SEO for estate agents
neometa provides estate agency SEO for UK sales and letting agents from £495 a month, with no VAT added on top. The work targets the vendor and landlord searches the portals do not own: valuation, “should I sell or let”, letting agent fees and area guides. Rightmove owns the buyer searches, and competing for them is not part of this. Where you need a new website, the build is included in the £495 plan.
You will not outrank the portals for property searches and you should stop trying. They have every property in the country and you have your stock. What they cannot own is the vendor deciding whether to sell, the landlord looking for management, and the person typing the name of one street in your patch.
Worth doing when
If you are winning all the instructions in your patch already, this is not where your money should go.
01 / 04
The instruction is decided before the property is listed
An estate agent's search demand splits into two populations that want opposite things. Buyers and applicants want stock, and the portals will always have more of it than you. Vendors and landlords want to know what their property is worth and who to trust with it. That is a question the portals answer badly and generically, because they are not local and you are.
Every instruction you win through your own site is one you did not pay a portal for. That is the entire commercial argument, and it is why the vendor-side searches are worth more to you than their volume suggests.
Vendor
The searches that become instructions, and the ones the portals serve worst. This is where the whole case for doing SEO at all sits, and it is usually the page nobody has built.
Landlord
Recurring management income instead of a one-off fee, and a searcher comparing local agents on service and cost. Consistently under-served relative to what a managed property is worth.
Area
Too specific for a portal to write well and too local for a national site to bother with. A genuine page about one area, written by somebody who knows it, is difficult to compete with.
Process
Asked months before the valuation is booked. The agency that answered is the one they think of first, and it costs nothing but the writing.
02 / 04
What the monthly work actually is
Build the vendor side first. Everything else on this list is worth doing and none of it changes the business the way an instruction won outside the portals does.
Search Console and the live results for your patch. Most agencies rank for the agency name and their own property listings, and nothing on the vendor side at all.
Categories, services, area covered, photos, and reviews from vendors as well as buyers. For a searcher comparing three local agents this does more work than the website does.
What actually moves a valuation in your area, what your fee covers, what a vendor should ask any agent before instructing. Not a form with a headline above it, but a page worth reading that happens to end in a form.
Genuinely different pages, written by somebody who knows the area: what sells there, what it is like to live there, what the market has done. Sequenced by which areas are worth the most, a few at a time.
Landlords are a separate audience with separate searches, and giving them a subheading on the sales page is why most agencies get no lettings enquiries from search.
03 / 04
£495 a month, against one instruction.
Local is £495 a month: one patch, the searches around it, the Business Profile and the site work. Growth is £995 a month where you want more job types, more towns or the harder terms. If you already have a website worth keeping there is no build to fund, so Growth is £895 a month on a six-month minimum term instead of 12. Prices are the full amount payable; no VAT is added on top.
The comparison to make is not against zero, it is against your portal spend. One instruction won through your own site is a fee you kept in full and did not pay to list. On most agencies' numbers the plan needs to produce one or two extra instructions a year to have covered itself, and unlike the portals the visibility keeps working once it is built. Full pricing.
04 / 04
Winning the searches the property portals do not own. Rightmove, Zoopla and OnTheMarket have the buyer and tenant searches locked up, and no independent agent is going to take them. The vendor and landlord searches are a different market and they are wide open.
In practice that means a valuation page, a “should I sell or let” page, a letting agent fees page, and an area guide for each patch you work. The instruction is what you are selling, and the instruction is decided before the property is ever listed.
On Local the website is part of the £495 a month: a mobile-responsive WordPress site of around five pages, with hosting, SSL and maintenance included and no build fee. Growth builds up to ten pages for £995 a month, and a standalone website without the SEO plan starts at £2,500. Where we build the site the minimum term is 12 months, and the site is yours at month 12.
The site is built around the vendor, landlord and area searches this page describes, alongside your property feed, so the website is ready for the searches the portals do not own from the day it launches.
£495 a month for one branch and the areas around it, £995 a month for more areas or the harder lettings terms, and £895 a month on a six-month minimum term where the website is worth keeping. Full amounts payable, no VAT added.
One instruction at an average UK commission covers several months of the plan. A single landlord signing a full management agreement covers considerably more than that, and keeps paying.
Not on the buyer searches, and it is not worth trying. On “how much is my house worth”, “estate agent fees [town]”, “letting agent fees” and the area guides, routinely, because the portals are not really competing for those and the national chains write them badly.
This is the whole strategy for an independent agent: concede the searches that need a portal's budget and take the ones that need somebody who knows the streets.
They are the most reliably underrated page an agent can build. A vendor deciding whether to sell reads about schools, transport, what has sold recently and what the street is like, and they read it months before they instruct anybody.
They also need maintaining. An area guide quoting three-year-old sold prices does more harm than not having one, because the vendor checking it knows the current numbers better than you would expect.
Lettings is the better opportunity of the two and gets less attention. Landlord searches are recurring, the decision is commercial rather than emotional, and a full management instruction is worth years of revenue rather than one commission.
The pages that win it are the unglamorous ones: what your management fee actually covers, what the landlord's legal obligations now are, and what happens when a tenant stops paying.
Background reading
Other professions
SEO for Estate Agents questions
Not for property searches, and you should not spend money trying. They have national stock, enormous authority and a structural advantage you cannot close. What they cannot do is write a good page about one street in your patch, or answer a vendor deciding whether to sell this year. That is the ground worth fighting for, and it is where the instructions are.
No, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. The portals are how buyers find property and that is not changing. This is about building a second channel for the vendor and landlord side, so that portal fees become one route to instructions and not the only one. Reducing dependence is the realistic goal.
Google Business Profile changes and on-page fixes can show inside a few weeks. Vendor and area pages more commonly take three to six months to rank. Property has a long cycle on top of that. Somebody reading your area page in spring may not book a valuation until autumn, so judge it over a year, not a quarter.
A range, with what it includes. Vendors are comparing agents on fee and service and cannot easily do either. An agency that explains its percentage and what the vendor gets for it converts better than one that insists on a phone call to find out, because the phone call is exactly what a vendor at the research stage is avoiding.
Local is £495 a month and covers one patch and the searches around it. Growth is £995 a month where you want more branches, more areas or the lettings side built alongside sales. Where you already have a website worth keeping there is no build to fund, so Growth is £895 a month on a six-month minimum term rather than 12. Prices are the full amount payable; no VAT is added on top.
Not yet. The client work is trades, clinics and professional services, and there is no estate agency case study to show you. Before you commit to anything we will show you what your own site ranks for today and which agents hold the vendor searches in your patch.
It limits the listings, not the pages that matter here. Most agency sites pull stock from a feed and have very little else, which is precisely why the vendor and area pages are winnable: almost nobody has built them. The feed can stay exactly as it is.
On position and clicks for the specific searches being targeted, monthly, in plain English. Where you will tell us, we also report how many valuations came through the site instead of a portal. That last number is the one worth holding us to.
Start the conversation
Send us your website and the areas you cover. We'll come back with what you currently rank for on the vendor side, who owns those searches, and whether this is worth doing.
Simon reviews every enquiry himself and replies within one working day. No finished brief required.
