- 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.
On the map
Each square is one spot on a seven by seven grid around the office. The number is where Prospect appears in Google's map results for that search, from that spot.
- Top 3
- 4 to 10
Reading, the toughest patch: in the top 10 at 36 of 49 points around the office, up from 17.
These are 3 of Prospect's 10 branches. The same work ran across all 10, with the Google Business Profile for every branch reworked.
