Words: Ashley Rigg
Published: 14th February 2008
Homes Overseas Online makes its mark
The re-launch of
Homes Overseas last month has already made a big difference to their search engine rankings on Google (UK). Our January top 20 European portal research published today shows the site climbed 20 places from 31 to 11 and now displays in the top 20 results 25% of the time for the popular European property searches we analysed.
FindaProperty.com and Primelocation.com come top, appearing in 73% and 61% of searches respectively. Pay-per-performance portals Sunshine Estates and Lead Galaxy both do well, achieving visibility in over 50% of searches.
ThinkSpain and a number of French portals make it into the top 20, which reflects the number of regions we analyse in those countries. French and Spanish regions account for 69 of the 163 regions we analyse in Europe, as there is a longer tail on searches in these countries.
Homes Overseas has achieved some remarkable results in a matter of weeks. Tony Price, Head of Marketing & Web Strategy for Homes Overseas, attributes the success to their content strategy. He says: “Google now comes to our site twice a week and we update our news daily and our property guides and features once a week”. Homes Overseas has employed former Property Investor News journalist Mark Da-Silva as Online Editor in an effort to bolster their online content. It’s a tactic that seems to be paying off.
There is another factor at play: age. Google promotes older sites with established links above newer sites. Homes Overseas has been online
since 2000 giving it a distinct advantage over newer sites like
Property Index, that are finding it very difficult to achieve even modest natural search engine positions.
If you have great content and an older site like Homes Overseas, it is relatively easy to achieve top 20 positions. It is the top 3 positions that generate the most traffic however. These spots tend to be much more competitive and require quite a bit of external link-building work to knock the incumbents out of the way. If we re-sort the data by the frequency of top 3 positions then Homes Overseas slips out of the top 20 entirely. It’s a great start but there’s still some way to go before they hit the traffic and lead generation levels of some of their more established competitors.