Client Feedback
We were up against franchises with far bigger budgets and years of backlinks. Now we sit at the top of the local map results, and we got there without trying to outspend anyone on links.
Case Study · Local Search Rankings
Real Estate Agents London
How a Ten-Month Local SEO Push Put Real Estate Agents London Ahead of Nine Rivals
#1
Ranked locally1M+
Backlink competitor outranked
1.1
Average local map position, improved from 8.9
88%
Gain in ranking position across the tracked search grid
#1
Top spot among nine competing agencies in the local area
21
Domain Authority, edging past a competitor average of 18
- Industry
- Property sales and lettings, based in London
- Location
- East and North-East London, United Kingdom
- Engagement Duration
- Ten months
- Services Provided
Client Snapshot
About Real Estate London
As an independent agency with its own website established in 2021, it faces competition from multi-branch franchises that have been operating in the region for many more years than this organisation has been around.
The Challenge
Franchise agencies are everywhere on East London’s local search engines. The competition has the advantage of many years of link citation building and massive backlink databases. An independently run website had little chance to compete against that.
- A single nearby competitor had more than a million backlinks documented
- Some franchise competitors had been operating in the local area for over five years
- The website link count was only 442 compared to its local competition
- Domain Authority among rivals climbed as high as 50 out of 100
Our Approach
A Three-Part Local SEO Programme Focused on Relevance Over Link Volume
Instead of focusing on backlink quantity with far more franchised business rivals, the process focused on addressing what was stopping the local ranking potential. Three linked streams of work were undertaken throughout the engagement.
On-Page & Local Relevance
- Optimised the title tags of more than 20 priority pages for local search intent
- Resolved indexing and meta description problems that prevented page visibility
- Sorted out the keyword cannibalisation issues of location and services pages
- Audited the current blog posts to make them relevant to local-intent search queries
Technical Health
- Crawled all 200 pages and fixed every 404, 4xx and 5xx error found
- Ensured an operational robots.txt file, XML sitemap and canonical URL structure
- Audited 29,086 internal links site-wide, fixing all broken links along the way
- Secured all 200 pages with SSL
Google Business Profile & Local Monitoring
- Ongoing management of Google Business Profile for accuracy
- Continuous tracking of local search grids through the full target area
- Ranking changes monitored using an 11×11 point grid in East London
The Results
Relevance Beat Raw Link Volume in the Rankings
Over ten months, average position across the full tracked grid improved from 8.9 to 1.1. This was done without reaching the number of links that the competitors had.
- The position has improved by 7.8 positions, or by 88%
- The company gained first position for “estate agents canning town”
- It outperformed the competitor with 1.08 million backlinks vs 442 for the company
- Domain Authority went up to 21, slightly higher than the average of 18
- No errors were found during the technical audit of 200 audited pages
- The overall site-wide internal linking made 29,086 links with zero broken links
- Now SSL is applied to all 200 crawled pages
What is important is not spending more on links than your competitors. What is more important here is the accuracy of the signal and the quality of the technical base.
Unlock similar results for your business
Every business is different, but the approach is the same: understand what’s working, fix what isn’t, and build a plan around real numbers, not guesswork. Get in touch for a free, no-obligation audit of your website and marketing.
Why This Worked
Precision Beat a Million-Link Head Start
This was never a fair fight on paper. Nearby franchise competitors had spent years, in some cases over a decade, building the kind of backlink libraries an independent agency simply couldn’t match in ten months. Trying to outspend them on links would have been the wrong battle entirely. The real insight was recognising what Google’s local pack actually rewards: not just authority, but accuracy. Correct citations, a technically sound site, and pages that speak directly to what someone nearby is searching for carry more weight than most businesses assume.
So the work went toward fixing what was genuinely broken: competing pages cannibalising each other’s rankings, indexing gaps hiding content from Google, a profile that wasn’t being managed with any consistency, rather than chasing a link count that was never realistic to begin with. Any business facing a much larger, better-linked competitor can take the same lesson from this. When you can’t win on scale, precision is still entirely within your control.