Property search has a quirk that shapes everything else: the person you want is not searching for you, they are searching for a place. Somebody typing a suburb name followed by "houses for sale" this week is the same person typing that suburb followed by "estate agents" a fortnight later. Local SEO for an agency is the discipline of being visible at neighbourhood level rather than town level.
Area-by-area visibility is the whole game
A branch ranks in a fairly tight radius around its map pin. Local results are weighted heavily by proximity, and property queries are almost always modified by a place name, so a branch on one side of the borough drops out of the results two miles away even though it sells across the whole area. You cannot move the pin, so visibility has to be built around it:
- Area pages do the work the profile cannot - one genuinely useful page per area you transact in, with real content about housing stock, transport, schools and what has been selling. Not a template with the place name swapped.
- Services should describe what you do, not where - residential sales, lettings and property management, valuations, block management, land and new homes. Stuffing place names into the services field does not create visibility in them.
- Measure across the patch, not from the office - coverage is a gradient.
Branch listings and the service-area question
Every staffed branch office gets its own listing. The hard cases are the agent covering a wide area from one small office, and the self-employed or hybrid agent working from home.
- A standard listing needs a real address where you meet clients - staffed during the hours you publish, with signage
- Home-based and personal agents should use a service area setup - the address is hidden and you declare the areas you serve. Publishing a home address is a safety issue and a maintenance problem when the agent moves
- Declare the areas you actually transact in - listing forty postcodes does not produce visibility in forty postcodes
- Mark closed branches permanently closed, never delete them - deleting throws away the review history
The other frequent error is a listing per department. Sales, lettings and property management run from the same desk are one business, and three listings is a duplicate that will be merged or removed. Handle it with categories: estate agent as the primary, then letting agency, property management company and commercial real estate agency as secondaries where the service genuinely exists in-house.
Reviews from a transaction that takes months
A property transaction is slow, stressful and full of moments where the client is furious with somebody who is not you: the chain, the other side's solicitor, the survey, the lender. Timing the ask is the entire skill, and asking only at completion is why most agencies have thin review profiles.
Ask the seller at instruction
A vendor who has just had a good valuation appointment and signed terms is at a high point. A review about the valuation and the marketing process is legitimate and arrives months before completion would have produced anything.
Ask the buyer at offer acceptance
Same logic from the other side. They are delighted, and the conveyancing has not started grinding yet.
Ask at completion within forty-eight hours
The window is short. Once the move takes over, the request disappears under two hundred other things.
Work lettings deliberately
Lettings produces far more transactions per year than sales and is the most under-used review source in almost every agency. Tenancy start, renewal, a maintenance issue resolved well. Landlords are a separate stream.
Ask the ones that fell through
A sale that collapsed but was handled honestly produces a surprisingly strong review. What you must never do is route unhappy clients to a private form while happy ones go to Google.
The recurring negative themes are predictable: a collapsed chain, calls not returned, and fees. Fee reviews should be answered with facts about what the fee covered. Chain reviews need a reply that separates what you controlled from what you did not.
Listing photos versus profile photos
An agency holds thousands of property photographs and almost none of them belong on the Google profile. This is the mistake specific to the sector.
The profile represents the business, not the stock. A photo tab full of houses is stale within weeks as those properties sell. Somebody looking at your profile is checking whether you look like a real, competent, findable business.
- The shopfront from the street - from both directions of approach, because high street frontages are easy to walk past
- The window display - the one piece of property imagery that is genuinely about you
- The office interior and meeting area - where a vendor will sit to discuss a valuation
- The team - with names, because property is a relationship purchase
Property photography does have a legitimate home: Google Posts. A post about a new instruction or an open house is time-bound by design and expires on its own, so stock imagery is appropriate there. The photo tab is not.
Content around local market knowledge
Estate agents hold something almost no other local business has: current, first-hand knowledge of a defined patch that people search for constantly. Very few agencies publish any of it.
- Regular market notes by area - what sold, how long it sat, how achieved prices compared with asking prices. Use your own transaction data or published land registry figures, and never invent a number
- Local process detail - how long local authority searches are taking, permit parking zones, conservation area constraints, a development in planning
- Catchment and amenity changes - a school catchment shift or a new transport link changes buyer behaviour in a set of streets, and you will know before the portals do
- Seasonal notes - the spring listing surge, the September push, the January enquiry spike. Publish ahead of each, not during
Weekly posting is enough: rotate a market note, a new instruction, an event and a piece of practical advice.
Across a multi-branch agency this becomes a scheduling problem more than a writing one. Ampli5 Pulse covers that layer with a multi-location dashboard, post scheduling so a market update goes out once with the right area page attached per branch, AI-assisted review replies you approve before they publish, a media library, performance insights covering calls, directions, clicks and views alongside Google Search Console, white-label reports and role-based access. It is not a rank tracker.