Did you know more than 60,000 searches are made every month in the UK for “estate agent near me”? Real estate agents near me = 6,600 searches a month. Local estate agents near me = 2,400 searches a month. That’s thousands of searches a month from potential buyers and sellers looking for your services. When
Did you know more than 60,000 searches are made every month in the UK for “estate agent near me”?
Real estate agents near me = 6,600 searches a month.
Local estate agents near me = 2,400 searches a month.
That’s thousands of searches a month from potential buyers and sellers looking for your services.
When they make those searches, who are they going to find?
One way to make sure they find you is to get your estate agent SEO as strong as possible.
In this guide, we’ll give you everything you need to know to improve your estate agency website’s SEO so you can be found online and win more instructions from buyers, sellers, landlords and tenants.
Less than 10% of buyers start a house search by visiting an estate agent’s branch or looking at listings in windows, according to one study by Zoopla.
For most people, buying or selling a house starts by looking at an estate agent’s website. Or on a property portal like Rightmove or Zoopla.
This means being visible for a variety of keywords and search phrases is essential if you want to catch the attention of potential clients early in their journey.
Estate agent SEO is the process of improving your website so it stands a better chance of showing up in search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant enquiries.
If you show up in more searches, whether it’s people looking for an estate agent to sell their property, people looking for a property to buy, or peope researching an area they’re
interested in moving to, you can get more organic traffic to your website.
If you get more organic traffic to your website, you have more chance of winning listings and instructions. If you can get those, you have more chance of closing deals and earning fees and commissions.
So, here’s some tips to improve your SEO for real estate agents.
As with any campaign, SEO for estate agents starts with finding the keywords and phrases that your potential clients use to find you or your services.
The key for estate agents is to not go too broad.
Trying to rank for “estate agents”, for example, is not only going to be very difficult (and expensive) but likely isn’t going to bring local leads in.
As you can see from the example below, “estate agents” as a search term gets 90,500 searches a month (a huge number for sure).
But with a keyword difficulty of 95, it’s going to be extremely difficult to rank for this term, especially if you’re an independent estate agent without a huge marketing budget.
You can see from the search results for this term, the SERPs are dominated by the big property portals and national estate agents with dozens or hundreds of franchises around the country:
A better approach, and one you’re likely to have more success with, is to target long tail, local keywords for the area, or areas, you work in.
This is an approach we took for one of our estate agency clients, Stapleton Derby, when they came to us looking to improve their organic visibility and lead generation in St Helens and around Merseyside.
Instead of targeting broad estate agent terms, we targeted local searches in St Helens (estate agents in St Helens), and, as you can see, it worked:
With around 1,300 searches a month, it doesn’t have the vanity volume that “estate agents” does.
But people searching for a service in a specific area are more likely to be qualified leads.
As you can also see, by taking the local approach, Stapleton Derby is even outranking Rightmove for these local property searches.
And it’s not just that one keyword they’re ranking for.
There are dozens of variations, each with more than 1,000 monthly searches that Stapleton Derby now ranks at least in the top two positions for (they’re currently 2nd for “estate agent St Helens” with 1,300 searches a month):
All estate agent websites have individual property listing pages. Which makes sense.
These are usually pulled through third-party feed subscriptions or plugins.
From an SEO perspective, the problem is very few people, if any, are searching for individual properties.
These pages are also temporary and deleted once the property sells, so there’s little, if any, SEO value.
Property searches usually start with a rough idea of what the person wants, like a “3-bedroom house in X area”.
This provides a massive opportunity for your estate agents’ SEO because you can create category pages using these broader search terms.
Let’s say someone searches for “2 bed house for sale St Helens”
This has 110 searches a month.
That’s 110 potential chances to make a sale, if you have a page for this (obviously, the search volume will be dictated by the demand for certain types of property at any given time).
Admittedly, there can be a lot of category pages you need to create, and it can depend how granular you want to go.
But a benefit of these category pages is that they’re “evergreen” pages (a fancy way of saying they’re going to remain unchanged forever. A 2 bed house for sale is always going to be a 2 bed house for sale).
This means over time, they’ll build more authority and rank higher for commercially relevant keywords that clients are searching for.
It also gives you a page to redirect expired listings to, so you avoid having loads of 404 errors (which is bad for SEO).
These category pages can be easy to create if you have a property filter system on your website.
Provided you have breadcrumbs set up between the pages you’ll see the SEO benefits.
The good thing about doing SEO for estate agents, you don’t need a lot of expensive software to find the best keywords to target.
If you’ve got a Google Ads account, you can use the free Google keyword planner tool.
This is good, because it shows you other information, like the cost per click of a keyword, which can show you which keywords are commercially valuable (tip, it’s usually the ones that have a higher CPC).
If you’ve got budget, we recommend keyword tools like Wincher, Ahrefs and SEMrush. These are easy to use, reliable tools for seeing the search volume and difficulty for keywords you might want to target.
Now you’ve got your keyword strategy in place, it’s time to look at the on-page SEO of your website.
This is going to make sure your content is structured so search engines can understand what your website and pages are about, so it can rank you in SERPs.
These are the main things you should pay attention to:
A title tag is the headline that shows up in search results (in purple below). Search engines use them to figure out what your page is about, so you should use your main keyword in the title:
The meta description is the blurb underneath the title tag, giving more context about the page.
This doesn’t have any impact on rankings, but it can contribute to how many people click through to your website, so it needs to be persuasive and provide a compelling selling point for your business.
Header tags (H1, H2, H3) help organise your page’s content and make it digestible for readers.
You should only ever have one H1 per page (which will include your main keyword).
H2s are the headers for each section on a page followed by H3, H4, H5, H6.
We’ve written in detail how to use header tags SEO.
This is where estate agent websites can struggle.
If you’re selling houses, one thing you need lots of is quality images (and increasingly, videos).
This page wouldn’t look particularly enticing or make you want to click on a listing without the images after all, would it?
But, if you’ve got lots of images and videos with large file sizes, it’s going to slow your website down, which hurts user experience, and impacts SEO.
To help, you should compress file sizes as much as possible to protect your page’s load speed.
For image file sizes, we’d recommend 200KB max.
For video, your file size should be less than 5MB.
You should also write alt text for your images, giving context to search engines what the image is about, and how it fits with the page content.
A great content strategy should target customers at every stage of their journey.
If you think about buying a new house (especially if it’s a new area), what are you thinking about? Other than the number of beds or bathrooms?
If you’ve got kids, you’re probably thinking about a house close to a good school.
So your website could have a blog about the best schools by area. You don’t have to be opinionated or controversial. Just a factual article using Ofsted results could be enough.
Maybe living within walking distance of a decent pub or restaurant is important. Again, articles ranking the best places to eat or drink in a particular area could be useful.
Or, maybe, you want to be close to a park or local amenities.
This should all fit into your estate agency’s content strategy. You should aim to become the main source of local information for people researching areas where they might want to buy a house.
Why put all this effort in?
Because you’ll reach people in the earlier stages of researching their new home, and start building trust with them.
It also positions you as an expert in the local area, which is reassuring for people looking to buy a new home.
If you can demonstrate your local knowledge, they’re more likely to trust that you can find them the home they want.
Other content you can use is to provide regular market updates on the state of the local housing market. This can be great content for newsletters.
You can also provide useful advice and tips like, “things to know when buying your first home” or “questions to ask on a viewing”.
These are all things potential buyers or sellers will be thinking about.
If you can provide the answers they’re looking for, they’re much more likely to trust you when it comes to choosing an estate agent.
There’s nothing more powerful when looking at a product or service than a recommendation from someone else who’s already used it.
It doesn’t matter how much research we do. A single positive or negative experience from someone we know can sway us when it comes to the choice we make.
Especially if the service is buying a house, when the process can be quite stressful and having the right estate agent can make all the difference.
This social proof is incredibly valuable when it comes to converting browsers into clients.
But it’s also a signal to search engines that you’re reliable, increasing your chances of being ranked highly in search engines.
Especially in local SEO (which is what most estate agent SEO is).
Google is increasingly paying more attention to positive reviews. Using them as a ranking factor in local search results.
If you’re going to ask for reviews, don’t just ask for a star rating.
Instead, ask for a detailed, written review alongside your star rating, highlighting the experience your client had with you and the results they got.
Research is showing Google is trying to root out engineered or fake reviews (which are usually just a star rating) and is giving more weight to listings with more detailed testimonials.
Another tip for reviews and testimonials: respond to them. Again, this is a signal to Google that you’re active with your SEO and can help push you higher up search results.
This is where things can get a bit…technical.
I’ll just say here. It’s entirely possible for you to manage the technical SEO of your website, if you have the time and know what you’re doing.
But this could be the point where you might consider the services of an SEO expert to help you.
Technical SEO is the backend of your website.
If all your content is the fancy decorations, technical SEO is the foundation that holds everything up. Without it, search engines like Google will have a hard time finding, crawling and indexing your pages.
That means there’s a higher chance you won’t appear in SERPs, and potential clients will never find you online.
These are the main things to watch out for with your technical SEO.
More than half of online property searches are done on mobile.
Which means your website needs to be designed and built “mobile first”.
The basics of mobile first mean a responsive design, so the page can be viewed easily on any device, fast loading speeds, and content that’s easy to read and navigate.
We’ve mentioned before that page load speed is a ranking factor, and it should be part of any technical SEO work you or your agency does.
Website security is essential for any business, not just estate agents, and it can definitely have an impact on your organic visibility.
Search engines aren’t likely to show websites that could pose a security risk to users, so you should have your website security set up with SSL certificates and HTTPS.
As we’ve mentioned, the majority of organic search for estate agents deals with local SEO.
Ranking for broad national terms like “estate agents” is not only not practical, but isn’t likely to bring qualified leads.
Local SEO for real estate agents is a massive opportunity to appear in valuable local searches.
There are some things to consider for your estate agency’s local SEO that we haven’t covered.
If you haven’t already, you should claim your Google Business Profile.
This is the box that appears in search providing all your business’ key information:
If you already have a Google Business Profile, make sure it’s optimised with accurate business information, including NAP details (Name, Address, Phone Number), photos, videos and posts, as well as reviews.
If you have offices in multiple locations, you can create a Google Business Profile for each one.
An optimised Google Business Profile also improves your chances of showing up in Google Maps:
Local business directories are a simple way of building valuable links to your website.
If you’re going to build these citations, ensure your NAP information is consistent, including the same format.
For example, if your phone number is formatted as 00000 000 000, then it should be the same everywhere the number appears.
If your NAP information is inconsistent, it can confuse search engines and mean you won’t rank as highly as you could.
We’ve mentioned this, but Google reviews are a key part of your Google Business Profile.
Google favours profiles with positive reviews (because they’re deemed more trustworthy) so you should have a strategy in place to encourage reviews from clients.
Google has hundreds of ranking factors when positioning websites in SERPs, and links are one of the main ones.
Links (sometimes called backlinks) are direct links from another website to yours and are a signal to Google that your website is authoritative and trustworthy in your industry.
The aim is to build relevant backlinks from other websites to yours. This could include links in industry blogs, or relevant trade news websites like estateagenttoday or propertyindustryeye.
There are a few ways you can build these types of links.
Create thought leadership articles with your insights into the current property market and trends. Give commentary on topical issues and position yourself as an authority in the property market.
Estate agents typically partner with other local businesses like mortgage companies and solicitors. Offer to share links from these partner websites.
If you’re going to do SEO, you’ll want to know how it’s performing so you can make improvements.
The two easiest tools, which are free to use, are:
Google Analytics (GA4) provide you information on the number of website visitors, where they’re coming from, how they’re using your website and what pages are getting the most traffic and, if you set up goals, how your website is converting.
This information can be critical for making improvements to your SEO campaigns.
If you’re getting lots of traffic, but no conversions, for example, it could be that you’re not targeting the right keywords and phrases, or that you need to set up better conversion optimisation on your website.
Google Search Console is great for telling you which keywords are bringing in the most impressions and clicks. What your click through rates are (what proportion of people who see your website click through to it) and if your site is having any performance issues like low load speeds.
Again, this can be valuable for assessing your campaign performance and making improvements.
A lack of impressions can mean you’re not ranking for any keywords, which could mean you page content needs to be improved and better targeted, or you need to build more links.
A lack of clicks could mean you’re showing up in searches, but people aren’t actually coming through to your website, which could be a signal that your title tags and meta descriptions need improving to encourage more clicks.
If you’re an estate agent looking to become more visible in organic search and win more listings or instructions, the steps in this guide should help you rank and get traffic from a higher number of online searches and queries.
If you think this all sounds great but you just don’t have the time or confidence to do it all yourself, get in touch with our SEO experts.
We’ve got experience creating successful SEO campaigns for estate agents. Helping them improve their website visibility and enquiries from Google Business Profiles.
If you’ve already got a website that isn’t performing as you’d like, we can give you a free audit to show you where the improvements could be made.
There’s no obligation to use us to fix any issues we find, so you’ve not got anything to lose.
Speak to a member of our team and start your project today!
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