Property businesses face a competitor no other sector deals with quite so bluntly: the portals. Rightmove and Zoopla will outrank you for almost any property search, and fighting them head-on is a waste of budget. The winning strategy is to rank for everything the portals cannot own — your area, your expertise, and the decision that comes before a search ever begins.
Accept it and redirect the effort. Portals have authority no independent agent can match on "3 bed house for sale in [town]". What they cannot do is write authoritatively about the local market, schools, transport, or what a specific street is genuinely like to live on.
Properties sell, pages die, and a site slowly accumulates hundreds of dead URLs. Left unhandled this bleeds authority and produces a poor experience. It needs a deliberate policy — redirect, retain as sold, or remove — applied consistently.
For most agents the money is not in buyers browsing listings; it is in vendors requesting a valuation. That single action deserves to be the most prominent, best-designed thing on the site, and on most agency sites it is a link buried in the navigation.
Listings usually arrive from a CRM feed with unoptimised images and messy markup. Without care this produces slow pages and duplicate content across dozens of near-identical listings.
"Best areas to live in [town]", "[town] house price trends", "is [area] a good place to buy" — these are winnable, they attract people at the start of a move, and they establish the local authority that makes your brand the one they remember.
"How much is my house worth", "estate agent fees", "how to choose an estate agent". These carry far more commercial value per visit than buyer searches, and they are markedly less contested than listing terms.
"Which estate agent should I use in [town]" is now a common assistant prompt. The answers are assembled from pages that state fees, coverage, specialisms and results plainly — which is a content problem, not a technical one.
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For individual property searches, realistically no. For area guides, market commentary, valuation questions and agent comparisons, yes — and those searches bring vendors, who are worth considerably more to an agency than browsing buyers.
Yes. Most agency CRMs offer a property feed, and we import it, process the images, and render listings from your own templates so you keep control of speed and layout rather than inheriting whatever the feed provides.
Keep them as evidence of local activity where they are useful, and redirect the rest to the relevant area or search page. Deleting them outright discards accumulated authority and leaves broken links across the web.
For anything substantial, usually yes. A development has its own audience, its own marketing spend and its own lifespan, and separating it makes performance measurable instead of blurred into the corporate site.
Typically three to six months for a new site to build enough authority, sooner on an established domain. They compound: guides written now continue attracting enquiries for years, unlike advertising that stops the moment you do.
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