The challenge
The pint glass is full — but how much of it is beer, and how much is froth?
When I started working with RateMyAgent, the team had been told by their previous agency that more pages meant better SEO. The logic felt intuitive: more pages, more coverage, more chances to rank. In practice, what it meant was thousands of pages with little to no real value — thin content that Google had no reason to surface, and that users had no reason to visit. The glass was full of froth.
RateMyAgent had built something genuinely useful — a platform connecting buyers and sellers with real estate agents through verified reviews. The product was good. The SEO strategy wasn’t serving it.
The approach
Changing the mindset
Before anything technical could improve, the way the team thought about SEO had to change. The instinct to add more — more pages, more content, more coverage — needed to give way to a focus on quality and user value.
My analogy that stuck: if you don’t have the content people are actually looking for, why would Google care about your page? A lot of what was on the site wasn’t answering real questions from real users. It was content for its own sake.
A significant amount of content was removed. Not reluctantly — deliberately, and with a clear framework for what stayed and what went. The measure wasn’t volume. It was whether a page had something genuine to offer a consumer trying to find the right real estate agent.
Refocusing on the consumer
RateMyAgent’s product served agents — helping them build their personal brand through reviews. But the people searching were consumers: buyers and sellers trying to evaluate agents before trusting them with one of the biggest transactions of their lives.
The shift was to design the content and the product experience around that consumer. What does someone need to know when choosing an agent? What makes a review useful? What context — suburb knowledge, transaction volume, client feedback — actually helps someone make a better decision? Answering those questions properly, and structuring the site around them, is what gave the pages real value.
Building the technical foundation
The site was heavily reliant on JavaScript-rendered content, which created a significant crawling and indexing problem. Google had to perform an extra rendering step before it could understand any page — slow, unreliable, and a bottleneck on growth. Moving to server-side rendering removed that friction and gave Google direct access to the content.
Entity mapping through structured data followed — connecting agents, reviews, suburbs, and agencies in a way that gave Google a clear picture of how everything related to each other. This strengthened representation in search results and the Knowledge Graph, and opened up enriched SERP features that had previously been unavailable.
Expanding the platform
With the Australian strategy proven, the model was adapted for New Zealand and the United States — where RateMyAgent competes with established players including Zillow and Realtor. Each market required its own approach, but the principles were the same: understand what consumers in that market actually need, and build content that serves them genuinely.
The outcome
10x growth — and a quote that lives rent free
Organic traffic has grown more than 10x, from 1 million to over 10 million annual clicks. RateMyAgent is now the market leader in Australia and is growing internationally, with over 350,000 agents, 10,000 agencies and offices, and 2.7 million client reviews on the platform.
But the outcome I’m proudest of isn’t a metric. It’s something the team’s tech lead said in a presentation, recalling a conversation from six years earlier:
“No gimmicks, no one weird tricks, just be consistently good. He is like every personal trainer I have never listened to. Andrew saying: ‘If you don’t have the content people are looking for, why would Google care about your page?’ Lives in my head, rent free.”
That’s what eight years of working with a genuinely excellent team looks like.