Tools to Make Rightmove's Website Better - Research Paper Example

Introduction Doing business in the internet or e-commerce has become more common throughout the evolution and the innovations that have conquered the world in recent decades. To catch up with the popularity of this new medium and to maintain competitiveness, many companies have moved their businesses from its physical existence and into the realm of the World Wide Web. Because of the nature of the internet, it provides for greater visibility, better accessibility and wider reach which are very important to businesses as they try to maintain their foothold on their customers and even broaden their customer’s base in the hope of increasing revenue. Company website’s become the all around representation of the company. It is the showroom and the virtual office and the selling area and whatever else that the company and its clients find use within and about the site. Similar to the real world, a good presentation to the actual and potential customers is imperative to convert visits into sales. Thus, all the ease and conveniences as well as the attraction and presentation must be present in the company’s website to lure customers to visit, “look around” and eventually purchase the goods that the company offer. One of the industries that find good usage of the internet is the real estate. Through an internet website, the meeting of buyers and sellers in this specific industry has become easier and faster while the reach has become broader. The website to be analyzed and evaluated in this paper is the real estate industry in the United Kingdom in general and Rightmove.co.uk website in particular. Web Site Analysis a. Business Objectives and Business model Rightmove.co.uk is a website where real estate buyers and sellers meet. As such the main purpose of the site is to advertise properties for sale or for rent in given locations and areas. Further, it aims to gather all the estate and letting agents, the properties which are up in the market and the potential clients in one site. It utilises the subscription model approach wherein the agents and offices has an ongoing subscription with Rightmove. Through this, they will be able to post the properties which are available in the market (Baker, 2008a). Primarily, the site is for the advertisement of the properties in the market whereas selling, which is the main goal of the site is not carried on within the site itself. It is handled off site. The website offers an extensive showcase of properties wherein the potential customers could have a general idea of the properties through the available information offered in the site. The client may already be able to select and discard depending on his requirements with regard to the size, the look, the number of rooms, the type of property, the locations and the price. b. Audience profile The primary target audience of this website are people who are currently looking for properties or “house-hunting” as it offers properties which are currently in the market for sale and for rent. A secondary target of the site could be potential customers who, in the near future will have the need to look for properties. Another possible audience are those who have no intention of buying but just happened to get attracted to the site and might be inclined to buy after being exposed to the advertisement. On the other hand, Rightmove market is location specific. It primarily caters to the residents of United Kingdom as its main title even proudly claims “UK's number one property website for properties for sale and to rent” (Rightmove). It even narrowed down its particular service locations or the location of its properties by listing on the left pane the following areas: London, England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and major towns and cities in UK (Rightmove). This clearly suggests that the target customers are the one’s living around the area and those who are planning to buy or rent a property in the given areas. However, it categorized its market for foreign properties as well as for short tem holiday vacations spots by differentiating these specific properties as early as the landing page of the website. Thus, those who are in need of a vacation house or a property overseas is a different segment of the market and is already taken cared of on the front page of the website. Web Evaluation a) Information Design: Information in the site is up to date as the products being offered are unique and not mass produced. Showcasing a property that has already been sold would necessarily provide negative feedback from its target clientele. The website does not provide a space for interaction and feedback because the set up becomes personalized once a potential customer is interested in a listed property. The website instantly provides a form for the customer so that the agent could directly contact the customer. The website is then just that, a listing of properties that are on the market. b) Navigation Design: The site in terms of organization and navigation is user friendly and cleanly structured. It offers a toolbar to enable the website visitor to surf the entire website with ease. It has also organized its products classification and content to better guide the visitors in looking for the products they need. The internal search engine is very effective as it should be. Because the site offers millions of product options, the search engine will easily direct the customer to what he/she is looking for. This is even the area which was provided with more focus by the website. What would immediately catch the eye is the large window of the internal search engine. The products are classified in varied ways – location, type of property, price, etc. Although searching through the website for a product that will match the customer’s need will prove to be a tedious process, the site has tried to do its part to make it easier for the site visitor by offering narrowed down searches. c) Presentation Design: The landing page of the site is clean and visually pleasing. Right from that page, it was clear that the site is about real estate even if the website brand may not be as clear as first. Seeing the pictures of houses outright with their price tags beside them is a clear statement that these houses are for sale and they are the focus of the site. The site’s brand name may not necessarily be clearly connected with selling of properties as “right move” might refer to other things and therefore may not immediately bring the proper connection and connotation. Even with the presence of the house logo beside the name, one might not easily make the connection. However, linking it with the picture of houses with the price tags will definitely clear the confusion and bring home the point that the term Rightmove is about moving to a right location within the context of real estate. d) Accessibility: With regard to the website accessibility, it does not fare well as it has no special options for the visually impaired and is even biased against those with poor eyesight. In its bid to contain all the possible information for the visitors who are seeking such, they sacrificed the sizes of the fonts and the pictures. The design did not also consider the special needs of the colour blind as well. One improvement that the site could implement is to incorporate video of the properties with audio for the descriptions. It could be coupled by hot keys to aid the visually impaired in navigating around the site. e) Visibility & Traffic Generation: Simon Baker in Property Portal watch reported that in July 2008, the Rightmove website is the most searched of the sites among the competing websites in its industry with 2.6 million unique visitors (UV) as measured by ComScore Media Metrix. It is followed the property finder network, which is composed of 3 sites (aggregate points of propertyfinder.com, hotproperty.co.uk, and ukpropertyshop.co.uk) with 1.6 M while findapropery.com and primelocation.com are at 3rd and 4th places respectively. He further declared that for the last 5 years or so, these big 4 has consequently dominated the real estate market. (Baker, 2008b) The results of the report are listed in figure 1 while figure 2 presents the same results but for different months. Figure 1 Site UV’s Rightmove.co.uk 2,606 Propertyfinder Network 1,625 findaproperty.co.uk 1,344 primelocation.com 1,015 thinkproperty.co.uk 662 nestoria.co.uk 481 homesandproperty.co.uk 386 homesonview.co.uk 334 ourproperty.co.uk 299 globrix.com 275 houseprices.co.uk 258 fish4homes.co.uk 246 email4property.co.uk 218 smartnewhomes.co.uk 213  Source: ComScore Media Metrix – July 2008 cited from Baker, 2008b Figure 2 Sep-08 Aug-08 Change Real Estate 7,719 7,572 1.9% RIGHTMOVE.CO.UK 2,431 2,400 1.3% PROPERTYFINDER.COM 1,308 1,123 16.5% FINDAPROPERTY.COM 1,201 1,304 -7.9% PRIMELOCATION.COM 824 929 -11.3% NESTORIA.CO.UK 473 508 -6.9% UKPROPERTYSHOP.CO.UK 371 377 -1.6% HOMESANDPROPERTY.CO.UK 348 321 8.5% ZOOPLA.CO.UK 345 261 32.2% HOMESONVIEW.CO.UK 337 300 12.2% THINKPROPERTY.COM 330 414 -20.2% HOTPROPERTY.CO.UK 279 296 -5.7% OURPROPERTY.CO.UK 261 232 12.7% FISH4HOMES.CO.UK 210 214 -1.9% GLOBRIX.COM 200 253 -21.0% Source: ComScore MediaMetrix September 2008 cited from Baker, 2008c According to the website grader (Hubspot Website Grader, 2009c) which analyzed the marketing effectiveness of the site, www.Rightmove.co.uk “ranks 16,488 of the 1,855,566 website” that had been ranked by the system. It has a website grade of 99.1/100 which means that the algorithm used has recognized that the website is higher than “99.1% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness”. Website grader explains that in coming up with this grade, “the algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over 50 different variables, including search engine data, website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others (Hubspot Website Grader, 2009c)”. The same site website grader also put forward some items in the website that affect the search ease capability of the site. The page title “UK's number one property website for properties for sale and to rent” explicitly suggest that this is a website for properties which are for rent and for sale. The Meta description on the other hand which is “search over a million properties for sale and to rent from the top estate agents and developers in the UK – Rightmove” is effective enough in the real estate market. It also contains meta tags that directly refer to what the website really is. Some samples are: “find a property, find property, property for sale, find property for sale, estate agents, properties in London, Rightmove” (Hubspot Website Grader, 2009c) Some other statistics that were reported by website grader include a Google Page Rank of 6 which measures the link structure of the site, inbound links of 57,228 and Alexa rank of Top 0.01 % or 1,471. More inbound links means the website is faring well especially if the links come from trusted sources while Alexa rank on the other hand is the measure of the traffic generated to the site (Hubspot Website Grader, 2009c). Using the popular Google and yahoo search engines with a variety of keywords such as property for sale, property for rent, London properties for sale, UK properties for sale, etc., Rightmove.co managed to always be present on the first page of the results of the searches except in one yahoo search where Rightmove was on the second page. However, Rightmove makes it better on search engines when the key words used are about for sale or properties for sale. Other websites beat Rightmove in search engines when the search is about for rent. It goes to show that Rightmove has been classified by search engines towards the for sale rather than for rent classification because of the key words used in the site. Even if also offers properties for rent, the bulk is on the for sale market. This is where the search engine optimisation comes into play. More often than not, Rightmove are accessed by potential customers who are looking for properties for sale rather than for rent. Competitor Analysis In terms of presentation, Rightmove is visually appealing and looks more user friendly compare with findaproperty.com and zoopla.com although primelocation might get the best vote in this category because of the sites organization and layout. Rightmove is also easier to navigate together with primelocation while findaproperty.com proves to be really a feat to find a property with its endless need to narrow down the search before it could yield a property to be viewed. Figure 3 – Landing pages of competing real estate websites in UK www.rightmove.co.uk www.findaproperty.com www.primelocation.com www.zoopla.co.uk With regard to content and comprehensive presentation of the property in exhibit, Rightmove has a full description of the property as well as a few pictures that satisfy people’s need for visual presentation. It also offers other options such as the location maps and floor plans (which is also present in other websites). However, Rightmove website offers a unique and outstanding feature of presenting a cool panoramic view of the street of the property complete with the street address. This provides the possible customer a given a view of the neighbourhood. This is also clearly a strategic advantage that the website provides for the organization. However, zoopla’s edge on the other hand is offering a property market overview which provides estimates and price ranges for property types and location. Figure 4 - a page from www.rightmove.co.uk In this type of market and industry, barrier to entry is high because company, agent and client relationships are based on trust and integrity. Thus, new entrants will find it harder to penetrate and steal the market share from those existing and established companies who have gained a strong foothold in the market. Baker (2008b) reported about this phenomenon in property portal watch website. He declared that new entrants tried to compete by offering strategic and competitive advantages that the existing leaders do not provide such as free to list, pay to upgrade business model and yet, they fail to topple the market leaders or even make a breakthrough in the market. What could only probably threaten the firms is the emergence of substitute to the existing business models. It may not be discovered yet at present but with the rapid evolution of the internet, it could come soon. One area that could probably be the source of a substitute for this subscription websites is the up and coming domination of social media. However, at this point, it could still be impossible to tell. It would depend on the innovations and the customers’ reactions to these breakthroughs. Figure 5 – interconnection of website with www.rightmove.co.uk (full report) Source: http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.php?start=www.rightmove.co.uk&signed=false Figure 6 – interconnection of website with www.rightmove.co.uk (graph only) Source: http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.php?start=www.rightmove.co.uk&signed=false Summary and Over All Assessment Overall, the website has a good streamlined design, clean and organized layout and comprehensive presentation of the features of the property that is being offered in the market. The information in the website alone provided the potential customers more information and visual look of the property without visiting the property. Clearly, this is very important especially in narrowing down the property searches if there are a handful in the market where visiting each one would entail too much time and effort. It provides ease and convenience as well as excellent visual and information presentation which are very integral in marketing. For this, www.rightmove.co.uk gets a 18.5 grade out of 20. Final Recommendations and Conclusions Even if the report has clearly shown that Rightmove is ahead of its competitors in terms of visits, it could profit more if it can still make some improvements and adjustments especially in search engine optimization. Often, it comes behind primelocation.com in search results. Even if both appears on the first page of the results, being on top still provide a better advantage to be the first to be visited by the potential customer. It could use tools to make its website better such as site-perf for loading speed analysis, 4Q from IPerceptions to gauge the customers satisfaction rate, bad neighbourhood link checker to ensure the integrity of the sites that links to the company’s website, and analytics, backlinks tool, etc to improve further its visibility. Another suggestion is the building a blog which is linked directly to the site which include customer’s testimonials of the service of the organization. Providing press releases and news features that could be bookmarked would greatly help fast and easy dissemination of information especially if done within the social media which has a far reaching effect. In this industry and in the type of website, word of mouth advertisement regarding the integrity of the company will greatly boost its popularity among the circles especially within the circle of its target and potential customers. Bibliography Baker, S., 2008. Property Portal Financial Models From Around the World. [Online] (Updated 31 Aug 2008) Available at: http://www1.propertyportalwatch.com/2008/08/ overview-property-portal-financial-models-from-around-the-world/ [Accessed 07 Dec 2009]. Baker, S., 2008. Traffic to UK property portal sites (July 2008). 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