How to Optimise Agent Relationships & Content for Better Real Estate Marketplace SEO

If you're handling SEO for a real estate marketplace, you'll know all too well how tricky agent-generated content can be. On the one hand, it's the lifeblood of your platform—fresh listings popping up every day, attracting potential buyers or renters. On the other hand, you often have minimal control over the quality and originality of this content.

This article takes its inspiration from Sitebulb’s recent Marketplace SEO webinar with Robyn Lodge of Zoopla and Zach Chahalis of apartments.com, and will provide you with some practical strategies for influencing and optimising agent content for better real estate marketplace SEO.

The challenge of agent-generated content

As Robyn pointed out in the webinar, “Agents write the content for their listings, not us... How do you balance that with site quality, ensuring that what goes on there is good enough?”

It's a real headache when trying to maintain high SEO standards at scale. The reality is that you have:

• Little control over how listings are written

• Large amounts of similar or duplicated content across competitors

• High variance in content quality, structure and completeness

Add in filters, templated page layouts and automated location taxonomies, and suddenly you’ve got millions of URLs with near-identical text, thin content, or awkward duplication.

Duplicate listings aren’t just a UX issue

Search engines use content uniqueness to assess quality and relevance. So if your listing descriptions match other online marketplaces, you’re going to struggle with:

• Indexation suppression of key pages

• Rankings plateauing despite strong authority

• Crawl budget waste on templated near-duplicates

• Risk of deselection as the preferred source

Worse, if your content doesn’t differentiate, it’s harder to establish topic authority—even if your overall product is stronger.

“We receive the same description that every other site we’re competing with is getting. So it becomes a case of, how do we differentiate?”

Zach Chahalis   Vice President of SEO, Apartments.com

OK, so what do you do?

Practical strategies for influencing & optimising agent content

Fortunately, there are effective ways to gently guide your agents toward better content practices.

Regular communication and collaboration

One powerful approach is through direct engagement and education.

Robyn shared an excellent strategy that they use at Zoopla: “We have quarterly offsite marketing days... We invite local agents in to talk to them, find out their pain points... and how we can help sell them.”

By regularly involving agents, you not only understand their needs better but can also subtly encourage better content creation practices—highlighting the importance of unique descriptions, quality photos, and clear, detailed listings.

Using SEO data to educate and empower

SEO isn't just about optimising behind-the-scenes; it can directly empower agents to create stronger content. As Zach explained, "We've given a lot more feedback and tooling for [agents] to optimise their listing in a unique and more eye-catching way.”

By sharing keyword insights, traffic data, and performance analytics with agents, you provide them with tangible reasons to invest effort into better content. This collaboration creates a win-win situation—better listings for them and improved organic visibility for your site.

Add value with structured data and smart design

Failing that, you don’t have to rewrite every listing to make it unique. You can enhance and enrich the listing with value-add components. For example:

• Interactive maps and nearby amenities

• Dynamic image galleries or floor plans

• School zones, commute times, crime data

• Custom schema markup for real estate or product data

Internal linking is your best friend

Internal linking is especially powerful for marketplaces because of the hierarchical and geographic nature of their content.

Zoopla and Apartments.com both use intelligent entity models to link:

• Parent > child (London → Shoreditch)

• Sibling (Bristol → Bath)

• Attribute (London → London flats with balconies)

This helps spread link equity, improve crawl paths, and disambiguate duplicate-sounding pages.

Implementing and monitoring quality improvements at scale

Quality improvement at scale can be daunting, but it’s manageable with the right tools and processes.

Robyn explained their approach at Zoopla: “We have regular scheduled crawls... The strategy is to crawl as much as possible and evaluate the data regularly.”

An enterprise-level crawler like Sitebulb Cloud is essential for efficiently monitoring millions of pages and quickly identifying areas needing attention. By regularly auditing your site and feeding back insights to agents, you create a continuous loop of improvement that keeps your marketplace ahead of the competition.

“Make sure you’ve got a crawler that can handle it… Otherwise, you're crawling for a month and the site’s changed before you finish.”

Robyn Lodge   SEO Manager at Zoopla

You’ll want to:

• Sample listing templates regularly with small, scheduled crawls

• Exclude known junk (low-quality or expired pages) where helpful

• Monitor thin content by page type and by location

• Evaluate internal linking depth and detect orphaned pages

• Track duplicates, near-duplicates, and missing structured data

FYI for marketplaces with millions of URLs, Sitebulb Cloud makes this process much more manageable!

Benefits of higher-quality agent content

Marketplace SEO comes with some unique problems—and duplicate content is one of the most persistent. But Zoopla and Apartments.com have shown there’s a way through it:

• Collaborate with and educate your content contributors
• Add value with structured design, not just words
• Build internal links that reinforce uniqueness
• Use crawlers to surface technical issues at scale

Better agent-generated content does more than just please the SEO gods—it directly improves user experience, boosts engagement, and enhances conversions.

And if you can't control the content? Control everything else.