add "near me" to their local search queries, while 53% are "sometimes" or "never."