Let’s start with a question: how much did you spend on Rightmove last month?
If you’re a typical estate agent in the UK, the answer is somewhere around £1,524, or £18,288 a year. And if you’re based in Manchester, those fees are eating up around 8.7% of your total sales commission before you’ve paid a single member of staff, covered your rent, or kept the lights on.
Nobody’s saying Rightmove doesn’t work. It does. But the moment you stop paying, the leads stop; you own nothing. You’ve rented your visibility for another month, and next year the bill will be higher than it was this year (because it always is). Rightmove’s average annual fee was £15,768 in 2022. By 2024 it had climbed to £18,288. That’s a 16% increase in two years, with no signs of slowing down.
So yes — SEO is worth it for estate agents. But the more interesting question is why, and that’s what this blog is actually about.
What SEO does that portals don’t
When someone finds your website through Google (because you rank for “estate agents in Didsbury” or “how much is my house worth in Sale”) that lead costs you nothing extra. It doesn’t matter if it’s the first enquiry this month or the five hundredth. That’s the fundamental difference between renting visibility and owning it.
The estate agents we work with who invest in SEO aren’t doing it instead of portals, at least not at first. They’re doing it to reduce their dependency over time and to build something that belongs to them.
What the numbers actually look like
Let’s put some figures around this, because “SEO is a long-term investment” is the kind of thing people say when they don’t want to commit to specifics!
The clients we’ve worked with have seen organic traffic grow by 2x, 4x, and in some cases significantly more. We understand that traffic only matters if it turns into enquiries, but a conservative conversion rate of 1–2% (i.e. one or two people out of every hundred visitors gets in touch) the maths starts to look interesting quite quickly.
Here’s a simple way to think about it. The average UK estate agent earns around £3,860 per instruction, based on an average sale price of £275,923 and a typical fee of 1.4%. If better search visibility brings in even two or three additional instructions a month, the return on a £2,000 SEO retainer isn’t a difficult case to make.
But, as the old phrase goes, don’t take our word for it! The calculator below lets you put your own numbers in. Change the assumptions, stress-test it, make it as conservative as you like. The point isn’t to sell you a rosy picture — it’s to give you a real basis for making the decision.
Rightmove vs SEO:
what’s the real cost?
What SEO actually involves for estate agents
It’s worth being clear about this, because “do SEO” can mean a lot of different things.
For estate agents, the work that tends to move the needle is fairly consistent. Area pages — properly written, locally relevant pages targeting the neighbourhoods you operate in — are usually the highest-return activity. Done well, these pages rank for searches like “estate agents in [area]” and “houses for sale in [area]” and bring in people who are actively looking for exactly what you offer.
Blog content helps too, but only when it’s genuinely useful. Posts that answer real questions about the buying process, local market conditions, what to look for in a surveyor and all that kind of thing build trust and bring in traffic at the research stage of the journey. That’s a longer path to a lead, but it does work.
Then there’s technical SEO, which making sure your site loads quickly, is easy for Google to crawl, and doesn’t have underlying issues holding it back. This is the foundation everything else sits on. And last but not least, links. Getting other credible websites to link to yours still carries significant weight in how Google ranks pages. For local estate agents, this often means local press coverage, community involvement, and being mentioned in the right places online.
Talk to Pollinate Marketing
If you’re an established agent who’s tired of watching your Rightmove bill go up every year, who wants to build something that works for you rather than for a portal, and who’s willing to invest consistently over six to twelve months — get in touch today.
The estate agents who figure this out early tend to be the ones their competitors are scratching their heads about in three years’ time. Don’t let that be you!
