The Technology Studio

(Part 1/5)

If you are a commercial property agent, have you asked yourself the following questions?

1.  Am I falling behind in the fight for the digital space?

We strongly suspect you may not even know how you stack up. We certainly couldn’t find a good analysis of who the winners and losers in the online UK commercial property space are.

2.  Who is winning and what are they doing right?

Hopefully this article will help you to understand who is winning a lot better. We have looked at a number of data sources to come up with a list.

3.  What are my opportunities to win online?

Now that’s the hard question. Albert Einstein once said “Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination.” Winning online is usually a combination of client passion, an excellent technology partner, and the appropriate business resources (both money and human).

At The Technology Studio we believe that websites are only really about two things:

1. Getting as many of the right people to visit your site as you can
2. Making it as easy as possible for those people to find what they are looking for

The first is all about Search Engine Optimisation or SEO and this is what this article focuses on. The second is all about usability. For example, you can have a site with a great Google page rank and great SEO but is hated by users and is very poor at converting visitors to leads. That site will still rank highly on the lists below as there are many more objective metrics for SEO (e.g. visitors, page rank, back links) than for usability.

Anyway, onto the analysis.

The Analysis

Methodology

This is normally the long boring part that you had to write in science reports at school. To make it easy for the reader, we will put a lot more detail in the final blog article in the series (for any insomniacs) but suffice it to say that we used a number of sources to get a representative list of more than 100 significant players in the commercial property marketing sector in the UK and then ran a lot of data queries over a period of a week to identify the top 100 and their key data and statistics.

Marketing Effectiveness

We didn’t want to just do some analysis on who got the most traffic (though we have that later in this series of articles) but wanted to give you a view on the marketing effectiveness of the websites. We looked around for an independent assessor and decided to use Websitegrader.com. In essence, WebsiteGrader looks across many of the parameters that Google uses to assess the value of your website and analyses how effectively it implements technology and content. It then turns this into a score out of 100 to rank a website vs. the 2m+ other sites it has already analysed. These are the top 22 from the list of UK commercial property websites we analysed.

Some surprises? We think so. It is worth noting a few on the list.

NovaLoca – this site didn’t exist 30 months ago yet has risen to 3rd on this list in that time. We are biased (The Technology Studio built NovaLoca) but it is a triumph that this is possible despite lower traffic levels, a lower number of back links and a UK only presence unlike many of the top 20. From our point of view this is directly due to the tenacity and innovation in the team and frankly a lot of hard work but we are pleased it is paying off.

Land Securities – this is a great success story and we commend everyone working on this site as it scores 97/100 (and a Google page rank of 6/10) and this despite it only being ranked 51^st in the list for UK traffic. We also like the layout and usability of the site – a really good all round success story and one others should aspire to and could learn from.

EGPropertyLink – being careful to be fair, 30 out of the 100 sites have a score of 90 or more putting them in the top 10% of sites in the world according to WebsiteGrader. However, whilst EGPropertyLink is the dominant UK portal with the most properties, it only comes in 23^rd on this list.

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

Duplicate Content has recently become a hot topic within the SEO community, with the 3 search engine “giants” (MSN, Yahoo! and Google) proactively filtering out similar search results in a quest to present the user with more relevant and distinct web pages.

Would you know if your site rank is suffering?

Duplicate Content refers to substantial blocks of similar web page content, either site-wide or across domains. This is a commonly used technique in search engine spam - You probably see this regularly; redundant websites full of keywords and links in an attempt to deliberately trick search engines into returning low quality results.

It’s good that people like Google are trying to give us a better user experience with original and fresh content, but sometimes hard working webmasters can unknowingly spam the search engines.

A common example is a dynamic E-commerce website which queries a database. The website may have multiple URLs which are in effect just different routes of accessing the same content: a product (which usually includes a copy & paste manufacturers description also found on any other site selling the same item), or the URL may contain a unique session id passed through the query string.

On February 12 2009, the 3 major search engines introduced a new microformat which lets the search engine know which URL you think is the “canonical” or “proper” version. In effect you are telling the search engines “this page is the most useful amongst those with duplicate content”. They will then consolidate link popularity into that single URL

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product/1234/" />

Although a step in the right direction for some types of site, the new microformat doesn’t completely address the problem of duplicate content. And whilst duplicate content isn’t grounds for search engines to take action unless it appears to be manipulative and intented to decieve them, there’s a few steps webmasters can take to ensure users are seeing their content.

Research by Fasthosts has found that half of UK businesses with a website make no effort to optimise their position on search engines.

When it comes to finding a business consumers are heavily reliant on search engine results and they prefer to use organic (main search results) rather than sponsored (businesses have paid to have them displayed) listings when making a decision on which business they should approach. However, with 17% of UK businesses yet to even submit their website to search engines and 35% of UK businesses making no effort to ensure their website is listed highly in search engine results it is not surprising that consumers are failing to find one in two businesses online: and this is ignoring all those businesses that don’t have a website at all. All these companies are losing out on potentially massive sales opportunities simply because they are not being found by the people that are out there actively looking for them.

The main reasons for this failure to cash in on online opportunities appear to be, that business owners and marketing teams do not understand how search engine results are compiled therefore they cannot see how their actions in terms of search engine optimisation (SEO) can influence their website ranking. In addition to this, there appears to be a lot of mis-understanding in regards to the amount of time and the costs involved in SEO.

The Technology Studio has long recognised the need for SEO when it comes to online marketing and making the most of a website. This is why the web development team ensure all websites they build are done so in an SEO friendly way. But you don’t need a whole new site to improve your search engine listing positions. Simple tweaks to your existing website such as making sure the content on your site is up to date, relevant, and contains keywords that your customers are searching with will make a huge difference to your online presence. The Technology Studio can make suggestions which you can then easily implement in-house as part of your company’s on-going marketing strategy.

Commercial property search engine, NovaLoca is just one company that has already benefited from making some simple changes. Read their story here and if you want to find out more about Search Engine Optimisation and how you can improve your ranking, contact The Technology Studio.