What is SEO For Estate Agents & Letting Agents?

Let’s start with the basics: SEO is short for search engine optimisation, a marketing discipline focused on growing visibility in organic (non-paid) search engine results.

SEO For Estate Agencies encompasses the technical and creative elements needed to

  • improve rankings,
  • drive traffic,
  • and increase awareness in search engines.

Today’s estate agents cannot wait for people to walk into their branch and, with such massive competition, previous clients are often just not that loyal anymore.

There is plenty of choices when it comes to choosing what estate agent to call out.

Let’s look at a typical Google page.

SEO for estate agents letting agents

Until the end of the image in the screenshot above, you can see

  1. On the top, there are 4 paid listings,
  2. then 3 on the map
  3. and just then you’ll start seeing organic listings

Even the best ranking ones, will appear most likely under the fold, which means you’d have to scroll down to view them).

What keywords should estate agents rank for?

Looking at the keyword search data, we know that the biggest searched phrases are not necessarily the ones that will generate better ROI.

Generally, the lower search phrases are much more targeted.

Estate and letting agents often have an idea of the most popular searches their prospective customers are inputting into Google, only to find out they may have been targeting the wrong term.

For example, “estate agents west London” is obviously a huge searched phrase – great if you need tenants or buyers. However, smaller search phrases like “estate agents TW1” or “estate agents Twickenham” have a much lower search volume but are much more targeted.

Long-tail keywords in SEO for estate agents

We dedicated a specific article to what are long-tail keywords and why they convert more, which you can find at this link.

In the property industry, within search, there are very descriptive phrases sometimes questions like, “What is it like to live in Chiswick” or “Why Teddington is the best place to live?” or “2 bedroom flat in Ealing for sale”

It is advisable to build your website out with this type of content: these searches are low but achievable to rank high in them. People like asking questions or being more descriptive in their search nowadays.

We all like to use Google as not only is it simple but it returns (most of the time) the result that we were looking for. For example – If you are looking for an estate agent in Brentford and you type in ‘Estate agents Brentford’ or “Properties to rent in Hammersmith and Fulham“, Google will return the most relevant website. In order to be the most relevant, you must have a page about that search term to at least give you a chance to rank.

First page ranking for your local branch town is possible. Local area guides and local information are key to this and making sure your website is a huge hub of information.

Would you sell your home with an estate agent that does not talk about your village or town on their website?

Challenges with SEO for estate agents

Appearing under property-related search can be tricky for quite a few estate agents as most use a live feed to the portals. However, we know that by sending all stock to your website first, Google won’t be seeing duplicated content.

Creating a clean URL structure with road and postcodes within the property listing is also a key ranking factor. Google wouldn’t understand just numbers and special characters, it would make it very hard to rank.

Helping Google rank a page

  • Page structure,
  • title tags,
  • H1s,
  • meta descriptions,
  • pictures,
  • page content

are some of the many on-page variables of a page being visible through Google’s algorithms.

Being experts in search and SEO, we know exactly which searches work and what doesn’t. Imagine a funnel of keywords put into a system: some lead to calls, some lead to sales and some don’t and could waste budgets quite easily. Unfortunately, choosing the wrong keywords will inevitably lead to limited results.

Local SEO for estate agents and letting agents

We have written a blog on Google maps for local businesses, which for estate agents and letting agents is a very powerful (and free) tool for local SEO to be used.

Be warned however that duplication of multiple branches is a common issue for most estate agents. Pulling everything together and merging pages would be our first key recommendations for starting a brilliant SEO campaign for estate agents.

Having consistent N-A-P (name, addresses, phone numbers) in local business directories is fundamental too. For example, a lot of estate agents have high street branches which could have the address of 23-25 High Street. On the estate agents’ website, this could read right, but across a directory like Yell, it could read 25 High Street. This will confuse Google and is not good practice as Google will lose confidence and play negative to your ranking factor.

A few data for you:

SEO is a data-driven science, so here are some figures for you to conclude.

  • 90% of home buyers use Google to search for properties
  • 42% of local searches result in clicks on the Google Map Pack
  • Organic SEO directly impacts your conversion rate since 67% of customers prefer brands from the top 5 list on Google search.
  • Sites listed on the first page of SERP get 95% of web traffic, and 99.22% of Google searchers click on results from the 1st page.
  • 53.3% of all website traffic comes from organic search
  • 53% of site visitors leave if a website loads longer than 3 seconds.

Get in touch with us, and let’s discuss your new SEO real estate strategy!