The Technology Studio

We are delighted that the website we’ve been involved in developing for the past 5 years GoLearnTo.com continues to go from strength to strength and this year has been nominated for no less than 3 British Travel Awards.

The categories are:

1) Online tour operator of the year

2) Best specialist singles tour operator

3) Small tour operator of the year

GoLearnTo.com are learning holiday specialists and sell a wide array of inspired holiday courses where you can learn anything from yoga, photography, painting and cooking to surfing, horse riding, languages and even gladiator fighting.
It’s great to hear that a website we have been involved with developing for 5 years now has made it into such prestige award categories and we wish them every success.

Winning relies on votes from the public and if you like the website we would love any support you can offer. In addition, if you register to vote you’ll automatically be added to the prize draw to win some amazing holiday prizes.

To vote for GoLearnTo.com (and we really hope you will!), please follow the steps below…

1. Click here to open the British Travel Awards website

2. Fill in your details

3. Our categories are the FIRST and THIRD boxes you see so please click on them to expand the sub-categories…

i) WHO ARE THE BEST TOUR OPERATORS FOR SPECIALIST HOLIDAYS

Under here you’ll find a sub-section for ‘BEST SPECIALIST SINGLES HOLIDAY TOUR OPERATOR” (its the last one in the list)
Please vote for GoLearnTo here…

ii)  The third box down says ‘WHO ARE THE BEST OVERALL TOUR OPERATORS (OF THE YEAR AWARDS)’

Expand this box and the first one you see is ‘SMALL TOUR OPERATOR OF THE YEAR’
Please vote for GoLearnTo here…

The third box you see is ‘ONLINE TOUR OPERATOR OF THE YEAR’
Please vote for GoLearnTo here…

4. You can either skip the rest and scroll down to the bottom to click submit for your chance to win or if you have some time, feel free to run through other categories and fill in your favourites…

Thank you for voting!

The award winning GoLearnTo website has had a design update recently and we think it looks great – even if we do say so ourselves!

After some market research GoLearnTo decided that their website needed to be more focused on their target demographic. In addition they wanted to widen the site from 800 pixels wide to 1024 pixels wide, considering that now less than 1% of people use 800×600 displays. Yes, that’s less than 1%!

See more information about browser display statistics.

There are now a  lot more jQuery effects, such as slider panels and more aesthetic and functional photo galleries. These kind of things are great as they give more information to the user as well as being relevant for search engines. They can also add a bit of flashiness to a site which a lot of people generally like!

Check it out and see what you think!

We were recently approached by Bizspace to completely redesign (in their words!) their old, tired and basic website!

Their previous site was falling well below par on all three of the most important things that a website needs to get right…

SEO (Search engine optimisation)

Unfortunately the site was built with minimal search engine optimisation consideration in mind. There were very few pages with a serious lack of detailed, relevant content, as well as some other more serious issues such as using images for text headers. Without spending the required time and effort on SEO you are negating much else of what you do on a website – because nobody will ever find it!

Website Usabillity

Clarity is the name of the game here – not making people have to think! Unfortunately the navigation through the site was not clear and neither were the most important calls to action on each page. Always remember to keep things simple and clear and ensure the things you want people to do on each page are easy to see and understand.

Website design

Aesthetically the design was below average. I say it all the time but people will make up their mind within seconds of visiting your site on who you are, what you stand for and whether they trust you. A clear professional design is extremely important to instantly reassure their subconscious that you are worthy of their trust.

But, it’s all of them working together that’s the key!

Getting one or even a couple of these things right is a good start, but it’s the combination of all three together that we here at The Technology Studio believe is the real goal. It’s not good enough to have a fantastic looking site if nobody knows how to use it. There’s no point having  a site with search engine optimisation tuned perfectly if it looks unprofessional and shabby as people will go elsewhere. You see where I’m going here!

With our help the new Bizspace website has released to much praise in each of the areas above. The proof as always is in the pudding however! Their previous site achieved half of the visitors that the new site achieves, but it’s the site goals that are really interesting. Previously the old Bizspace site achieved an average of just 4 contact forms per week. It is now achieving an average of 40. That’s a ten fold increase!

As we have previously mentioned (throughout our site) is that we know a bit about commercial property in the UK.  With NovaLoca being one of our websites and having grown from being nothing to the second biggest commercial property search engine in the UK with nearly 100,000 visitors a month in three and a half years.  We have also recently developed the NovaLoca iphone app and have other apps and projects in the pipeline.

We also like using cool new technology and so rather than “Death by Powerpoint” we decided to put a credentials presentation together using something we were recommended (Thanks Nick Merryfield) called Prezi (www.prezi.com).  While it takes significantly longer to put together the content we really like the impact when we use it.  I then noticed we might be able to embed it in our blog and so I thought I would have a go (I am not a techie at all).

See the results of our commercial property technology and website credentials in the Prezi presentation below.

If you would like to chat through any of our client stories and see if we might be able to help drive your commercial property business through technology then please get in touch.

Neil

At The Technology Studio we don’t believe the work of creating a successful website that makes the most of digital marketing opportunities finishes when you sign off the delivered specification – that’s just the beginning.  We also don’t believe that you can outsource SEO to the next muppet who SPAM emails you with the email title “Guaranteed to get you to #1 in the Google search rankings” (if you ever get one of these use the delete key immediately – nobody can do this).

The Technology Studio believes that the best Search Engine Optimisation is a team effort between a client and their web developer or technology partner.  Many clients struggle to understand (or frankly get excited) about SEO and would dearly love to delegate (or more accurately abdicate) the hard work of getting to the top of Google Rankings to anyone other than themselves.  SEO and PPC (Pay per Click) are not exactly the sexy side of offline or online marketing!

At The Technology Studio we believe there are a lot of things a good web developer can do for SEO but that clients also have to take responsibility for a very important part of this – content.  Why?  Because it is very difficult for anyone outside the business to understand the business well enough to write a lot of compelling content (and frankly it is very expensive to outsource this to a PR/copy writer).  In addition, the client may write good copy for a human being to read but forgets that each page has two audiences – human beings (potential clients) and search engines (the way potential clients find the relevant page in the first place).

At the Technology Studio, we are always looking for ways to help our clients make the most of their websites.  We were recently approached by a new client who was struggling to write 110 pages of compelling content, including good key words and key phrases, about their properties dotted around the UK.  They asked us to help so we dumped everything they had into a file and created our own Keyword Density Tool.  The client was so delighted (it saved them days of work) that we decided to create a generic version and give it away (at least for a while anyway).

Click the ‘Keyword Density Tool’ link below to download our Keyword Density Tool and feel free to use it to write great keyword rich web copy for your website.  We only ask that if you are ever looking to find your next technology partner then you consider The Technology Studio. You can also see how we used the tool to write this blog article by downloading the ‘Keyword Density Tool with example’ from the link below to help you get started.

If you have any comments of questions or just want to let us know how you got on using the Keyword Density Tool then please do get in touch with us on 0845 642 9880 or email info@thetechnologystudio.co.uk.

Since publishing our series of blog articles about which commercial property websites are leading the way, we have had a number of requests asking to have all the articles in one place. We have now created a pdf file containing all the analysis and comment for you to download:

As always, if you have any questions or comments please contact us.

(Part 5/5)

Read ‘Who leads the pack for commercial property websites in the UK? Part 1: Website Grader’

Read ‘Who leads the pack for commercial property websites in the UK? Part 2: Google Page Rank and Inbound Links’

Read ‘Who leads the pack for commercial property websites in the UK? Part 3: Site Traffic’

Read ‘Who leads the pack for commercial property websites in the UK? Part 4: The Top 100’

This is the final part in this blog series. Previously we have looked at the marketing effectiveness ratings of UK commercial property websites according to WebsiteGrader.com, at Google Page Rank and at inbound links (according to Alexa.com). We then looked at traffic both globally and from the UK (again according to Alexa.com). For anyone still awake and interested this is how we went about compiling the list.

Methodology in Detail

Compiling the List of companies

We couldn’t find a generic list of top 100 UK commercial property companies on the internet so the first challenge was to come up with a list of top UK based commercial property search engines. In order to do this we looked at three different things:

Mailing List – we were provided with a mailing list of commercial property companies by MJM Marketing Ltd (who specialise in mailings and mailing lists for the UK commercial property marketplace) for which we are very grateful. We then compiled a list of all the companies that appeared on this list and that had 50 or more employees.

NovaLoca – we then asked NovaLoca for a list of any agent that had over 100 properties listed on NovaLoca.com and added any that didn’t appear on the mailing list data.

Google – we then undertook a few generic Google searches (“Commercial Property”, “Commercial Property UK”, “Industrial Property”) and looked at the first few pages of the search results and added any companies that did not already appear to the list.

We then made some decisions on which URLs to exclude from the list and used the following principles:

1. For any company site where they had two sites, we used the higher rated site. An example of this would be www.edwinhill.co.uk and www.altus-edwinhill.com – we took www.edwinhill.co.uk

2. We excluded sites where they either have very few instances of commercial property or are a portal where the primary focus is residential property. An example being www.findaproperty.com.

3. We excluded any site where the predominant raison d’etre is to market businesses rather than commercial properties. Examples being www.rightbiz.co.uk and www.daltonsbusiness.com.

4. We excluded sites which may be focused on commercial property but where they did not market commercial property. Examples being www.rics.org and www.communities.gov.uk.

Following the analysis we then drew an arbitrary line at a round number of companies close to a websitegrader score of 50/100.

We are sure that we are missing some (probably obvious) companies for which we can only apologise and assure you that this is inadvertent. We may repeat this exercise on a regular basis and if we do we would like to improve the list so please email me at neil@thetechnologystudio.co.uk if you have any suggested inclusions for next time.

Deciding on what metrics to use

When doing this analysis we were really looking to find a trusted independent third party who could provide data on all the commercial property websites. One obvious choice was Alexa.com which has become the gold standard in comparing website traffic. Alexa is a company owned by Amazon.com that has built a database of information about sites that includes statistics, related links and more. All of this information can be found on Alexa’s site overview pages, traffic detail pages and related links pages. You can look at all the parameters over one month, three months, six months or a year. Balancing recency against a robust time period, we opted for last three months.

The next choice was to use Google’s page rank which is an indicator of the relative value Google places on a website relative to a comparable website. This is available through the Google toolbar.

The last choice was less easy and we looked across the web to find a company that specialised in not just giving data on traffic but also analysed how good the site is for SEO. My theory was that you can have a poor site for a big international brand and a fantastic site for a small regional brand and based on traffic, back links, page rank etc, the bigger, poorer site would score better. However, it would be the small company that would be arguably the more successful in the digital marketplace. We looked at quite a few solutions but in the end arrived at WebsiteGrader. WebsiteGrader is a free SEO tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective. It is owned and operated by HubSpot who are a specialist internet marketing company.

Timing

Alexa traffic ranks, Google Page ranks and WebsiteGrader ranks can all change on a relatively frequent basis so we gathered all the stats over a relatively short period of one week between Tuesday 16^th and Thursday 25^nd February 2010. Please note that if you go and check any of the data now, it will have changed at least slightly but this may be perfectly natural due to the ebb and flow of traffic etc.

Reporting any inaccuracies

This is the first time we have looked at pulling together research such as this (though we may make it a semi regular thing depending on the feedback). If you find any errors or would like to make any comments on how we could have improved this, please let me know and we will endeavour to make restitution and to apologise in advance. Please contact me via email at neil@thetechnologystudio.co.uk.

(Part 4/5)

Read ‘Who leads the pack for commercial property websites in the UK? Part 1: Website Grader’

Read ‘Who leads the pack for commercial property websites in the UK? Part 2: Google Page Rank and Inbound Links’

Read ‘Who leads the pack for commercial property websites in the UK? Part 3: Site Traffic’

In the previous parts of this blog series we looked at the marketing effectiveness ratings of UK commercial property websites according to WebsiteGrader.com, at Google Page Rank and at inbound links (according to Alexa.com). We then looked at traffic both globally and from the UK (again according to Alexa.com). Now it’s time to put all these together and reveal the top 100 UK commercial property websites.

The Full List

But, before revealing the list, let me explain how we came up with it: Firstly, we have ordered it by the web sites’ WebsiteGrader ranking (as this series of blog articles was really about who excels at marketing UK commercial property in the digital space and not who has the biggest company). We then included their Google page rank, global traffic rank, UK traffic rank and the number of inbound links they have (according to Alexa.com). So, sit back and enjoy…

Overall Observations

This is the bit where we rant on about SEO and usability and how important they are… well maybe a bit. Here are a few thoughts for those trying to really succeed in the UK commercial property digital marketplace.

1. Being national helps, being international helps even more

The Google algorithm likes big sites with lots of indexed pages. It also likes well established sites. However, it especially likes lots of relevant and high page rank sites linking to your site (non reciprocal links). It is much easier for you to achieve this if you have national, or better still international, presence or have another helpful way of doing this (e.g. being part of a publishing group like EGPropertyLink).

2. You have to fight really hard to beat the big boys and portals - but be smart and fight hard in your areas of strength

You can try and compete for the search term “commercial property” or “commercial property London” but good luck. If you are a regional or local agent you almost certainly can’t beat the big boys but you really CAN compete in your locality for search terms such as “Industrial Units in Accrington”. If you type this in (and we really did pick this at random) the first on the list is www.taylorweaver.co.uk, the second is www.thomasvshaw.co.uk and the third is NovaLoca. This is because NovaLoca’s SEO strategy was to target hundreds of thousands of keyword combinations rather than the most popular – it is no surprise therefore that only less than 10% of visitors arrive on NovaLoca’s home page as most arrive on a page much more targeted to their search terms.

3. Marketing Effectiveness is not just about traffic

As we have mentioned before, it is one thing to appear as high as possible on a Google search, but it is quite another to create a compelling experience when a user makes it to your site. You need to think hard about page layout, calls to action, usability, language, ease of search, the right information at the right time, maximising conversions, tracking usage and ongoing development. A website is often seen as a product that can be launched and ignored for two or three years. This is not true if you really want to drive ROI.

4. There are 30 commercial property websites with a UK presence that Website Grader puts in the top 10% of marketing effectiveness worldwide

This means that the competition is challenging and improving all the time and it takes lots of effort to get further up this list. Emerging technologies are really playing a part in this too (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, iphone apps, blogs) and you really need to have a strong view on where you are going to focus your energies to maximise your returns. It really isn’t about building a pretty website and then putting it on a URL – “Build it and they will come” is alright for Kevin Costner (Field of Dreams) but it doesn’t work in the real world.

5. If you work really hard you can beat the odds

There is hope. We like stories like NovaLoca, Paramount Investments and UK commercial agents like Gerald Eve who all beat EGPropertyLink in terms of their websitegrader score. They may not beat them in terms of UK or global traffic but we bet you that where they focus their energies is their localities and their specialism’s they are really winning. It takes initiative, innovation, focus and frankly a lot of hard work, but it is possible.

6. If you are going to focus your energies on one thing, make it back links

It has long been known that back links are massively important to Google. In many ways this is because they are the greatest compliment that can be paid in the impersonal world of the internet, but it is mostly because they are so difficult to get if you want them and don’t have them. What’s more, your web developers can’t just get them for you no matter how much money you throw at them. Yes, you can register on press release sites and directories but generally people only link back to you if you have something valuable to say or offer. A good example is NovaLoca who launched Street Level View in the UK a full four months before Google did in partnership with a small Italian company called Seety. This didn’t create the huge PR that Google did but it certainly provided some press coverage and some good back links.

7. If you receive an email that says something like “We guarantee to get you to the top of Google”, our advice is to delete it immediately

It just isn’t possible to guarantee anything with Google (or any other search engine) and anyone who promises to is just after your cash. Page ranks go up and down, back links are so important (but not under your control) and SEO is so much about what you do as a company and how much effort you are prepared to invest. The best strategy is to find a technology partner who knows what they are doing and who knows their limitations and then works extremely hard on both technical and non technical SEO activities. Then watch what happens. A good rule of thumb is try ten things and probably two will be really valuable – you just won’t know which two until you try!

If you want to know more about why your site appears where it does on the list, if you want to explore the data in more detail, if you want to complain about an inaccuracy or hopefully most importantly you want to chat about how you can get the most out of your digital marketing spend then please feel free to get in touch with me directly:

Neil Osmond
email me at neil@thetechnologystudio.co.uk
call me at 0845 642 9885
follow/contact me on twitter @mredonny
skype me at neil.osmond
or please feel free to comment on this blog article.

Read ‘Who leads the way for commercial property websites in the UK? Part 5: Methodology’

(Part 3/5)

Read ‘Who leads the pack for commercial property websites in the UK? Part 1: Website Grader’

Read ‘Who leads the pack for commercial property websites in the UK? Part 2: Google Page Rank and Inbound Links’

In the previous parts of this blog series we looked at the marketing effectiveness ratings of UK commercial property websites according to WebsiteGrader.com and at Google Page Rank and inbound links (according to Alexa.com). Now we turn our attention to website traffic.

Traffic

Using Alexa.com (established as the most used website for traffic stats) we looked at the rank (in terms of traffic) both globally and for UK based visitors. The following table looks at the global traffic rank (e.g. google.com is ranked at number 1):

This definitely weights towards the multinational commercial property organisations such as CBRE, Cushman & Wakefield, Instant Offices, Jones Laing LaSalle & Chesterton. This therefore begs an obvious next question: “What does this table look like if we looked at UK traffic figures?” (which is what we are focussing on in this analysis). Does this change the list much?

The following table outlines ranking for UK traffic only:

The simple answer is that 75% of the companies are the same as the global list. However, you do see significant differences. For example:

Scottish Property, Eddisons, Commercial Property Database, Goadsby, and Bidwells make it onto the list despite their UK only focus. However, as an example we would like to use Paramount Investments which comes in 23rd on the list. Paramount Investments are a commercial property investment consultancy based in London whose online marketing is an example of what it takes to punch well above your weight on this list. They track and monitor their search engine positioning on keywords such as “Freehold Pubs for Sale” and publish market leading blogs with the latest news and information on their specialist commercial property investment niches. Then they collate their KPIs (traffic sources, conversions, leads, click through rates) and implement changes that impact on their top and bottom line.

It is probably those that disappear from the list that are more interesting. These are CBRE (#2), Cushman & Wakefield (#3), Jones Lang LaSalle (#6), DTZ (#12) and The Crown Estate (#20). This really demonstrates the value of localised SEO activity and how Google’s algorithm is very specific to search terms and location. Just because you have a Google Page Rank of 7, WebsiteGrader score of 98/100 and rank #3 on the global traffic list (as Cushman & Wakefield do), you are not guaranteed a first page slot on Google when searching for “Offices in Basingstoke”.

This list also shows how UK focused portals really come into their own, probably due to their targeted SEO efforts, combined with their nationally distributed, larger property portfolios. EGPropertyLink, ShopProperty and NovaLoca all appear in the top 10 sites for traffic in the UK.

Read ‘Who leads the pack for commercial property websites in the UK? Part 4: The Top 100’

(Part 2/5)

Read ‘Who leads the pack for commercial property websites in the UK? Part 1: Website Grader’

In the previous part of this blog series we looked at the marketing effectiveness ratings of UK commercial property websites according to WebsiteGrader.com. In this part we will be looking at how Google views the value of commercial property web sites using Google Page Rank as the metric for doing this. Please note that we could look at other search engines but given Google is the dominant player, we assume that if you rank well for the Google search term it follows you probably will for other search engines.

Google Page Rank

Now a lot has been written about page rank and its importance (or otherwise) but there is no doubt that this is the most public indicator of the value of a site to Google. However, it does not automatically follow that a site with a page rank of 5 will listed above a site with a page rank of 3 on a search results page. A search on the term “Commercial Property” in google.co.uk today (22^nd Feb 2010 @15:10) shows www.ukbusinessproperty.co.uk as second on the list despite it having a page rank of 2 (and despite 74 of this list having a page rank of 3 or above). There is a lot more to SEO than a good page rank for one keyword or term. However, the companies in the list with a page rank of 5 or above are listed below:

Some surprises again?

EGPropertyLink – doesn’t even feature on this list as it has a page rank of 4. Despite this, it still commands a lot of traffic and when searching on the term “Commercial Property” in Google.co.uk today (22^nd Feb 2010 @15:10) it shows first on the list. However, it does probably mean that for less popular, more local, keywords such as “Industrial units in Aldershot” (we promise we picked this at random) it doesn’t rank as highly as NovaLoca, ComProperty and many local agents (EGPropertyLink’s first entry is 26^th on the list).

The Crown Estate – this is similar to Land Securities as it seems to punch well above its weight in terms of page rank (and WebsiteGrader result). Looking more carefully this high ranking is probably mainly due to the quantity and quality of the 221 inbound links from other websites according to Alexa.com (which include high ranking sites such as Google.com, BBC.co.uk, Guardian.co.uk, Economist.com, and sky.com). It really shows the importance Google places on inbound links.

But not such a surprise …

The top 20 here are probably more representative of a list of top commercial property organisations in the UK than the previous section. This is almost certainly because the larger the company, the more likely you are to have inbound links to your site from well viewed sites (news stories, blogs etc.). It shows how hard it is for smaller organisations to break in and how much effort this really takes.

To give you an example of what we mean, the table below lists the top 20 websites from the list in terms of inbound links (often referred to as back links) as measured by Alexa.com:

If you want a very full explanation on Google Page rank and the Google algorithm, you may want to refer to the article “Page Rank Uncovered” by Chris Ridings and Mike Shishigin but beware, it is not a short document.

Read ‘Who leads the way for commercial property websites in the UK? Part 3: Site Traffic’