Industrial units for sale: State of Search and Recommendations

Executive Summary

This original research by Reach Marketing provides a comprehensive analysis of the visibility of various website types in Google search results for the keyword phrase “industrial units for sale” across 97 UK locations. The analysis reveals that property search portal websites overwhelmingly dominate the Google search results, whereas estate agent and property developer websites are notably underrepresented.

Key Findings

• Property search portals such as Rightmove and Zoopla hold nearly 77.3% of the top 10 Google search results. These websites benefit from superior SEO practices, high authority, and extensive local content, making them highly visible to users searching for industrial units.
• Estate agent websites account for only 5.4% of the top 10 results, while property developers are virtually absent, with just one website making it into the results. This indicates a significant missed opportunity for these sectors to capture organic search traffic.
• Property search portals also dominate the top 3 positions, capturing the majority of organic clicks. Rightmove, Zoopla, and Estates Gazette are the top performers, appearing frequently in the top spots, which emphasises the need for industrial property marketers to focus on these platforms.

Recommendations

For Property Developers

• Despite the low difficulty of ranking for these keywords, property developers rarely appear in search results. Implementing basic SEO best practices can significantly improve visibility.
• Developers should not rely solely on agents for marketing. By enhancing their own online presence, they can control branding and accelerate the sales process.
• When selecting agents, assess their approach to digital marketing to ensure complementary efforts.

For industrial agents

• Simple SEO improvements can help estate agent websites rank higher, providing an additional path for users to find available properties.
• Strategic Use of Search Portals: Focus on the top-performing portal for a specific location to reduce costs and maintain effectiveness.
• Utilise Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising to achieve top visibility on Google search pages, especially for high-volume locations.

For Property Consultants

• Although consultants perform well, there's room for improvement to consistently reach the top 3 positions.
• Similar to industrial agents, using PPC can ensure prominent placement in search results, bypassing competition from major property portals.

Why “industrial units for sale”?

Our study focuses on the root keyword “industrial units for sale”. “Industrial units'' is an industry specific term more likely to be used by an industry insider, such as an agent or a logistics manager within a large organisation. The use of the term as part of a query in Google Search is thus an important hint towards the quality and intent of the user behind the search, i.e. searches containing the term are more likely to be of high quality and have meaningful commercial intent.

In turn, the findings and recommendations of our study are targeted towards this niche.

Location Modifier

The keywords included in our study are “industrial units for sale” + location. Geography has a crucial relevance in real estate transactions, thus it is expected that when users have a real estate related query (“industrial units”) with a transactional intent (“for sale”), location will become an important factor.

For this study, Reach has limited locations covered to cities and towns in the UK with a population of over 100,000 people as of the last census. The following 97 locations have met the criteria:

• London
• Birmingham
• Liverpool
• Nottingham
• Sheffield
• Bristol
• Glasgow
• Leicester
• Edinburgh
• Leeds
• Cardiff
• Manchester
• Stoke-On-Trent
• Coventry
• Sunderland
• Birkenhead
• Islington
• Reading
• Kingston Upon Hull
• Preston
• Newport
• Swansea
• Bradford
• Southend-On-Sea
• Belfast
• Derby
• Plymouth
• Luton
• Wolverhampton
• City Of Westminster
• Southampton
• Blackpool
• Milton Keynes
• Bexley
• Northampton
• Archway
• Norwich
• Dudley
• Aberdeen
• Portsmouth
• Newcastle Upon Tyne
• Sutton
• Swindon
• Crawley
• Ipswich
• Wigan
• Croydon
• Walsall
• Mansfield
• Oxford
• Warrington
• Slough
• Bournemouth
• Peterborough
• Cambridge
• Doncaster
• York
• Poole
• Gloucester
• Burnley
• Huddersfield
• Telford
• Dundee
• Blackburn
• Basildon
• Middlesbrough
• Bolton
• Stockport
• Brighton
• West Bromwich
• Grimsby
• Hastings
• High Wycombe
• Watford
• Saint Peters
• Burton Upon Trent
• Colchester
• Eastbourne
• Exeter
• Rotherham
• Cheltenham
• Lincoln
• Chesterfield
• Chelmsford
• Mendip
• Dagenham
• Basingstoke
• Maidstone
• Sutton Coldfield
• Bedford
• Oldham
• Enfield Town
• Woking
• St Helens
• Worcester
• Gillingham
• Becontree

Overall, the locations above have a combined population of 29,772,666.

Data collection

Google searches for the query “industrial units for sale” + each location modifier have been performed by Reach.

For each search, the first ten organic results were recorded with their corresponding rank.

The domain has been extracted from each recorded URL and assigned a website type, as described below.

Overall, 970 Google Search results were analysed.

This study reflects the state of search as of the 28th of June.

Classification of website types

All the websites Reach identified within the first 10 results of each Google search have been categorised based on their type, as follows:

Property Search Portal

Websites with the primary purpose of showing property listings from a wide range of vendors, examples being Rightmove or Zoopla. These websites do not have any direct relationship with the properties shown on their platform.

Property Developer

Websites about a property development organisation, which has the primary business focus of building and selling/leasing industrial property.

Property Consultant

Property consultant websites are the collection of organisations that work with property developers in various stages of property development. This category includes land valuers, commercial surveyors, property managers, among others.

Estate Agent

Estate agent websites are categorised as those organisations with the purpose of bringing properties to market and facilitating the link between buyers and sellers. These websites are mainly focussed on providing listings for the properties they manage.

Government

This section refers to websites belonging to a local or national government organisation, such as local councils or national government agencies.

News

News is the category comprising websites with the main purpose of reporting information, with no direct involvement in the process of buying or selling industrial property.

Findings

Website Type – Google Top 10

The pie chart below groups our search results by website type and compares the percentage of results recorded.

Overall, Property Search Portal websites account for almost 77.3% of the total results we collected. In other words, almost 8 out of 10 results on the first page of Google for “industrial units for sale” will show a property search portal.

A breakdown of the results is below:

Property Search Portal - 77.3% (749)

Property Consultant - 14.8% (143)

Estate Agent - 5.4% (52)

Other / Unclassified - 1.3% (13)

Government - 0.9% (9)

News - 0.2% (2)

Property Developer - 0.1% (1)

Prior to conducting our research, we anticipated that Property Search Portal websites would dominate Google searches, and our instincts proved correct. Websites such as Rightmove and Zoopla engage in a continuous battle for dominance on Google via SEO optimisation. These websites not only have strong technical performance, but they also have huge authority. Their vast local content also perfectly matches the intent of the search, giving these websites all the arguments to rank highly in Google searches.

At the other end of the scale, industrial agents and Property Developers have been our biggest surprise regarding the volume of results on the first page of Google searches. The low volume of representation in top 10 results shows us that websites in these niches are not optimised for “industrial units for sale”. This demonstrates a market-wide missed opportunity for industrial agents and Property Developers to optimise their websites for highly relevant keywords, in turn driving traffic and generating leads.

This problem is most visible for property developers, a category in which only one website made our list. This shows that property developers are not leveraging SEO effectively, instead relying on other sales channels to create demand.

Website Type – Google Top 3

The pie chart below shows the representation of each website type in the top 3 results only.

This chart is significant because most organic clicks go to the first 3 websites. Understanding which websites take the top spot can highlight where most organic clicks are going and which players are harvesting the largest pool of traffic.

When analysing the top 3 results for all searches, Property Search Portals had the highest number of entries, completely dominating all the other categories.

A full breakdown is below:

• Property Search Portals - 85.2% (248)
• Property Consultant - 11.7% (34)
• Estate Agent - 2.4% (7)
• News - 0.3% (1)
• Government - 0.3% (1)

Our key takeaway here is that, given the current state of search, having the top listing on a property search portal page will also give you the de facto top spot in a Google search. As users mainly click on the first 3 results, which are dominated by property search portals, appearing high on these platforms can be the quickest route to increasing your online visibility. This finding should inform every industrial real estate marketing strategy going forward.

Google Top 3 – Property Search Portals Drilldown

The table below shows a breakdown of the Property Search Portal category within Google top 3 results. It answers the question “Which property search portal websites rank in top 3 and how many times?”

The results are:

• rightmove.co.uk - 88
• zoopla.co.uk - 84
• propertylink.estatesgazette.com - 52
• novaloca.com - 17
• loopnet.co.uk - 3
• onthemarket.com - 2
• propertypal.com - 1
• movehut.co.uk - 1

Note that Rightmove and Zoopla dominate, accounting for 35.4% (Rightmove) and 33.8% (Zoopla) of total property search portal results in the top 3 results of Google searches. Estate Gazette also has a noticeable presence in results, accounting for 20.96%. In total, the three search portals account for a massive 90.1% of the total results in this drilldown.

The key learning from this table is that not all property search portals are equally visible in Google searches. Just three websites dominate the entire category. We discuss the implications of this in our recommendations section.

Rightmove, Zoopla, and Estate Gazette

Average position when in Top 3

The scorecards above show the average ranking (when in top 3) of the three best performing websites in the study: Rightmove, Zoopla, and Estates Gazette.

These numbers show us that Rightmove and Zoopla are performing equally well, generally ranking first or second. Estates Gazette ranks towards the lower end of the top 3 positions.

Overall, Rightmove and Zoopla dominated the results of our study, not only in volume (record count in searches), but also in rank position, generally ranking in the first two results, and mainly competing with each other.

These findings further show that Rightmove and Zoopla are the main players in organic real estate searches, dominating both residential and commercial real estate.

With such a powerful organic record, as well as tremendous brand recognition, Rightmove and Zoopla need to be part of any marketing plan to sell industrial real estate. Not appearing on these platforms is a huge missed opportunity.

Locations where Rightmove , Zoopla & Gazette make up top 3

Out of the 97 searches we analysed for our study, 38 locations (39.1%) featured a mix of Rightmove, Zoopla, and Estates Gazette as the top 3 results.

These locations are:

• Basildon, United Kingdom
• Becontree, United Kingdom
• Bexley, United Kingdom
• Birmingham, United Kingdom
• Bradford, United Kingdom
• Burnley, United Kingdom
• Burton Upon Trent, United Kingdom
• Cambridge, United Kingdom
• Chelmsford, United Kingdom
• Chesterfield, United Kingdom
• City Of Westminster, United Kingdom
• Coventry, United Kingdom
• Doncaster, United Kingdom
• Enfield Town, United Kingdom
• Gloucester, United Kingdom
• Grimsby, United Kingdom
• Ipswich, United Kingdom
• Leeds, United Kingdom
• Leicester, United Kingdom
• Liverpool, United Kingdom
• Manchester, United Kingdom
• Mansfield, United Kingdom
• Newcastle Upon Tyne, United Kingdom
• Newport, United Kingdom
• Northampton, United Kingdom
• Nottingham, United Kingdom
• Oxford, United Kingdom
• Plymouth, United Kingdom
• Rotherham, United Kingdom
• Sheffield, United Kingdom
• Slough, United Kingdom
• Southend-On-Sea, United Kingdom
• St Helens, United Kingdom
• Sunderland, United Kingdom
• Sutton, United Kingdom
• Watford, United Kingdom
• Worcester, United Kingdom
• York, United Kingdom

Heat Maps

The heatmaps below provide a visual representation of how visible Rightmove, Zoopla, and Estates Gazette are in search results in the UK for the term “industrial units for sale”.

In short, the greener the area, the closer the website is to the first position in search results.

Comparing the three maps, we can clearly see the difference between Estates Gazette and the other two platforms, with the maps for Rightmove and Zoopla appearing visibly greener. The map shows clear differences around the north west, in the Manchester and Liverpool regions, areas with high importance for industrial real estate. On the other hand, London and the south east are highly contested regions, with similar performances between the three websites in this region.

Recommendations

All this is very good, you might be thinking, but what does it mean for me?

Fortunately, we’re well ahead of you. Below, we have provided a list of recommendations on how these findings should impact your marketing strategy. Because we understand the different motivations of different stakeholders to appear in Google searches, we have split our recommendations between property developers, industrial agents, and property consultants.

Recommendations for Property Developers

The keyword set we analysed had a generally low ranking difficulty. This means that appearing in these searches should not require extensive SEO efforts. Despite this, only one property developer website has been featured in our study.

The key learning here is not that property developers cannot rank in Google. More rather, property developers currently do not optimise their websites to appear in Google searches. If developers did invest relatively low resources into SEO best practices, their websites could also appear in these highly relevant search results. Depending on the location, searches for “industrial units for sale” are the subject of upwards of 500 monthly searches. This is a huge missed opportunity for developers.

Another possible reason for the lack of property developer websites in Google searches is the standard industry practice of appointing agents for the marketing of industrial property. Using reputable agents and property consultants is crucial for an effective industrial real estate sale process. However, we always advise our property developer clients to conduct their own parallel marketing campaigns for two reasons.

Firstly, third parties will rarely run marketing efforts aimed at increasing the brand recognition of the developer. Having a good brand reputation as a developer can become instrumental in the sale process, therefore not actively investing in this can cause problems down the line. Visibility in meaningful search results is a great way to improve brand recognition.

Secondly, running marketing efforts as a property developer can radically improve the sales process. As the study shows, agents and consultants do not have amazing visibility in search results on their own platforms. By optimising search engine performance and appearing in searches with a high transactional intent, the developer can take proactive steps in their own sales and marketing efforts. This also maintains a high degree of control over how the industrial development is brought to the market.

When choosing an agent to work with on your development, gain an understanding of their approach to digital marketing. Also, we recommend property developers run their own marketing activity concurrently with estate agent or consultant activities, to maximise reach and speed up the sale process.

Recommendations for Industrial Agents

Industrial agent websites struggled to perform well in our study, having a low presence in the top 10 and top 3 results. This shows that industrial agents are currently not optimising their websites for the highly transactional term “industrial units for sale”. The presence of a select few websites in the study shows that the potential for more industrial agents’ websites to rank is there, especially as these websites generally meet the intent behind the search. Basic SEO optimisations could see industrial agent’s websites that don’t currently appear in searches achieve impressions and clicks in a relatively short time.

Industry practice dictates that estate agents from all sectors often rely on property search portals to advertise their stock. By optimising owned websites to appear for highly meaningful terms, industrial agents could provide a secondary path to users to access their available industrial properties for sale, at the same time having more control over the information displayed.

When considering property search portals, it can be seen that Rightmove and Zoopla perform similarly, and generally towards the top two positions for searches around “industrial units for sale”. Therefore, there is no need to advertise industrial property on both platforms. Choosing the platform that ranks first for a specific location will provide an easy way to reduce marketing costs while maintaining performance.

When using a property search portal, investing in the paid features of the platform can yield high results. All platforms boost paid listings to the top of the page. This means that if you list your property on the search portal that ranks first on Google, and your listing appears first when the page loads, you will grab the de facto first ranking in Google. Following this strategy will ensure that you get the highest possible organic visibility.

There is another way to appear on top of property search portals in Google pages. Using PPC (Pay Per Click), you can place ads pointing users to your website to appear at the top of organic results. This can be a high-yielding strategy, specifically when advertising industrial property in locations with high search volumes. Setting up PPC advertising is slightly more complicated than just boosting a listing on Rightmove or Zoopla, but the control over how your property is presented to users will be worth the extra effort.

See the example below on how PPC can propel your website on top of all the big property search portals.

Recommendations for Property Consultants

Our study found that property consultant websites had a strong presence in Google pages, showing that this category does a better job at optimising websites for search queries. This can provide a competitive advantage over estate agent’s websites.

The strong performance indicates that more websites in this sector have the potential to rank highly in searches if they optimise their website. When it comes to property consultants, if your marketing doesn’t include search engine optimisation, you are potentially falling behind and missing opportunities to be competitive.

Although property consultants generally show up on the first page of Google, they struggle to reach the top 3, with only 1 in 10 searches featuring a property consultant in the top 3. A more comprehensive approach to SEO could lead to a wider, more consistent presence in the top 3, greatly increasing traffic and leads for industrial properties.

Similarly to industrial agents, property consultant websites can also benefit from introducing PPC to their marketing mix, as a reliable way to show up at the top of the search pages, without competing organically with the major property search portals.

Conclusion

Our study underscores the critical importance of SEO and digital marketing for industrial property stakeholders. The numbers tell us that key players in the sector, including property developers, industrial agents, and property consultants, will all significantly benefit from optimising their online presence, utilising both organic and paid search strategies to enhance visibility and attract potential buyers or occupiers.

About Reach Marketing

Reach Marketing is one of Leicester’s longest established marketing agencies. Our clients hail from a wide range of sectors, but our main specialism is in property marketing for the industrial, commercial, and residential sectors.

This study was produced by George Sfintescu-Niculescu, SEO Executive at Reach Marketing. George has a proven track record of delivering organic growth and enhancing online visibility for websites in the property industry, at national and international levels. His research and insights are crucial to the success of our digital marketing strategies.

To find out more about this research, contact George via the Reach website.