My last post compared the top rental sites in the U.S. based on their rankings in Google for competitive terms. But it left me with some questions. For example, does Rentals.com challenge Apartments.com for keywords like “apartments for rent”? So as a followup, I wanted to share some competitive keyword data that didn’t make it into the original post.
Some quick observations before getting into the data:
- It is incredibly hard to dominate multiple categories, so sites are picking their battles carefully (see Apartments.com vs. Rentals.com).
- Craigslist ranks perennially well in most categories – property managers take note.
- Vacation rentals is a different ball game; the top 10 sites don’t perform well in this category.
Thanks to Google’s visualization API, I was able to put together the following interactive chart to allow you to mix and match the data for yourself. Here are some quick pointers:
- Remember that #1 is the best rank, so in this case lower is better.
- Select any combination of values, and the chart will change. Cool, huh?
- Hold your mouse over elements of the chart to get more details.
Interactive Keyword Rankings Chart
Make head-to-head comparisons by selecting from the two lists below:
Note: if you are a stakeholder in any of these companies and would like more data, contact me (360-718-9934). As always, suggestions and critiques are welcome.
Search engine optimization is one of the things we’re passionate about, and periodically we like to do a deep dive and get a handle on what is happening in related industries. Recently we ran across Andrew Shotlands’s post “IYP SEO Rankings Report 2009” ranking the different internet yellow pages sites by their share of competitive search engine rankings, and decided to apply a similar methodology to see how the different rental sites stacked up against each other.
Since many of you property managers use these sites to publish your rental listings, we thought you’d be interested in seeing which of these sites perform the best for the most important rental keywords in the search engines.
In brief, here is the methodology we followed:
- Identified the top 20 rental keywords using Google Suggest and the Adwords Keyword tool (see below)
- Performed Google searches for these keywords in the top 20 U.S. cities, with personalization turned off (for a total of 400 geotargeted queries).
- Each time a site appeared in the serps, we awarded it 1 point for each position, starting at the bottom. (On a page with 10 results, the first result got 10 points, the second 9 points, etc.)
- Weighted each search by the U.S. monthly search volume for that keyword reported by Google.
- Summed up the points for each domain to determine its final score.
So, in theory, this data should tell us which rental sites dominate the search engine rankings for the most important and competitive rental keywords.
And here are the results:
Top 25 Rental Sites by Search Engine Market Share
Regional Rankings – Top 10 Rental Sites by City
Those were the nationwide rankings, but we noticed quite a bit of diversity in the rankings for each city. For example, regional websites like AllAustin.com frequently claimed top spots, even though they didn’t make the nationwide list. Property managers and investors operating in these markets might be interested in the following regional rankings:
Anticipated questions
- Why did you only use Google rankings? We realized that results would vary by search engine, but collecting data for multiple search engines would have been tricky, and given that Google still commands 65.5% of the market, they were the logical first pick.
- Why only the top 20 keywords? From a data collection standpoint, this was the only approach that made sense. There are simply too many “long tail” keywords, and we weren’t confident that we could develop a representative sample set. So we decided to focus on performance for the highest traffic “head” terms.
- What about site traffic? It is hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison based on traffic numbers. Some sites get a lot of traffic from non-organic sources, and some cover a wide range of topics, like Craigslist.org, so Compete.com numbers aren’t very helpful when trying to determine search engine dominance.
- Were the searches conducted from an IP address located in the searched city? Nope, that would have been helpful but our branch offices in these 20 cities were all tied up while we performing the research
, so to quote Andrew Shotland on this point “c’est la seach”.
If you have any other specific questions about our methodology or the data we collected, let us know in the comments or via email.
Footnotes
Here are the keywords we used, with search volume data from Google Adwords:
| Keyword |
Search Share |
US Monthly Searches |
| apartments |
28% |
37,200,000 |
| rentals |
23% |
30,400,000 |
| apartment |
10% |
13,600,000 |
| apartments for rent |
6% |
7,480,000 |
| vacation rentals |
6% |
7,480,000 |
| homes for rent |
5% |
6,120,000 |
| homes rent |
5% |
6,120,000 |
| rent houses |
3% |
4,090,000 |
| apartments rent |
3% |
4,090,000 |
| houses for rent |
3% |
3,350,000 |
| vacation rental |
1% |
1,830,000 |
| apartment rental |
1% |
1,500,000 |
| rent house |
1% |
1,500,000 |
| apartment rent |
1% |
1,220,000 |
| rental homes |
1% |
1,220,000 |
| house for rent |
1% |
1,000,000 |
| apartment rentals |
1% |
1,000,000 |
| rental home |
1% |
1,000,000 |
| house rentals |
1% |
1,000,000 |
| rental house |
1% |
823,000 |
So, that’s it. Thoughts?
Update: There’s more! See our followup post.