The Q4 2024 benchmarking report for UK estate agents has just been published. Learn how the top 12 UK estate agents perform across the digital space.

The latest Q4 2024 benchmarking report for UK estate agents has just been published. It covers the largest 12 national estate agents, including Reeds Rains, Purplebricks, Hunters, Connells, Knight Frank, Savills, Your Move, Chancellors, Yopa, Haart, Foxtons, and William H Brown.

The research gives an inside track on who is winning the biggest share of voice online, and quantifies the gaps, risks and missed opportunities for other estate agents to win brand exposure locally, drive in-branch footfall, and generate property viewings. The report highlights quick wins that will improve enquiries from your online strategy and identifies the barriers that may be reducing your site’s ability to optimise digital performance.

To see a preview and contents page of the Q4 report, click here. To get a copy of the full report and the key takeaways, please complete the enquiry form or schedule a call.

Q4 2024 WINNERS LEADERBOARD

For a glance into just 6 of the metrics we evaluated these top 12 estate agents on, check out our quick-look table below;

Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's best and poorest-performing estate agents, or request a copy of the report for the full review.

Request the report

What The Industry Research Report Covers

The 70+ pages of research benchmarks each site based on 50+ metrics and indicators of successful digital strategy, including organic visibility, domain authority, paid media ads, conversion performance, technical performance, site speed, universal search, content, social ads, accessibility, and mobile performance.

Driving Optimal ROAS from Paid Media Channels

Some of the leading players in the space are high spenders on paid media channels such as Google, Bing & Facebook - but have a poor or sub-optimal conversion improvement strategy. Without an optimised, sophisticated conversion strategy that maximises the conversion rate, the return on investment is unsustainable or will underperform. Scaling spend on paid media is not achievable unless the conversion rate delivers optimal performance in the sector. Some in the space have paid media spend levels from 30k+ per month but dedicate minimal resources and budgets to conversion testing.  Given the cost per clicks on ad networks will continue to rise, we recommend spending at least 10% of your paid media budget on ongoing conversion optimisation testing schedules to ensure your paid media ROI maintains long-term viability, competitive advantage, and sustainability.

Technical Website Compliance

Savvy digital marketers know that having a technically sound website is an essential component of a successful fully integrated digital strategy - plus a site capable of maximising conversion performance. For estate agents, who'll need to manage an ever-changing range of homes, they'll want to keep on top of their internal linking and redirect strategy, ensuring users looking for pages that have been removed are redirected to alternative content.

Haart reported 792 4xx errors (the highest of all estate agents). It’s important that brands regularly assess their internal and external links to ensure they’re not directing consumers to broken links. A database containing all active links is an effective way for brands to keep track of all links and make updates.

Site Speed & Conversion Rate Performance

When 62% of consumers are less likely to convert if they have a negative mobile site experience, ensuring that your site is quick and easy to load makes a significant improvement on your overall conversion rates. Estate agents will want to ensure homebuyers have a positive mobile experience, as modern house-hunters will often be browsing on mobile while doing other tasks.

The mobile site speed ranged between 48 and 9, with Dexters reporting the lowest. This estate agent can improve its mobile site speed by reducing the number of images on each page and ensuring all images are compressed and optimised to further improve mobile site speed.

Building Competitive Advantage with Domain Authority

Domain authority is an essential metric for measuring the effectiveness of SEO performance, and helps create a reliable overall gauge of how effective your site is at achieving organic traffic, i.e. ‘free’ traffic that isn’t gained through sponsored ads. For estate agents, they can work with a digital PR specialist on engaging content that can be picked up by local and national press, including topics such as most desirable places to live, house price changes over time, and even demographic splits of house-type ownerships.

A ‘good’ DA really comes down to how your competitors are performing, however it’s generally considered average between 40 and 50, good between 50 and 60, and excellent above 60. The DA rating for this quarter ranged between 79 and 43, with William H Brown reporting the lowest DA score. This estate agent also received backlinks from the fewest domains, which will affect a brand’s overall DA score. To make improvements, it should focus on uploading content that’s shareable and unique.

Organic Performance – Mobile & Desktop

A strong organic performance is strategically important as it ensures your site ranks above competitors for key, transactional keywords. When 93% of your customers won’t go past the first page of Google, your absence or lack of targeting for essential keywords will cost you conversions. High mortgage rates and house prices will make estate agents vulnerable to changing consumer habits, so each will need to be cautious that they're consistently optimising for the most relevant terms, so as not to lose traffic to competitors.

Three estate agents reported a decline in organic traffic on desktop (Knight Frank received the biggest decline of -28%). Meanwhile, 10 estate agents saw a decline in organic traffic on mobile (Haart reported the biggest decline of -41%). With this data in mind, all brands should ensure they’re using a mobile-friendly theme so that they’re not missing out on traffic.

Universal Search Opportunity

Google Universal Search Results is an evolving opportunity to make your pages visible on a SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Universal results often appear before traditional listings and are eye-catching for users. Universal search results refer to rankings on a SERP that are not the traditional ‘blue line’ Google link, and a site can appear for universal search results without being strong in standard rankings. 'Local pack' and 'image pack' results could prove most useful for estate agents, who can instantly show their location and houses for sale directly from the SERP.

Foxtons continues to secure the most Universal Search appearances (35,662), with the majority of these coming from ‘reviews’ and ‘images’.

The Longtail Keyword Opportunity

Longtail keywords are often considered high intent and potentially more likely to convert as a searcher is being more specific. Optimising for longtail keywords also puts your content strategy in a strong position to rank for brand new search terms as they enter Google’s index. Estate agents performing well for 'people also ask' results are also likely to be performing well for longtail keywords, and should be targeting both informational phrases and questions, along with specific terms that indicate a high-buying intent.

Foxtons continues to secure the most longtail keyword appearances for position 3 (2,586), while Your Move received the most appearances for positions 4–10 (16,354). Receiving appearances for positions 4–10 is one of the quickest and most effective way to improve your SEO ranking.

Facebook Adverts

With the number of Facebook users in the United Kingdom (UK) hitting over 44 million users in 2023, it is not surprising that companies have jumped at the opportunity to advertise on the social media platform. Facebook’s UK digital advertising revenue has been estimated to have breached 2.6b GB pounds in 2019. Estate agents can use Facebook ads to promote time-sensitive content quickly, as opposed to waiting for organic posts to gain traction and build reach.

We’ve included 3 examples of Purplebricks’s sponsored Facebook posts. This estate agent included short lines of text and few lines, which is a great way to attract social media users’ attention. However, it should focus on uploading imagery that’s unique to avoid a repetition of colours and themes.

Top Social Shares & Content

When it comes to social media and on-site content strategies, it is important to release content that has a longer shelf life. An article is considered 'Evergreen' if it has maintained its relevancy to an audience for longer. It's great for your brand engagement, but great for Google too, who will recognise content which achieves traffic over a long period of time. Estate agents can look to creating shareable content across the full range of home buying and ownership, from guides to the processes involved in buying a home at various stages of the property ladder, to advice for selling your home, and even guides on how to maximise the value of your home over time.

Your Move has the largest Facebook page (691,600 Likes) and the largest Instagram account (1.1 million followers). This estate agent uploads content regularly and focuses on offering its audience free property advice.

Website Readability & Accessibility

20% of people in the UK have a disability – 2 million of which are people living with sight loss. In addition, 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women have some degree of colour vision deficiency. When websites are not designed to meet these needs, brands lose customer interest as they turn elsewhere. As housing is a universal need, estate agents must consider all levels of ability when designing their site. Estate agents should also consider being clear about accessibility benefits within their house descriptions, normalising any additional accessibility needs house-hunters may have.

In our previous report, William H Brown received the highest accessibility alerts (251). This quarter, it’s slightly reduced this figure to 235, and Your Move is currently the brand to watch with 241 accessibility alerts. This estate agent should update text titles on each page so that the information is relevant to the topic.

GET THE FULL 70-PAGE Q4 2024 REPORT

To get a copy of the full report, please complete the enquiry form. If you want to talk to us about accelerating your digital performance, please call us on 01543 410014 or schedule a call with Mike Movassaghi.

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