SEO for estate agents
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.
Four different searches
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 — and 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.
How it works
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 — 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.
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.
Other professions
SEO for Estate Agents questions
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.
