Canadian Rental Website Rankings – June 2009

Chris — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 21:38:57 +0000

Renters and Real Estate investors both have similar needs. Renters want a place to live and investors have a place for them. Getting the two parties together can be a difficult exercise. However, there is one thing which brings us together. You might jump to the conclusion that it’s just the Internet. You’d be wrong.

The internet is a disjointed web of billions of pages, from the smallest one-page site to the massive and useful. Both have one thing in common: search.

Before the birth of the internet, the field of information retrieval was working to make search a reality. Today we see the impact of search in a very profound way. People use Google (orYahoo, Bing, Ask or AOL) for almost everything on the internet. Even when we know the address of a website (like www.chrisdavies.ca), we frequently Google it. The word ‘chrisdavies.ca’ is one of the most popular keywords for this website.

Skip straight to:
The Top 15 Websites
Download the full report

The Goal of This Survey

My intention is to provide real estate investors with a list of the most visible rental websites so we can advertise our vacancies where they’re most likely to be found. There’s three aspects I’ve considered when scoring these websites:

Search Engine Market Share
Keyword Search Volume
Organic Keyword Position (ranking)

Search Engine Market Share

It’s no surprise that Google is the leader when it comes to search engines with 80% of Canadian searches. The full breakdown of Canadian search engine market share can be found in my post of internet marketing resources at the end of June. This edition of the rankings only accounts for Google rankings, however the future editions will consider Google, Yahoo and Bing, each weighted appropriately.

Keyword Search Volume

Not all every keyword phrase is a popular as the next. This chart shows search volumes from Google’s Keyword Tool (Canada, May 2009). To come up with the keyword list for this exercise I’ve applied the same methodology I use in my work as a SEO at Enquiro. Scores are weighted for the popularity of the keyword.

Keywords	Local Search Volume
apartments for rent	24,900,000
apartments	13,600,000
for rent	13,600,000
apartments rent	11,100,000
rental housing	7,480,000
house rental	5,000,000
rentals	3,350,000
edmonton housing	1,220,000
apartment	1,000,000

Organic Keyword Position (Rank)

For anyone who has a website or has done any reading around search engine optimization (SEO), it quickly becomes evident that websites get more traffic for a given keyword if they’re at the top. Enquiro did some pioneering research into this using eyetracking software, and the full report is available for purchase. (Shameless plug: the other whitepapers are great too!)

I’ve weighted each ranking based on the principles laid out in our research at Enquiro.

The Results

This report was intended as a test and began with the keywords. I used the results of my keyword analysis to cast a net and see which sites appeared organically (no pun intended). Here are the winners.

The top 15 sites are:

The full report includes more information on:

Methodology
Keyword Selection
The Full List (76 Websites!)
Tips and Tools for Investors

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Canadian Internet Marketing Resources

Chris — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:52:10 +0000

I gave a talk about marketing for Canadian real estate investors this week, focusing on internet marketing. Given that I work as an SEO, it’s a topic I know a bit about, so combining internet marketing and real estate investing was a pretty good fit.

Here are some of the resources I promised people.

Canadian Search Engine Market Share

Hitwise is finally publishing Canadian-specific search engine statistics. You can see their full press release here.

Google Receives 80 Percent of Canadian Searches in April 2009
Search Engines, Social Networking and Entertainment top visited categories in Canada
New York, NY - May 27, 2009 – Hitwise, an Experian company, announced today that Google search properties accounted for 80.17 percent of all Canadian searches conducted in the 12 weeks ending April 25, 2009. MSN search properties, Yahoo! search properties and Ask search properties received 8.84 percent, 7.34 percent and 2.75 percent, respectively. The remaining 41 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1 percent of Canadian searches.

Percentage of Canadian searches among leading search engine providers

Domain

April 2009

Google search properties
80.17%

MSN search properties
8.84%

Yahoo! search properties
7.34%

Ask search properties
2.75%

Note: Data is based on 12-week rolling periods

Google Trends

Google’s Keyword Tool

Gmail (and how to use multiple addresses via Gmail)

Google Docs

Google Analytics

Google Webmaster Tools

WordPress.org (for install it yourself)

WordPress.com (which is simpler, but less powerful)

Netfirms (which also offers one-click WordPress.org installations)