Marketing for estate agents, built around valuations booked
You are not going to outrank Rightmove for property searches and you do not need to. The search that makes you money is a vendor looking for an agent, and that one is winnable.
Organic impressions for one client in 12 months
Client development pages ranking top for their own names
Based here, working with businesses across the UK
Marketing the properties is not marketing the agency
Estate agency marketing means two completely different things and they get conflated constantly. Marketing a property on behalf of a vendor is a service you already deliver, largely through the portals. Marketing the agency, so vendors instruct you in the first place, is a different job entirely.
The portals own property search and there is no point competing with them for it. What they do not own is the vendor deciding who to invite round. That decision is made on local visibility, reviews, and whether you look like the agent who sells houses on that street.
So the metric is valuations booked, not traffic. Everything else is a step towards that, and anything that does not lead to it is decoration.
What gets a valuation booked
The local pack, street by street
Vendors search with a place name attached, and the map results sit above everything. Profile quality and a steady flow of recent reviews decide this more than the website does. Covered on our local SEO page.
Area pages that are actually about the area
A real page per area you genuinely sell in, with local sold evidence and detail. Thirty thin pages with the place name swapped is a pattern that gets filtered out, and it is what most agents have.
A valuation request that works
Instant valuation tools, a booking flow that takes seconds on a phone, and property feeds pulled from Reapit, Alto or Jupix so listings stay current without anybody rekeying them. We build integrations as standard.
Landlord acquisition, handled separately
Winning landlords is not the same as finding tenants, and lettings is the more predictable revenue. It needs its own pages and its own targeting rather than a mention on the sales page.
Traffic to your property listings is mostly people browsing houses they will never buy. Count valuations instead and the picture changes completely.
Reviews decide more instructions than your website does
Choosing an estate agent is a high value, low frequency, high anxiety decision. Vendors are looking for reassurance, and they find it in recent reviews from people in their area, not in your homepage copy.
Review volume and recency also feed the local pack directly, so the same effort improves both the ranking and the conversion. It is the cheapest improvement available to almost every agency we look at, and the one most consistently neglected because it requires asking every single time.
Build it into the completion process and it stops being a marketing task.
What agents ask
Can we compete with Rightmove and Zoopla?
For property searches, no, and you should not spend money trying. They have authority and inventory you cannot match. For “estate agents in [your area]” and valuation searches, absolutely, and those are the ones that produce instructions rather than browsing.
Do we need a page for every area we cover?
Only for areas you genuinely sell in and can write something true about, with real local evidence. Four substantial area pages will outperform twenty thin ones, and the thin ones carry a real risk of being filtered out entirely.
Is it worth advertising, or just SEO?
Paid search on valuation intent terms works and is usually affordable, because the competition is other local agents rather than national brands. The catch is that instruction volume is seasonal and tied to the housing market, so budgets need to flex with it rather than run flat all year.
We are a lettings agency, not sales. Is this different?
Yes, and usually simpler. Landlord acquisition is a smaller, more identifiable audience with much better lifetime value than a single sale. Tenant demand largely looks after itself in most markets, so the effort goes almost entirely into landlords.
What does it cost?
It depends on how many branches and areas are involved and whether a website build is part of it. The fee is agreed in writing before work starts and sits separately from any advertising budget on the invoice.
Talk to us about your agency
Tell us which areas you want more instructions in. We will look at who holds those searches now and what it would take to get in front of them.
