Who is the dominant player in Google?

We know that search engines are usually the main traffic source for property portals worldwide. Whoever is strong in Google, has an important battle of the war won. So following my previous article about the top property portals in Singapore, this time I’d like to dig into their organic rankings.

Let’s check the SEO visibility for four different keyword sets: City level (i.e. property for sale in singapore), Area level (i.e. condos for sale tanglin), New developments (i.e. riverfront residences) and Rent (i.e. holland village condos for rent). These are the results:

Just to understand well this figures, SEO visibility is a metric that tells us what percentage of all possible organic clicks a website is getting for a given keyword. And I applied that to a keyword sets define by myself, after doing a basic keyword research in English. It’s a limited keyword set but still, a good reference.

We can see how PropertyGuru dominates the SERPs with sufficiency for every keyword set. For the city and area level keywords they get a visibility higher than 50% which is outstanding, and almost a 40% for rentals. For new launches they face more competition, since we probably have developers and dedicated micro-sites ranking as well.

Ranking second overall we might have SRX Property, followed by 99.co and iProperty, with EdgeProp last. Depends on the keyword set. SRX is strong in new launches while iProperty is almost invisible for those, which is surprising. Then for rentals, 99.co and iProperty are the ones competing better.

Why PropertyGuru is so strong in Google?

Leaving the technical SEO aside (it would need an article or two by itself) let’s try to answer that question checking these two metrics: Authority and volume of properties. Since we know that both have a direct impact on SEO performance.

SEO Authority

Google says there is no such thing as “authority”, but there is a high correlation between the 3rd party metrics from MoZ and aHrefs, and the actual rankings. This is what we have:

PropertyGuru is the strongest as expected with a DA of 67 and DR of 78, very high figures. Second we have 99.co with potential to compete face to face with them with a DA of 61 and DR of 73. They probably got a nice authority boost after acquiring and redirecting UrbanIndo, one of the leading portals in Indonesia.

Between SRX Property, EdgeProp and iProperty things are more balanced in authority.

Volume of Properties

We know it’s very difficult to rank for a location higher than a competitor, if we just have 200 properties while they have 2,000. To analyse this fairly, we would need to take into account the duplicates and distribution across locations. But to simplify the analysis, let’s just look at the totals:

As expected, PropertyGuru is on top in property volume too. I couldn’t get the figures for 99.co because they don’t show them anywhere, which is pretty strange. EdgeProp and SRX Property are quite balanced and last we have iProperty.

In terms of content and together with the authority, I’d say EdgeProp has a good potentialto increase their rankings and being much closer from SRX Property. For iProperty is pretty clear that working on product acquisition strategies is basic to catch up with the rest.

Conclusions

PropertyGuru’s dominance is just too much, I hope their competitors are working hard the SEO to make things more interesting in Singapore ;)

Beating an established player in SEO is not easy and requires an important investment in time and resources. But is not impossible at all and fighting them in search engines is a must if the contenders want to beat them overall.

Competing in SEO with low resources it’s also possible. Need to research and dig deep to find the gaps and opportunities where you can still get property search traffic. Try to be the strongest where your competitor is weaker and be creative to gain authority, which is probably the most challenging part.