Sellers, by valuation and by fee
What is my house worth, estate agent fees, how much commission, should I sell now. Modest volume, and the only searches that reliably lead to an instruction.
Property
Real estate marketing on the searches portals do not own
An agent asked to rank for property for sale in their city. The first page was four portals, two national brokerages and a newspaper, with no realistic route in. There was an obvious opening on the seller and process searches nobody local had written a word about. Everything that works for an individual agent sits in the searches the portals have no answer for.
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Certified across the platforms we buy on. 150+ businesses, 7 years.
Marketing does not behave the same way here.
Real estate is the clearest case in marketing of a category where the highest-volume searches are unwinnable and largely worthless to the person trying to win them. Property search results are owned by portals with national inventory, and an individual agent has nothing to put on the page that competes.
Meanwhile the searches that produce a listing, which is the only thing that actually earns, have almost no competition: what is my house worth, should I sell now, how much are agent fees, what happens when a sale falls through.
A buyer and a seller are completely different customers. Buyer leads are plentiful, cheap and mostly worthless, because the buyer transacts with whoever holds the property. Seller leads are scarce, expensive, and are the business. And the agent is the brand more than the brokerage is, which means personal visibility outperforms company marketing in a way that is unusual anywhere else.
How your customers actually search.
Sellers, by problem
House not selling, sale fell through, switching agent, selling a probate property, selling with a tenant. Specific situations with almost no local competition and a very motivated searcher.
Buyers, by property, on a portal
Property for sale in an area, with filters. Enormous volume, owned by portals, and the buyer transacts through whoever holds the listing rather than through whoever they found first.
How an enquiry becomes a customer.
Different intents take different routes. Serving all of them with one page is the most common structural mistake in this industry.
- A seller trigger, then research on value and on fees, largely anonymously.
- A valuation appointment, which is the real conversion and where the instruction is won or lost.
- An instruction, then a transaction, then a referral that most agents never ask for.
- The entire site built around property listings, competing on the one set of searches portals cannot be beaten on.
- No valuation or fee content, which is where seller intent concentrates and where local competition barely exists.
- Agent profiles that are a photograph and two lines, when the agent is the thing being chosen.
- Nothing written for the situation searches, so the firm is invisible at exactly the moments a seller is motivated and unrepresented.
- Seller-intent campaigns on valuation, fee and situation terms, with buyer property searches added as negatives.
- Tight geographic targeting, because a lead outside the patch costs the same and is worth nothing.
- Campaigns aimed at expired and withdrawn listings, where the seller is proven motivated and currently unrepresented.
- Negatives against rent, jobs, licensing, courses and property investment courses, which arrive in volume on property terms.
- Valuation follow-up over months, since somebody who requested a valuation and did not instruct is the warmest audience the agent has.
- Past client and referral nurture, because repeat instruction and referral is the cheapest business in the sector and is almost never systematised.
What the report should lead with.
- Valuation appointments booked, not leads
- Valuation to instruction conversion rate
- Cost per instruction against average commission
- Referral and repeat instruction share of total business
Proof
The closest accounts we have published.
Two property accounts, neither named: a brokerage in one city and a national listings platform.
Real estate brokerage, SEOSEO
1.81Korganic clicks in three months
- 145Kimpressions
- 1.2%click-through rate
- 22.5average position
National property listings platform, SEOSEO
3.1Morganic clicks in three months, up from 2.15M
- 77Mimpressions, from 70M
- 4%click-through rate, from 3.1%
- 5.5average position, from 7.7
On camera
Four clients on camera, in their own words.
Four clients, four industries, one thing in common: the number moved and they said so on camera.
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It is the best long-term investment we have made in the company, full stop.
Ahmed · Business owner · SEO
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The cost per lead from organic is a fraction of what we pay on ads, and that math gets better every month.
Sandra · Founder · SEO
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People can book a table without calling during the dinner rush. My host actually thanked me.
Aaliyah · Restaurant owner · Website
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These tech geeks know the Facebook analytics and the data and the pixels and all that stuff that makes a musician’s head explode.
David · The Wankers · Social ads
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Questions from this industry.
01 Can a real estate agent outrank the portals for property searches?
Realistically no, and it is worth accepting that early rather than spending two years finding out. They have national inventory, enormous authority and a page type your site cannot match. The opportunity is that they have written almost nothing useful for sellers, which is the audience that actually generates your income, and local agents have generally written nothing either.
02 Are buyer leads worth paying for?
Much less than seller leads, and the difference is larger than most agents assume. A buyer transacts through whoever holds the property they want, so a buyer lead is only valuable if you hold matching inventory or can convert them into a future seller. Sellers are the constraint on the business, and the marketing should reflect that.
03 Should real estate marketing be about the agent or the brokerage?
The agent, in most cases. Sellers choose a person to trust with the largest transaction of their life, and they research that person. A brokerage page with a grid of headshots does far less work than a proper profile with recent local sales, an area the agent genuinely knows, and something that sounds like a human wrote it.
04 What about expired and withdrawn listings?
It is one of the few audiences in the sector that is both identifiable and proven motivated, and it is under-served because the outreach is uncomfortable. The marketing version of it is content and campaigns aimed at why a house did not sell and what to do next, which reaches the same person without the cold call.