It is the most common objection I hear, and it is a fair one. “We are on Rightmove and Zoopla. Every buyer in the country is looking there. Why would I pay to be found on Google as well?”
The answer is in the question. Every buyer is looking there. The person who decides whether you get the instruction is not a buyer, and they are not on Rightmove looking for an agent. They are on Google. This article is the numbers behind that, and it sits alongside our complete guide to SEO for estate agents, which covers what to do about it.
What the portals are for
Rightmove is the most visited property website in the country by a very long way. The brand name alone is searched 11.1 million times a month in the UK, against 1.83 million for Zoopla (SE Ranking, Google UK search data, September 2026). Rightmove’s own figures put more than 80% of the time UK home hunters spend on portals on Rightmove (Rightmove, October 2025). If you have a property to sell, it needs to be there, and no amount of SEO changes that.
But look at who is doing the searching. A person typing “rightmove” into Google is looking for a home. They are a buyer or a tenant. When they find your listing, they enquire about the property, not about you, and if they buy it, the fee was earned by the seller’s decision to instruct you weeks earlier, a decision the portal had nothing to do with.
What sellers do instead
A homeowner deciding to sell does not open Rightmove to find an agent. Rightmove’s agent search exists, but it is a directory buried behind the property search, and it is not where the decision starts. The decision starts on Google, in three searches we can measure.
The first is the valuation search. “How much is my house worth” is searched 14,800 times a month, “value my house” 12,100 and “house valuation” 12,100. The second is the location search. “Estate agents near me” is searched 40,500 times a month and “estate agent near me” 22,400, up from 6,600 a year ago. The third is the fee search: “estate agent fees” at 4,400 a month. None of those searches returns a portal listing. They return a map pack with three agencies in it, a set of local websites, and increasingly an AI answer that names agents.
When Zoopla and YouGov asked 1,006 recent sellers what mattered most in choosing an agent, the top answers were local presence at 20%, being well known locally at 13% and reputation at 9% (Zoopla and YouGov, June 2025). The same survey found 49% get three valuations before choosing. The shortlist of three is built on Google, from the map pack and the reviews, before anyone rings anyone.
The portal listing is the result of SEO, not a replacement for it
Here is the way to think about it. Every property on Rightmove got there because a seller chose an agent. The portal shows the outcome of that choice; it does not influence it. Your competitor’s listings on Rightmove are a record of the instructions they won, and if they are winning more than you in the same town, the difference was decided before the property was listed, on the searches above.
That is also why “we get all our leads from Rightmove” is a misleading sentence. The applicant enquiries come from Rightmove. The instructions, the part of the business that produces the fee, come from valuation appointments, and the valuation appointments come from a homeowner picking up the phone after a search.
The dependency problem
There is a second reason to build your own search presence, and it is about risk rather than volume. An agency whose only route to new business is the portals is renting its visibility from a supplier that sets the price. Every agent in the country has seen the fee letters. A Google Business Profile, a set of area pages and a stream of reviews are assets you own. They do not go up in price every January, and they keep producing calls whether or not you are paying anyone.
One of our clients, an independent agent in a competitive town, gets 879 profile views, 374 website visits and 14 direct phone calls in a typical month from the Google Business Profile alone, before any paid activity. Another gets 198 interactions and 30 calls a month. Those are valuation requests and landlord enquiries arriving through a channel that costs nothing to run once it is built.
Where the two do overlap
Portals and search are not entirely separate, and it is worth being honest about where they touch. A buyer who finds your listing on Rightmove will often Google your agency name before enquiring, to check you are real and read your reviews. That is a search you need to win, and it is won by the same profile and reviews that win the seller searches. Rightmove and Zoopla also both let you link to your website and display your reviews, and an agency with a strong profile looks better on the portals than one without.
And the reverse: if you are not on the portals at all, your search presence has less to sell. Sellers ask which portals you list on, and “all of them” is the answer they want. SEO wins the instruction; the portal markets the property. You need both, and only one of them is a monthly bill you cannot control.
What to do if you have been portal-only
Start with the free things, in this order. Fix the Google Business Profile so it is complete and active, using our Google Profile guide. Put the review ask into every completion so the flow is steady, following our review guide. Build one area page for your main town, using the area page template, and a proper valuation page for the searches that start every sale. Those four things take a month of evenings and cost nothing but time, and they put you in the map pack for the searches your next seller is about to make.
If you would rather have it done alongside running the agency, that is what our Local SEO for estate agents service is for. Book a discovery call and I will show you, on screen, which of the seller searches in your town you currently appear for and which your competitors do.
Sources
- SE Ranking, Google UK search volume data, September 2026
- Rightmove, home mover research and portal time share, October 2025: https://www.rightmove.co.uk/
- Zoopla and YouGov, survey of 1,006 recent UK home sellers, June 2025: https://www.zoopla.co.uk/
- EAM client data, Google Business Profile performance, 2026
