Real estate and property SEO
Real estate SEO, where the listings are borrowed and the areas are yours.
Property descriptions arrive from the same feed every competing agent receives, and the listing disappears when the property sells. Ranking individual stock is building on sand. The pages that last are the areas, the property types and the branches, and those are usually the thinnest pages on an agency site.
Borrowed stock
Your listings are the same as everyone's. Your area knowledge is not.
Feed copy cannot be made unique and stock does not last. Everything durable on an estate agency site is local knowledge, which is the one thing a portal cannot copy from you.
What does not work
- Town name swapped on otherwise identical area pages
- Sold and let properties left as empty stubs at 200
- Every type, beds and price filter crawlable
- One contact page standing in for six branches
What does
- Area pages with real stock, price movement and local detail
- Sold listings redirected or served a 410
- Only the searched filter combinations indexable
- A real page per branch, with its own catchment
Eight good pages beat forty
The area pages are where this is won, and writing them properly is slower than generating them. We will tell you if what you have is a set of doorway pages, because publishing forty of them is a risk, not a strategy, and eight useful ones will out-earn all forty.
Scope
What real estate SEO covers here.
In the order it tends to pay back for an agency or property portal.
Area page architecture
Which areas deserve a page, what each has to contain to be worth ranking, and how they link to the stock inside them. The highest value pages on the site and usually the weakest.
Listing lifecycle
What happens to a URL when a property sells or lets. Redirect to the area or type page, or a clean 410. Never an indefinite stub returning 200 and piling up unnoticed.
Feed duplication
Accepting that shared descriptions cannot rank, and building value around them: your own photography, your own commentary, and canonical handling so your filtered views stop competing with each other.
Faceted search control
Type, bedrooms, price and area multiply fast. "Three bed houses in [area] under £400,000" is a real search. Most permutations are not, and they should not be crawlable.
Branch-level local signals
Each branch set up as a local business in its own right, with a real page, profile and catchment. Handled alongside local SEO.
Listing performance
Galleries of twenty-plus photographs per property, plus map embeds and virtual tours, on the pages that convert. The same image pipeline discipline any gallery needs.
Cost
What it costs.
Billed at £90 to £110 an hour, or the £95 blended rate where it crosses into development. Minimum engagement is 4 hours.
Technical audit
From £900
Listing URL handling, faceted indexation, duplication across the feed and the area page structure assessed, ranked by what each is costing you.
Area page project
Scoped
The areas that matter, built or rewritten with genuine local substance, and linked properly to the stock inside them.
Multi-branch architecture
Scoped
Branch pages and profiles separated so each has its own catchment and signals. No more competing under one generic contact page.
Time is logged as it is spent and the ledger is open to you. Full breakdown on the rates page.
FAQ
Questions clients ask
What is different about SEO for estate agents?
The listings are borrowed and temporary. Property descriptions usually come from the same feed every other agent is using, so hundreds of sites publish near-identical copy, and the listing itself disappears once the property sells or lets. Trying to rank individual listings is building on sand.
What lasts is the area. Neighbourhood and town pages, valuation and guide content, and the branch pages, all of which survive the stock turning over and are where the enquiries come from.
How should sold and let properties be handled?
With a policy, not by leaving them up forever at a 200 status. A sold listing that stays live as a stub is a soft 404, and at portfolio scale you accumulate thousands of them. Either redirect to the relevant area or property-type page, or return a 410 so it drops out of the index cleanly.
Some agents choose to keep sold listings as social proof, which is a legitimate choice. If you do, they need to be useful pages with sold price and date, and they should not be competing with your live stock.
Do area and neighbourhood pages work?
They are usually the highest value pages on an estate agency site, and they are usually the thinnest. A page that says "we sell property in Chorlton" with a postcode swapped from the last one is the doorway pattern, and it does not rank.
One that works has genuine local substance: what the housing stock is, what the schools and transport are, real price data, and how the area has moved. That is harder to write, which is exactly why the agents who do it own those searches.
Is this local SEO?
Largely, yes, and for a multi-branch agency it is the main event. Each branch is a local business with its own catchment, profile and citations, and "estate agents in [town]" is decided in the map pack, well before anyone reaches the blue links. That side is covered in the scope below.
The national layer is the guide content: valuations, buying process, landlord obligations. It earns the authority that helps the local pages, but it does not replace them.
Our portal feed creates duplicate content. Can that be fixed?
Partly, and there is a ceiling you should know about. You cannot make a feed description unique if every agent receives the same text, so the answer is not to rely on the listing copy for ranking at all. Add what is yours: your own photography, your own commentary on the property, local context nobody else has.
Structurally it means the area and type pages carry the rankings while listings serve conversion, plus correct canonical handling so your own filtered views are not competing with each other.
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Area pages not ranking for their own towns?
Send us the domain and two or three areas you want to own. We will tell you whether the pages have enough substance to rank, and how much of your crawl is going into sold stock and filters.