SEO + UX: A Combined Strategy for Better Property Listings
Client: Rocket Companies
Role: UX Lead & CRO Strategist
Collaborators: UX Designer, SEO, Content
Overview
Rocket Homes is a real estate platform operating within the broader Rocket Companies ecosystem — connecting homebuyers with property listings and real estate agents while feeding into Rocket Mortgage’s lending business. When the opportunity came to pitch a new line of business for their home listings division, our team was tasked with proving that SEO and UX shouldn’t operate in silos. I partnered with our SEO specialists to conduct a deep-dive competitive analysis of property listing pages and deliver actionable recommendations to improve conversions.
Visual suggestion: Two side-by-side screenshots showing the relationship between Rocket Homes and Rocket Mortgage — with branding removed if needed for confidentiality.
My Approach
Before making any recommendations, I needed to understand how the business actually worked, not just the website. Rocket Homes sits at an interesting intersection: it’s a discovery platform for homebuyers, but its financial value to the organization runs through mortgage origination. Understanding that tension early shaped every decision I made on this project.
I reviewed whatever project documentation existed, got familiar with the real estate industry and the home-buying journey, and aligned with our SEO team on what we were trying to prove and why.
Visual suggestion: A simple diagram or flow showing the relationship between home search → agent connection → mortgage application, illustrating where Rocket Homes sits in the funnel.
Guerrilla Research
With no access to analytics or heatmap data, I needed another way to understand where the experience was breaking down. I decided to request property tours directly through the client’s website and competitor sites. I spoke with agents and told them who I was and asked if they had a few minutes to help me improve the leads they were receiving.
Most conversations lasted more than 15 minutes.
The insight that surfaced consistently was that lead quality was poor across competitor platforms. Buyers were entering the tour scheduling process without understanding basic prerequisites, such as needing mortgage pre-approval before making an offer. Agents were spending significant time on follow-up conversations that could have been avoided with better upfront qualification.
One agent put it plainly: if buyers knew they needed pre-approval before making an offer, the entire process would be easier for everyone involved.
This gave us a clear signal: the experience gap wasn’t just a UX problem. It was an education problem at a critical moment in the funnel.
Visual suggestion: A sanitized screenshot of the tour scheduling flow on the client site and one competitor — highlight the step where pre-approval context is either present or absent.
Finding the Real Problem
Early in the project, our primary client contact pushed to optimize the listing pages for mortgage applications. This wasn’t an unreasonable ask because mortgage leads are higher value. But it wasn’t what the website was designed to do, and it wasn’t what users were coming to Rocket Homes for.
We referenced back to a prior workshop that a previous team had conducted with the client. That workshop had established three primary goals for the site: listing a property to sell a home, scheduling a tour, and getting pre-approved for a mortgage. Tour scheduling was the natural first conversion — the lower-friction action that moves a prospect closer to a financing conversation without asking too much too soon.
Using that prior work as a foundation, we made the case to shift the primary conversion goal of the project to tour scheduling. The client agreed.
Visual suggestion: A simple priority matrix or icon-driven visual showing the three site goals — with tour scheduling highlighted as the primary conversion focus for this project.
Limitations
We went into this project without access to analytics, heatmap reports, or agent lead-quality data. That meant our recommendations were grounded in heuristics, competitive benchmarking, and the qualitative signal from agent interviews rather than quantitative validation.
We were transparent about this with the client. Rather than treat the data gaps as a weakness, we framed them as the starting point for a measurement plan and outlined what we’d want to track post-implementation to validate our recommendations.
Visual suggestion: An icon-driven summary of the data sources we did have access to — competitive analysis, heuristic evaluation, agent interviews — alongside the sources we didn’t.
What I’d Measure
If I were running the full program post-launch, here’s what I would have tracked:
- Tour request completion rate from listing pages
- Lead quality scores reported by agents post-contact
- Drop-off points within the tour scheduling flow
- Mobile vs. desktop conversion differences across the scheduling flow
- Pre-approval awareness at the point of tour request
Visual suggestion: A clean list or dashboard mockup showing these as hypothetical KPIs — framed as a measurement plan rather than reported results.
What I Learned
This project reinforced a few things I now treat as non-negotiable.
Guerrilla research works when formal recruitment fails. Cold outreach to real agents produced richer, more specific insights than a structured recruiting process would have in the same timeframe. The key was being transparent about who I was and why I was calling.
Stakeholder incentives shape the problem. Our contact wasn’t wrong to prioritize mortgage leads since that’s what his role rewarded. Understanding that early helped me make a more persuasive case using evidence he already trusted: the prior workshop his own team had participated in.
A Note on What Came After
In 2024, Rocket Companies acquired Redfin and rebranded the combined platform under the Rocket name. What was once Rocket Homes — the platform at the center of this project — now runs on Redfin’s infrastructure and looks almost nothing like what I assessed during this engagement.
The competitive landscape I documented, the listing page patterns I benchmarked, and the tour scheduling flows I evaluated have all since changed significantly. This case study reflects the state of the platform and its competitors at the time of the project.