Most of what is written about estate agent SEO is written for sales. The searches, the pages, the reviews, the whole set-up assumes a homeowner deciding who to sell with. Lettings is different in almost every respect: the customer is a landlord rather than a seller, the relationship lasts years rather than months, the fee question comes first, and the searches people type are not the same.
This article is the lettings version. It sits alongside our complete guide to SEO for estate agents, which covers how local search works, and it focuses on the parts that change when the person searching owns a rental property rather than a home to sell.
What landlords actually type
The lettings search market is smaller than sales, and it behaves differently. “Letting agents” is searched 8,100 times a month in the UK, and Google treats it as a local search, showing a map pack. Below that, the searches that matter are about money and quality: “letting agent fees” at 480 a month, “best letting agents near me” at 260, and “letting agent fees for landlords” at 210 (SE Ranking, Google UK search data, September 2026).
Two things stand out. First, landlords search for fees before they search for an agent, so a page that answers the fee question honestly will meet them earlier than any competitor’s homepage. Second, the “best letting agents near me” search has grown from 70 a month to 260 a month over the past year, which tells you landlords are shortlisting on reputation, and that the map pack and reviews decide it.
There is also a pool of much smaller searches, “property management near me”, “letting agent near me”, “rental agents near me”, each in the tens per month nationally, that add up town by town. You will not target these with a page each; you catch them by having the profile and area pages set up for lettings in the first place.
The Google Business Profile changes for lettings
If your agency does both sales and lettings from one branch, the profile stays as one listing, with “Real estate agency” as the primary category and “Property management company” and “Letting agent” as secondaries. If lettings is a separate business, a separate brand or a separate office, it gets its own profile with “Property management company” as the primary category. Two profiles for one branch will get one of them suspended.
The services list is where lettings usually goes missing. Add every lettings service with a description: fully managed, let only, rent collection, tenant find, landlord compliance, rent guarantee, inventories, deposit handling, HMO management if you do it. Put the towns in the descriptions. Landlords who search “property management [town]” are matched against these.
In the Q&A section, ask and answer the landlord questions: what are your fees, what does fully managed include, how do you vet tenants, how quickly do you respond to maintenance, do you handle compliance. If you leave these blank, the answers that appear will be from the public.
The pages a letting agent needs
Sales SEO is built on area pages, and lettings needs them too, but with one addition. Every area page you have for sellers should have a lettings section: “Letting agents in Farnham”, the rental market snapshot for the town, two or three properties you have let with the street and the rent achieved, and a landlord review from that town.
The addition is a landlord fees page. It should state your fee structure plainly, in pounds and percentages, for each level of service, with what is included and what is not. Agencies hide fees because they are worried about competitors. Landlords search “letting agent fees” 480 times a month and “letting agent fees for landlords” 210 times, and the agency that answers is the one they ring. Put an FAQ under the fee table covering the questions the Q&A section covers, so the page can carry FAQ schema and feed the AI answers Google now shows on around three in ten searches (Ofcom, Online Nation 2025).
If you offer a landlord guide or a rental valuation, give each its own page with the town names in the copy, and link them from the area pages and the fees page.
Reviews from landlords, not just tenants
Most letting agents’ Google reviews come from tenants, because tenants are the people staff deal with daily. Tenant reviews are useful, but a landlord reads them differently: a tenant praising how quickly the boiler was fixed is telling the landlord you cost them money quickly. The reviews that win landlords are from landlords: “found a tenant in ten days”, “rent has never been late”, “handled the deposit dispute for me”.
To get more reviews from landlords, ask them to leave a review shortly after the moments that matter to them. For example, the day a tenant is placed, or the first rent lands, are the strongest. The annual renewal, when the landlord has had a year with no trouble, is second. Ask by name, from the property manager they deal with, with the direct review link.
Reply to every review, and use the replies to say what you did. “Glad we got the flat in Weybourne let so quickly” tells Google, and the next landlord, what you do and where.
Responsiveness is the product
Rightmove found that 97% of home movers rate an agent’s responsiveness as essential or very important (Rightmove, October 2025). For a landlord, it is the whole service. A landlord chooses an agent so they do not have to take the call at 9pm about the boiler, and everything on your profile and pages should demonstrate that the calls get answered: the response time in the Q&A, the maintenance process on the fees page, the review replies within a day or two.
The letting agent SEO checklist
Profile: correct primary category, lettings categories added, every lettings service listed with a town-naming description, landlord questions answered in Q&A, photos of the team who manage properties.
Website: a lettings section on every area page with let properties and a rental market snapshot, a landlord fees page with a plain fee table and FAQ, rental valuation and landlord guide pages linked from both.
Reviews: a landlord ask at tenant placement and at renewal, replies to every review, landlord reviews pulled into the area pages.
Consistency: the lettings phone number and email matching everywhere the business is listed, with the same trading name as the sales side unless it is a separate business.
When to bring in help
Everything above can be set up in-house by a lettings manager with an afternoon a week for a month. Where we help is in running it alongside the sales side so the two do not fight each other, keeping the area pages and fee page current, and reporting monthly on which searches the landlord enquiries are coming from. That is the work behind our marketing for letting agents service. If you want to see which lettings searches your agency is visible for today, book a discovery call and I will show you the map.
Sources
- SE Ranking, Google UK search volume data, September 2026
- Rightmove, home mover survey on agent responsiveness, October 2025: https://www.rightmove.co.uk/
- Ofcom, Online Nation 2025: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/
- Google Business Profile Help, guidelines for representing your business: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177
- Google Business Profile Help, prohibited and restricted content (reviews): https://support.google.com/contributionpolicy/answer/7400114
