I would like to thank all of the following sites for boring me to death with their ‘new innovative offerings’. My snooze rating has reached an all tme high with these new ‘local’ search engines (they are not search engines just directory listings)
So why are they doing this? Well firstly they want to make more money out of any sucker that will spend it and with 100’s of thousands of small businesses out there, it could be worth millions, secondly, they want to make more money out of any sucker that will spend it on these sites.
With News Limited, Sensis and now Ninemsn all claiming to have the best local search sites going around it makes sense to sit back and actually see what this means to real estate agents and more importantly – is it worth the money? All of these sites have a big network to make the sites at least attract visitors, but will it work?
Simple answer – in my opinion no! The reason? For one there is already the Yellow pages and White pages directories, which lists every Australian business. Secondly, it is just boring which means no one will return after their initial visit!
Big business still seems to think they know what consumers want, but in my less than humble opinion, they only know what they want and that is more money – it is simply all too little too late.
Google is the search king and will be for at least the next 5 years. The reason? Consumers have now invested a good deal of time getting to know the intricacies of the Google Search Engine and they continue to mine the service for new ways to find what they are looking for.
This is important because it gives us an insite into consumer behaviour and another reason why realestate.com.au if managed correctly will be further entrenched as the number one portal in Australia over the coming years.
Google is always looking at new ways to enhance the user experience, whether it be maps, news, images, blog searching, book searching, mobile integration, toolbars, translation or the forever expanding desktop tools,
Google is basically making it the only choice for the vast majority of Australians.
Sure, some real estate agents will be sucked in again and pay stupid annual fees (around $600 per annum) only because their competitor is listed higher than them.
So let’s look at the options:
www.sensis.com.au
The Sensis site has been around for a number of years but still has less than 1% of the search market. Their local version seems to list sites with a .com.au which in principal is a good start, but 10’s of thousands of Australian sites end in .com and Sensis lists these as world results! The Yellow Pages and White Pages directory results give you all the businesses you need.Well laid out and really clean as a positive but unless you are looking for information in the Yellow/White pages I would not bother.
Opinion: List for FREE in search and leave it at that.
www.mylocal.com.au
Ninemsn has released their own local search engine and it has some interesting mapping features in real time, it is clean and has some interesting features, such as send to mobile, but overall nothing really enticing here.
Opinion: List for FREE and leave it at that.
www.truelocal.com.au
News Limited of course has its own (don’t you just love the catchy names) True Local Search Directory, again nothing new, I a sure all of these sites are up all night copying each others features. This site again is clean but is the most basic of the 3. It also does not work properly in Firefox browser, so slap on the wrist for the developers, but I a sure they will fix this shortly.
Opinion: List for FREE and leave it at that.
Overall a complete waste of time and money in my opinion and it will be interesting to see what they do about this in the long term, most of them will promote the hell out of these in their own newspapers and online properties but really this was a boring exercise for me, with lots of rolling of the eyes.
These sites will quote visitor numbers that are huge, mainly because they already have popular portals that attract visitors and they will be sure to add advertising everywhere promoting these products – and yes some consumers will at least take a look at the local portals. But think about this!
If you spent the same amount of money advertising your business on the Google Search Engine ($600.00 per annum) you would be guaranteed around 4000 visitors for the year from these ads. These local search sites will be lucky to give you 100!
And if the Sensis search engine is anything to go by, user behaviour will not change a bit, in fact since MSN and Sensis have launched their search websites in Australia they have spent at least 50 million dollars between them on marketing and have LOST market share to Google.
So in thinking about this we turn to real estate portals. If realestate.com.au work on a variety of ways to enhance the user experience and create tools consumers use on a day to day basis, they will make it harder and harder for anyone else to gain enough momentum to actually challenge them.
Domain.com.au is not lost but they have dropped the ball in recent years and need to drastically change their approach to the real estate space in the near future to even just compete with the ever increasing might of realestate.com.au and if only for real estate agents sake I hope they do this.
So in closing, when you think get a call from any of these local search sites get yourself a FREE basic listing and move on, you will only be wasting your money in the short term.
Get a FREE listing and see how many visitors you get to your site. If it is not in the 1000’s per annum forget about it.
If things change I will be sure to let you know, but lets let these companies fight it out amongst each other for at least 12 months and see if any of them actually make a difference!