Engineering Discoverability to Help People Find the Homes They Need

The Challenge

How do you outrank Rightmove and Zoopla when you don’t have their budget?

Shared ownership and affordable housing are widely misunderstood, which means they’re also widely unsearched. L&Q didn’t just need rankings. They had to address a discoverability gap by ensuring that homes could easily be found by those who need them most.

They needed visibility built around what buyers actually search for – by region, by scheme, by life stage – content that explains shared ownership well enough to turn curious users into qualified enquiries, the speed to capture demand surges before competitors move and a partner who goes beyond the ranking to fix the conversion journey too.

The Insight

When you’re marketing affordability, visibility must be built around user intent – not just page rankings.

ROAST recognised that discoverability and education were inseparable. Before someone could enquire about a development, they needed to understand the scheme. That insight shaped everything – from content architecture to how ROAST monitored search trends and reacted when media coverage shifted demand overnight.

The Solution

ROAST’s SEO strategy linked informational content to conversion at every stage, across hundreds of developments and a shifting portfolio.

ROAST built and optimised hundreds of regional landing pages across the UK – from Chelmsford to Kew – each targeting the precise queries buyers in that local market were using. Alongside the local infrastructure, ROAST built authority on Shared Ownership and London Living Rent terms before they became contested.

When the Evening Standard featured London Living Rent in September 2024, L&Q was already ranking #1–2. Pre-emptive positioning, not reactive.

When performance dipped despite strong rankings, ROAST went beyond the brief to find out why – diagnosing CTA friction that was costing conversions and recommending UX fixes that brought rankings and enquiries back into alignment. Made shared ownership and LLR findable to buyers who didn’t know how to search for them.

The Results

Over four years, ROAST helped L&Q outrank Rightmove, Zoopla and private developers for the queries that drive real enquiries – without their budgets.

Our partnership built discoverability to reach the people affordable housing is built for, outranking competitors with far larger budgets by knowing exactly what those buyers searched for.