How to Compete With Rightmove
and Zoopla in Google Search
How to compete with Rightmove and Zoopla in Google search: stop trying to outrank them on listings and win the searches and map pack the portals do not own.
You will not outrank Rightmove and Zoopla for property listings. You do not need to. The portals are built to dominate listings. When you push a property to them Google ranks their version above yours anyway. The win is elsewhere. Portals do not rank for the best agent in a town, a house valuation in your area, is now a good time to sell or your area guides. Almost no one competes for those. They are also largely absent from the local map pack, where local searches are won. So compete by owning those searches: a strong Google Business Profile, genuine area guides and local market data the portals cannot match. SEO wins you the client, the portals market the property.
The portal problem in search
Search for almost any property and the portals are there first. Rightmove, Zoopla and OnTheMarket take the top spots. Rightmove alone accounts for a large share of all property search in the UK. For an independent agent that can feel hopeless. It is not. The mistake is trying to beat the portals at their own game. Compete where they are weak instead and you can win the searches that bring you clients. Here is how.
Why you cannot outrank them on listings
Start by accepting what you cannot win. The portals exist to rank property listings. They have the scale, authority and traffic to own that space. Worse, when you list a property on your own site and push it to the portals at the same time, Google usually treats their version as the original and ranks it above yours. Chasing listing searches is a losing battle that almost every agent wastes effort on. The good news is you do not need those searches to win business.
The searches portals do not own
Here is the opening. The portals rank for listings, yet they do not rank for the searches that decide who gets instructed. They do not show up for the best estate agent in a town, a house valuation in an area, estate agent fees or is now a good time to sell. They do not write area guides for your neighbourhoods. Those are your searches. Because most agents are busy fighting the portals on listings, hardly anyone is competing for them. That is where your effort should go.
Win the local map pack
The other place portals rarely appear is the local map pack, the box of three businesses with a map that sits at the top of local searches. When someone searches for an estate agent in your town, that pack shows local agents with their ratings and phone numbers, not the portals. Ranking there puts you above Rightmove for that search and brings calls straight from Google, with no listing fee. Your Google Business Profile and reviews drive it, which we cover in How to Rank for Local Property Searches.
Out-expert them with area guides and local data
This is the heart of competing with portals: out-expert them rather than outspend them. Rightmove has every listing, yet it cannot write a useful guide to your neighbourhoods, with the schools, catchments, transport and market detail a local agent knows. Build a real page for each area you serve and pair it with current market data, like recent sold prices refreshed each quarter. This is content the portals will never match at a local level. It ranks for exactly the searches buyers and sellers make while researching.
Turn every sale into content
You have one advantage the portals cannot copy: every deal you do generates material. Real sold prices, case studies of homes you sold, buyer and seller stories, local market shifts you have seen first hand. Turned into market updates and guides, this is genuinely useful, current and unique to your patch, exactly what Google and AI tools want to surface. A steady stream of it builds your authority over time. We look at this in How Blogging Can Generate Leads for Estate Agents.
SEO wins the client, portals market the property
The healthiest way to see it is not SEO versus the portals but each doing its job. Your SEO wins you the client, the vendor who searches, compares agents and chooses you. Once you have the instruction, the portals do what they are good at and market the property to buyers. You still list on Rightmove and Zoopla, you just stop depending on them for finding clients. Over time, owned search visibility is an asset that reduces that dependence. We compare the two directly in SEO vs Property Portals: How Estate Agents Can Compete Online.
In short, do not try to outrank Rightmove and Zoopla on listings, because that is their game and you cannot win it. Compete where they are absent: the best agent and valuation searches, the local map pack and area guides built on real local knowledge. Let SEO win you the client and let the portals market the property. Our SEO for Estate Agents service is built to win exactly the searches the portals cannot.
Beat the portals
where it counts.
We win you the searches Rightmove and Zoopla cannot, the best agent and valuation searches and the local map pack, through a strong profile, genuine area guides and local data, so you find clients without depending on portal fees.
Here is what is included in our local SEO plan for an estate agent:
One clear retainer. No setup fee. No twelve month tie in trap.
This guide is part of our complete SEO Guides for Estate Agents series. The hub gathers every question an agency asks about SEO in one place, from cost and timescales through to local search, beating the portals and working with an agency, each one written for UK estate agents.