Written by Nassira Sennoune
TLDR: When I moved into SEO for a Marrakech luxury real estate brokerage after years in a different marketing role, I spent six months building content around what I assumed cross-border property buyers cared about, and almost none of it worked. The turnaround came from sitting in on intake calls instead of guessing, and rebuilding the entire content plan around the actual questions buyers asked out loud. Being confidently wrong for six months taught me more than the years of being cautiously right before it ever did.
I took the role convinced I already understood the audience. I had years of marketing experience behind me, a genuine interest in real estate, and a set of assumptions I never questioned because nobody had asked me to. I assumed buyers researching a Marrakech property wanted to see interior photography, neighbourhood prestige, architectural detail. I built an entire first-quarter content plan around exactly that, dozens of pages, real time invested, real belief behind it.
The Six Months Where Almost Nothing Worked
The pages performed poorly by every measure that mattered. Traffic was thin. Enquiries were thinner. I told myself the market was slow, that luxury buyers move at their own pace, that the results would come once the pages had time to age in search results. None of those explanations were true. The real problem was that I had built an entire content strategy on what I personally found compelling about the properties, not on what the actual buyers were stuck on before they would ever pick up the phone.
By month five, a colleague suggested something I had not thought to do: sit silently on the next round of buyer intake calls and just listen, without preparing talking points, without trying to sell anything. I expected to hear questions about finishes and views. What I actually heard, call after call, was foreign ownership law, currency transfer mechanics, what happens if a deal collapses partway through. Not one caller asked about interior photography unprompted.
What Changed Once I Started Listening Instead of Assuming
Gallup’s workplace research describes a pattern I recognised immediately once I read it after the fact: people closest to a problem consistently have better information than the people theorising about it from a distance, and the fix is almost always to go listen to the people closest to it rather than refine the theory further. I had spent six months refining a theory about buyers instead of listening to actual buyers, and the theory had been wrong the entire time.
I scrapped most of the original content plan and rebuilt it around the four questions that came up in nearly every intake call: the legal ownership process for foreigners, the currency transfer timeline, the notary process, and what recourse a buyer has if a deal falls through. None of those four topics had been anywhere on my original plan. Every one of them now sits among the highest-performing pages on the site.
The Harder Truth Underneath the Turnaround
Admitting the first plan had failed was the actual hard part, not the rebuild itself. The rebuild took a matter of weeks once I knew what to build. Standing in front of my own manager and saying the first six months of work had been built on the wrong assumption, with nothing concrete to show for it yet, was the moment that actually tested whether I would push through or quietly protect the version of myself who had been confident from day one.
I pushed through it, and the numbers that followed made the conversation easier in hindsight than it felt in the moment. But the lesson I carry from it has nothing to do with the numbers. It is that expertise built on assumption, however well-intentioned, is still a guess, and the only thing that turns a guess into something real is going and listening to the people the work is actually for, a habit the content calendar at Originn Properties has run on ever since.
What I’d Tell Someone Starting Over in a New Role
Do not trust your first quarter’s plan, no matter how much experience you are bringing into the room. Go sit in on the conversations the business is already having with the people it serves, before you write a single page based on what you assume they want to hear. The six months I spent being wrong taught me that the fastest way to be right is almost never to think harder alone in an office.
Author Bio:
Nassira Sennoune is the SEO consultant at Originn Properties, a luxury real estate brokerage based in Marrakech working with buyers and owners across Morocco and the Gulf.
