You know the job. What I do is the other half: making sure the person deciding who to invite round to value their house finds you while they’re deciding.
That’s the search worth winning, and it isn’t the one a buyer is doing. Buyers are on the portals. Vendors are choosing a company, which is a decision your website can actually influence. Below is where I think an independent agency can compete for it, and where I’d tell you to save your money.
What a vendor is weighing up before they call
Somebody thinking about selling does two things before they ring anybody. They look up what their property might be worth, and they look up who the agents in their town are.
Neither of those searches is about your stock. They’re about you. And on most agency websites the pages that answer them are the thinnest on the site: a valuation form with a line of copy above it, and an about page that says the team has served the area for years without saying anything a vendor could act on.
What a vendor is actually weighing up is fees, tie-in periods, how you market a property, what happens if it doesn’t sell, and whether you’re the agent who gets asking price or the one who gets a quick sale. Answer those plainly and you’ve done more than any amount of keyword work on a listings page.
The portals will win the listing searches
An independent agency isn’t going to consistently beat Rightmove, Zoopla or OnTheMarket for broad property searches in its town. They hold more stock and the whole experience is built for comparing it. Spending a small agency’s budget trying to reproduce that is money going the wrong way.
Worth knowing that the portals also run their own instant valuation tools, so even the valuation search has national competition on it. That doesn’t make it unwinnable. It does mean you’re competing for the local version of it, where somebody wants a person who knows the street. That’s a narrower search and a much better fit for what you can offer.
Branch and area pages only work if you work the area
Most agencies have a page per area covered. They’re often the same page with the place name changed, and Google treats them roughly the way a vendor would if they read two of them back to back.
What makes an area page worth having is the thing only somebody selling houses there could write. What’s moving and what’s sitting. What the difference is between two streets that look the same on a map. What a seller in that area usually gets wrong about pricing. If you publish price examples, date them and keep them current, because a stale figure is worse than none.
If you also do lettings, keep the two sides distinct instead of merging them into one property services page. The landlord side is a different decision with a different search behaviour, and it’s covered on the letting agents page.
Where I’d start
There isn’t a running order that fits every agency. If the valuation form doesn’t work properly on a phone, or nobody can tell which enquiries came from search, fix that before anything else. Area guides won’t rescue a booking route that’s failing.
After that, roughly:
- The valuation journey. Everything a vendor needs in order to pick up the phone, from fees through to what you do when a sale falls through.
- The Google Business Profile, with a review habit somebody in the office actually owns. Google says local results depend mainly on relevance, distance and prominence, and reviews are the part of prominence you can build deliberately.
- The area pages, fewer and better, covering places you genuinely work.
- The measurement, separating vendor enquiries from buyer traffic, because the second is much larger and will hide what the first is doing.
That isn’t a fixed programme. If you’re already getting valuations but losing them at the appointment, more visibility isn’t the constraint and I’d say so.
Would Google Ads help?
It can, when you need instructions sooner than content is likely to deliver them. Valuation terms are about as commercially obvious as search gets, so expect company on them.
The thing that decides whether it’s worth it is the gap between a click and a sign outside a house. That’s a long gap, and most agencies can’t currently see across it. Get the calls and form submissions recorded against their source first, then the spending decision answers itself. My Google Ads service covers how I’d approach it.
What about AI answers?
Ask an assistant how to choose an estate agent and you’ll mostly get criteria rather than names: compare fees, check the tie-in, look at how long their stock sits, ask what happens if it doesn’t sell.
That’s more useful to you than a mention would be. It’s a list of what a vendor is being told to ask, and you can check your own site against it in ten minutes. If an assistant is telling sellers to ask about tie-in periods and your site doesn’t mention them anywhere, that’s a gap you can close this week.
Run the same questions a few times, because the answers move, and note where you are named and whether what’s said about you is right. There’s more under AI search visibility.
Who this suits
Independent agencies competing against corporates and online-only models on the same high street.
Agencies with a specialism, whether that’s a property type, the prime end of a local market or something like new homes or land, where fewer people search and far fewer firms have written anything useful.
Agencies covering several towns, where the area pages are doing the heavy lifting and usually aren’t built to.
What does it cost to work together?
I can’t price this from a sector name. It depends on the state of the site, how many areas you cover and what turns out to be wrong. I’d look at the site, whatever you can share from Search Console, and the agents you’re losing instructions to. Then I’d tell you what I’d do first, why, and what it would cost.
Most of the work happens remotely, and I’m near Liverpool if a conversation in person would help. Nearby towns are on the locations page.
Questions people ask
Where should a small agency actually compete?
On the searches about choosing an agent, not the ones about browsing houses. Valuations, fees, how you market a property, and your town plus the word estate agent. The broad listings searches belong to the portals and I wouldn’t spend your budget contesting them.
Are area pages worth doing?
Yes, if they’re written by somebody who works there. A set of near-identical pages with the town name swapped is the version that doesn’t work. Fewer, more specific pages tend to do more.
How much does the Google Business Profile matter?
For the local searches, a great deal, because the map listing sits above the ordinary results. Search your town plus estate agents on a phone, off your own wifi, and see who appears and how many reviews they have against yours. That tells you in two minutes whether reviews are your problem.
Should I publish my fees?
You don’t have to publish a full fee structure, but a vendor comparing agents is trying to understand what they’re buying. Explaining what’s included, what a tie-in means and what happens if the property doesn’t sell will do more than a page that avoids the subject entirely.
Do you only work with agencies in the North West?
No. Almost all of the work is remote and the majority of clients are elsewhere. Estate agency has its own page here because the vendor search is genuinely different from the rest of property, not because location matters to the work.
Start with an assessment
Tell me where your valuations currently come from and which areas you want more of. I’ll look at the site, your profile and the results in your own town, then tell you where I think the first useful change is. You can request a free assessment or get in touch. Other sectors are on the industries page.