About this data

When deciding whether to use an overseas property portal, their natural search engine rankings are one of the most important factors to consider.  Our data enables you to make quick and easy comparisons of portal rankings for popular overseas property search phrases used by English speaking buyers.

Our system checks the natural search engine rankings of each portal on Google.com and Google.co.uk.  We report if a portal ranks in the top 3 or top 20 results on either one.   

Popular Search Words

We have spent considerable time looking at the phrases most commonly used by English speaking overseas property buyers.  When markets are driven by English speaking Europeans, the most popular phrases almost always contain “property” and “properties” combined with the location name and sometimes a “stop word”, such as “in”. An example would be “Property in Costa Blanca”.  The phrase “property for sale” is also very popular.

When markets are driven by buyers in North & South America or Australia and New Zealand however then phrase “real estate” tends to be more popular than “property” or “properties”.

Methodology

We have combined the location names of the most popular locations in the Globaledge Search Index with the popular property search words mentioned above: “property”, “property for sale”, “properties” and “real estate”.  We have combined them in the following way:

 “Costa Blanca Property”
“Property for sale in Costa Blanca”
“Costa Blanca Properties”
“Costa Blanca Real Estate”

We use the location name first in three of the cases as this is the most common way people search in the majority of locations according to Google figures.  The exception is “property for sale” where the location almost always comes afterwards.

At country level, we also used the country adjective as well as the noun as these are often very popular phrases. For example, we included “Spanish property”, “Spanish properties” and “Spanish Real Estate” in our analysis of Spain.

If a portal ranks in the top 3 or top 20 on either Google.co.uk or Google.com* for any of the above search combinations in each locations, then our tables report a “yes”.  If they do not, our system reports a “no”.  We believe our methodology serves our purpose in an efficient way. It’s regularly updated and saves our readers time when creating a short-list of possible portals to use.