This is a question we are often asked, and based on a few quick queries for the obvious high demand keyword phrases you can start to get a feel for which sites consistently do well in natural (organic) search results. As you would expect the big aggregators like RealEstate.co.nz and TradeMe Property feature quite consistently, as do some of the big property groups.
The thing about assessing rankings for individual queries however is that not all keywords are created equal. Some keywords are searched alot more often than others, and while a number one ranking for a given keyword is nice, it isn’t worth much if that particular phrase isn’t searched on very often.
So, to try and answer this question in a slightly more scientific way we have developed what we are calling a weighted visibility index. The goal here is to create a way to compare the overall visibility of the top real estate sites in New Zealand to see which ones have the greatest total visibility across a range of keywords. It is weighted in the sense that rankings for keywords which are searched more often are worth more, so provide more visibility.
So, without further ado, here are the results (details follow the chart)…
Real Estate Industry – Weighted Search Visibility Index
(click to enlarge)
The first obvious thing to note is how much Realestate.co.nz comprehensively own the results in the New Zealand market. This is a total credit to the team there and everyone involved in building the site. There are certainly lots of lessons to learn from the way they have put the site together, but that’s a post for another time.
To provide some important context for these results we should explain how we put these numbers together as well as provide some caveats…
How we calculated these numbers:
- First we did some keyword research to indentify the highest demand keyword phrases in the real estate market. Starting with “property” and “real estate” then drilling to the various types of property and also looking at location qualifiers. The goal was to find a good representative set of phrases which reflect the biggest demand across the spectrum. In the end we settled on 82 different phrases and recorded the reported monthly exact match demand for each of these. Obviously 82 is actually a pretty small number compared the thousands of phrases which people use day to day, but we feel the 82 phrases we choose are nicely representative of the overall picture and they certainly cover the biggest demand phrases.
- We then checked the rankings for the biggest national real estate sites.
- Based on these rankings we then estimated the amount of traffic each site would see from each keyword. To do this we multiplied the reported monthly exact match demand by the average click though rate for each of the top 10 positions. For rankings on page 2-3 we applied a single (low) multiplier, the point being that clickthrough from any given query drops to next to nothing after the first page of results.. The rates we used for this come from the recent Optify report on click through rates from organic search results.
- With an estimate of traffic to each site from each of the keywords in the study we then calculated the weighted visibility index which is reflected as a % of the maximum available traffic if a site was to rank number 1 for every query.
So in the end RealEstate.co.nz clearly ranked number one for many many phrases, recording a final visibility score of 95.99% – We did expect the big sites to rank highly…they have a natural advantage as central agreggators for all property listings. What we didn’t expect to find was the very big gap between Real Estate and everyone else in natural search rankings. TradeMe Property’s performance in natural search was especially surprising. Clearly they don’t hurt for traffic by virture of being TradeMe, but we expected they would generally rank better than they do. Interesting stuff.
In closing we do need to make some important caveats about this data:
- Yes we could have used more keywords in the study, and certainly the more used the more accurate and representative the data. We feel comfortable however that the phrases we did use are representative and we think that the overall trend would be born out even in a larger study. We may even try that ourselves time permitting.
- The Google Keyword tool does not provide exact demand numbers, and indeed demand changes over time so this should be considered a snapshot.
- The CTR numbers we used to estimate traffic from given keyword searches is based on one study and the Google search result pages have been changing a lot recently which must have an impact on CTRs as they add in more and more Place listings, and images and maps etc. These numbers are just the best we have for making these kinds of calculations. Applied consistently in this kind of context they do give us reasonable relativity so while the individual numbers are not exact the overall picture is pretty good.
What do you think? Fair, surprising, or way off? Know how we could improve the study?
If you have any questions or feedback about this please leave a comment. We’d love to hear from you.