# Prospect Estate Agents

> Every main branch-town search onto page 1 of Google, and more than double the non-brand clicks, for an independent estate and letting agent across Berkshire, Hampshire and Surrey.

Mark Porter, Search Valley · Filed CASE STUDY · https://searchvalley.co.uk/case-studies/prospect/

| | |
|---|---|
| Client | Prospect Estate Agents |
| What they do | Independent estate and letting agent with branches across Berkshire, Hampshire and Surrey |
| Work | Local and technical SEO, content, Google Business Profiles, reporting |

## At a glance

- **116% more clicks** from non-branded searches, year on year
- **10 of 10** main branch-town searches on page 1 of Google, up from 4
- Average position across those searches from **11.6 to 4.2**
- "Estate agents Reading", the toughest patch they operate in, from **18th to 6th**

## The brief

Prospect wanted to win the searches that bring in valuations: "estate agents" and "letting agents" plus the name of each branch town. Those are the searches people make when they're about to sell or let, and they're fought over by every agent in the area, local and national.

## Where it started

Across the ten main branch-town searches (estate and letting agents in Reading, Maidenhead, Wokingham, Bracknell and Farnborough), only 4 were on page 1, all of them 9th or 10th, and none were in the top 3. In Reading, the biggest market of the lot, they were 18th.

Each town also had two separate pages, one for estate agents and one for letting agents, both chasing the same searches and getting in each other's way.

## What I did

The first job was setting up localised rank tracking around every branch, so every change could be measured against a proper baseline. Then:

- Merged the estate and letting pages into one strong page per town, which gave the first lift within a couple of months
- Worked through several rounds of improvements to the branch pages: titles and headings, copy, reviews, trust signals and recently sold properties
- Rewrote the town area guides. The big towns now rank first for their "[town] area guide" searches, the guides are the best performing content on the site, and they're the pages Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode cite when people ask about the area
- Reworked the Google Business Profile for every branch, cleaned up business details across the directories and reviewed categories against the agents winning the map
- Built relevant local links, e.g. the Thames Valley Chamber and Bracknell Forest Council's local business pages
- Set up a monthly dashboard, weekly map scans around every branch and tracking for 180 village and valuation searches, so Prospect always knew exactly what had moved and why

## The results

> Clicks from non-branded searches more than doubled in a year.

Clicks from non-branded searches (people looking for an estate agent, not looking for Prospect by name) rose 116% year on year. That's the traffic SEO is there to win, and it more than doubled in a year when Google made clicks harder to come by for everyone (the site's overall click-through rate roughly halved).

| | Start | Now |
|---|---|---|
| Main branch-town searches on page 1 | 4 of 10 | 10 of 10 |
| Average position across the 10 | 11.6 | 4.2 |
| Estate agents Reading | 18th | 6th |

Lettings did especially well, ranking 1st in Maidenhead, Wokingham and Bracknell. Of the 20 searches tracked across all the branches, 18 improved, and the other 2 were already 1st.

> "Mark slotted straight into our team and worked closely with our marketing and web resource from day one. Together we got every one of our main branch towns onto the first page of Google, with several ranking first for lettings. He explained things clearly, was easy to work with and always came with a plan for what to do next."
>
> Jason Messingham, Head of Marketing, Prospect

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Mark Porter, SEO consultant, Reading, Berkshire. mark@searchvalley.co.uk · https://searchvalley.co.uk/ · Field notes: https://searchvalley.co.uk/blog/ · Site summary for agents: https://searchvalley.co.uk/llms.txt