Vendors
The one that matters commercially. Somebody deciding whether to sell, and then who to instruct. They search valuation and fee questions long before they search for an agency, and whoever answered those is on the shortlist of three.
Portals sell your listings. They don't sell your agency.
Rightmove and Zoopla put your properties in front of buyers, at a price that goes one way. What they don't do is win you the instruction in the first place, and that decision happens on Google weeks earlier.
Check my visibilityWHAT THEY SEARCHESTATE AGENTS
01
estate agents in [town]
02
free house valuation [town]
03
estate agent fees [area]
04
letting agents [town]
05
how much is my house worth
Example patterns. Real opportunities depend on your branches and the market you work in.
Why this sector is its own problem.
Estate agency has the same structural problem as the trades, in a more expensive form. You pay a portal to be visible, the fee rises, and you have no asset at the end of it. Cancel and the listings vanish that month. It is the Checkatrade problem with two more zeroes on the invoice.
The important thing the portals don't touch is the instruction. A vendor deciding who to invite round for a valuation isn't browsing Rightmove for agents, they're searching for agents in their town, reading reviews, and looking at who seems to know the area. That search is winnable and most agencies have never seriously tried.
Three audiences, one website.
They want different things, and only one of them pays you directly.
Landlords
Recurring revenue and a completely different set of questions: yields, compliance, tenant find against full management, what the legal obligations actually are. Chronically underserved, and it repeats every time they buy another property.
Buyers and tenants
Plentiful, and mostly already on the portals. Worth capturing but not worth building the site around, which is the mistake most agency sites make.
Where we would start.
Own the valuation search
Free valuation and house valuation terms in your towns are the highest-intent commercial searches in the sector. They're also the ones agencies leave to the national online-only firms with big ad budgets.
Build branch pages that earn their place
One page per branch with real local knowledge, actual sold evidence and the people who work there. Not the same page with the town swapped, which is what most multi-branch agency sites are.
Write for landlords properly
Lettings is the recurring half of the business and the search competition is far weaker than sales. Compliance questions in particular are searched constantly and answered by almost nobody local.
Publish your fees
Vendors are comparing three agencies and fee is the question they're too polite to ask first. Being the one that states it plainly filters the tyre-kickers and wins the trust of everyone else.
Treat reviews as the shortlist
Nobody instructs an agency without reading reviews. Recency matters more than total, and replies are read by every vendor deciding who to call.
Show sold evidence, not stock photography
What sold, in what street, in how long, at what proportion of asking. That's the single most persuasive thing an agency can publish and almost nobody does it.
What most agencies get wrong.
Building the website for buyers. Buyers are already on the portals and they generate no fee for you directly. The site's job is to win instructions, and that means it should be built for vendors and landlords first.
Treating the portal spend as fixed and the website as discretionary. It is the wrong way round: one is rent with no residual value, the other is the only part of your marketing you actually own.
Duplicating one branch page across twelve towns. It is the same thin-location-page problem that catches the trades, and in a sector where local knowledge is the entire proposition it is also self-defeating.
Questions we get asked.
Can this replace Rightmove?
No, and be wary of anyone who says otherwise. Portals are where buyers look for property. What search work does is win you the instruction, so you have more properties to list and more leverage in the conversation about what the portals are worth to you.
We're a small independent competing with the online agencies. Is it worth it?
It is where independents have the advantage. The national online-only firms cannot credibly write about your specific town, its housing stock or its market, and local knowledge is exactly what a nervous vendor is looking for.
How long before we see valuation requests?
Months rather than weeks for the competitive town terms, though branch and lettings pages often move sooner because the competition is thinner. Nobody can give you a date honestly.
Do you work with multi-branch agencies?
Yes, and the branch structure is usually the first thing worth fixing. Most multi-branch sites have twelve versions of one page, which competes with itself and convinces nobody.
Where these figures come from
UK search demand, August 2026
"seo for estate agents" runs at 480 monthly UK searches at £13.16 per click with low advertiser competition (0.18). Measured via Google Ads keyword data on 2 August 2026. That is higher volume than every trade term we measured except roofing, which is why this branch exists at all.
Want to see what your towns look like?
Tell us which branches you cover. We'll check what the valuation searches there look like, who is currently taking them, and whether it is winnable.