In a recent shuffle in Google ranking “Business2sell.com.au” have now reached the top rank for the keyword “Businesses for sale”, Business2sell also holds higher rankings for other major keywords like:
Rank #2 for keyword business for sale.
Rank #1 for keyword business for sale gold coast.
Rank #2 for keyword business for sale brisbane.
Rank #1 for keyword business for sale perth.
Rank #1 for keyword business for sale australia.
Rank #1 for keyword business for sale sydney.
In the buying and selling business industry the three major players are deemed to be Real Businesses, Domain and Seek Commercial. With these sites charging hundreds of dollars each month to Business Brokers to list their stock, websites like Business2Sell are very attractive cost effective alternatives.
In a discussion with Business2Sell they indicated:
Business2sell offers similar services to the large portals for $300 / year for Business Brokers to list unlimited listings. We have the power of experience as well having been operating in the industry since 2005 and have been prominent among the top 4 websites in buying and selling businesses in Australia for the past 3 years now. We have over 6500 + business listings and reach over 1500+ visitors and 12000+ page views per day and have over 90+ Business Brokers listing their businesses for sale every day.
Ranking well for “business for sale city” is quite important in the business portal sector and should drive considerable search engine traffic to their broker’s stock. Well done to the guys at Business2Sell!
Note : figures above provided by Business2Sell and all the ranks are checked as of 16th Jan 2012 and all the Numbers were displayed on Business2Sell homepage.
19 Comments
PropertyNow
Nice effort indeed.
What percentage of the quoted traffic of 1500 visitors per day is paid traffic and who owns the business Ryan?
Andrew Blachut
PropertyNow
Ryan O'Grady
Andrew, I’m not sure about the answer to those questions. Perhaps someone from Business2Sell can comment about this?
Manish
Hello Andrew
Business2Sell have reached even higher from 1500 to 1800+ visitors per day since the article was written.
I am Manish owner and developer of the Business.
Our major source (99.999%) of traffic is Organic Ranks in Search Engines. The Rates we charge from Brokers ($300 to $500 / year ) , we can never afford to do what big guys do.
We do have adwords campaign specific for a keyword “sell business” and we get less than 10 hits a day from that.
@Ryan : thanks for the article, much appreciated.
vic Del Vecchio
Well done Mannish,
A great looking site and great little niche. Organic results are great and I agree that adwords cost is not worth the result.
Manish
Thank you Vic
PropertyNow
Well done Manish.
Like you, we do zero paid advertising.
It’s something I am ambivalent about though. Proud on the one hand, but also aware that paid traffic confers certain advantages as well. Without paid traffic, most portals would have embarassing levels of visitors.
I am seeing surprisingly good results ( in terms of client enquiry) for residential property sales,from thehomepage portal. It seems like a quality site headed in the right direction also. They have a good seo guy on their team.
Andrew Blachut
Licensee
PropertyNow
Manish
Thanks Again Andrew
The idea was to create that is reasonable for the struggling Buying and Selling Businesses Industry.
All the big guys have business model where they will charge more and pay more on google adwords or generate higher income for share holders.
It is small but noticeable, In future Australian Internet Market will be in big threats as well. As the website can be done in any other place and reach higher in Australia. We must be ready to compete with International Markets at the same time. For example : We hardly have hand full of hosting companies that are doing good jobs, majority of them goes to US.
In Business Buying and Selling a UK website is trying to break in Australian Market, they have reached pinnacle in US. Businessesforsale.com that is worlds No# 1 website, they charge $50 / month in Australia. How can “Market Leaders” will compete with our old and google adwords based websites.
so here we are not only working hard on less pay to meet the International Market, but building for future to reach International and generate more Export Income.
Manish
Director
Business2Sell.com.au
Glenn Batten
Ryan,
I think the SERP results and the SEO for the capital cities is even better than you mentioned but for suburb based searches and outside of the capital cities there results are not being replicated.
Business for sale Carlton, Business for sale Parramatta, Business for sale Townsville, Business for sale albury, Business for sale Newcastle etc are nowhere near their results for capital city based searches. I think if they can replicate their success then they will gain some serious traction.
Something I found interesting though is I wonder how their recall is amongst buyers as their domain name is targeted towards sellers…. ie Business2sell.com.au not Business2buy.com.au
Yes, I can understand you look at it from the perspective of we have a business to sell… but buyers would IMHO be more likely to remember and to use business for sale or business to buy rather than business to sell type keywords.
Ryan O'Grady
It would be interesting to see what is the split in businesses for sale between capital cities and the rest of the state. Maybe its not worth them targeting towns.
Glenn Batten
It is not just the towns.. people would also search regions and suburbs.
Manish
1. Regarding the city and towns SEO, Our Major focus was the main industry keywords like “businesses for sale:, “business for sale” etc, secondary focus is industry based (“cafe for sale” etc ) and city based, now we are working on suburb and town based optimisation. In buying and selling businesses industry , business brokers do not like to provide location or suburb of the shop, until the confidentiality agreement is signed, makes it harder for us to work on the search basic, that why you will see we have suburbs and the regions both in the place. As the Suburbs are not preferred to be displayed , you can not promote the business in the particular suburb. Cause the listing says “eastern suburbs in Sydney “…
2. Buying business, selling business, business for sale, businesses for sale, would loved to have any domain name like that, but unfortunately they are all gone 30 years ago. Secondly what’s the point of having a best domain name when you cannot make a simple website, good marketing , and no SEO results generated. Our 75% traffic comes from Search Engines, as they find us on top, I don’t think they care what the website name is, as long as it is relevant and easy to use, and easy to remember.
We went with business2sell as we have business2sell.com , businesstosell.com.au , businessestosell.com.au, businesses2sell.com.au, and similar options . com, .co.nz , .co.uk and .co.za, za.co .info etc
Hope I have answered your questions.
Thanks you very much for your comments
Manish Khanna
Business2Sell.com.au
Glenn Batten
Manish,
Thanks for your responses to my “questions” but I did not have any questions as such 🙂 but always happy to discuss the issues and your point over the business brokers not wanting to use the suburbs is interesting. For years real estate agents did not like listing the property addresses but the internet has now changed this and using an address is the norm so it’s interesting that this has not happened in the BB world. That’s probably a whole other discussion but I will take your word for it that the BB dont want to show the address.
you said… “Secondly what’s the point of having a best domain name when you cannot make a simple website, good marketing , and no SEO results generated.”
Umm.. I agree there is no point in that, but I didnt say there was …. naturally the best solution is to have both.
The reason you went with the domain name you did was obvious… somebody beat you to the punch on the preferred names…. …. it seems you think I questioned the domain name you chose but I did not actually do that.. I wondered about the RECALL amongst business buyers of your website.
Using analytics there is two ways to test this… Direct Traffic and navigational searches… ie when people type into google “www.business2sell.com.au”. If very few people are typing that into google then your SEO is great but your recall or branding needs work.
Effective SEO is great .. but ideally that should just be the introduction to the brand.. once they have found your site the perfect solution is that they return direct back to the site rather than again do a search and you hope that you top that SERP. ie SEO is used as a foundation to Build the Brand… If SEO is your only egg in the basket, one day somebody is going to beat you at SEO and your traffic will totally dissappear.
Dont get me wrong.. I am not saying you cannot build a brand from Business2Sell at all. If you can build a brand based on an Apple or a Google.. you can do anything 🙂
I merely pondered how the natural recall of that name was.
Manish
Hi Glenn
Agreed on all counts.
We do have direct traffic and google keyword search as “business2sell” in our top 10 traffic keywords .
Thanks
Manish
vic Del Vecchio
Glen and Mannish,
I get what Glenn is saying and it is a very good point.
We pondered the question of a domain name for ourselves for months before we settled on Watersidepropertysales. We were aware of the need to ensure that the public did not see us as a portal solely devoted to Waterfront only. Most of the major portals and franchise sites had filters to filter down to waterfront and waterviews. So by using waterside and property sales we have been able to grab some good organic search results. Then adding the keywords and phrases to reflect our content ie Beachfront houses, homes, real estate, Riverside, lakeside Marina etc and adding some of the main geographical areas we are managing to build further on the phrases that we think our target market will use to find our listings. But I think you are already well aware of this Mannish.
The disadvantages you and I have Mannish is our inability to spend wads of cash to “brand market” our domain names the way the big boys do. If we did then both your and our niche portals could take off.
Good luck Mannish and if you ever want to knock a few thoughts around just give me a buzz (phone number on our portal)
Cheers Vic Del Vecchio
Managing Director
Waterside Property Sales Pty Ltd
Glenn Batten
Vic and Manish
Think about this for a second…
AOPA = Australian Online Portal Association
A marketing cooperative for small and niche portals focussed primarily around cross display advertising of member sites and SEO.
Why don’t you start an association or marketing cooperative for smaller portals just like you two run. The News and Fairfax networks helps realestate.com.au and domain.com.au dramatically why dont you guys get together to create an association for the benefit of each member. You could run ads on each others sites but most importantly build each others seo up to challenge the bigger portals.
If you cherry pick 5 niche or smaller portals, especially those with excellent seo the benefits could be massive… You don’t need every smaller portal, you just need enough to make a “network”.
vic Del Vecchio
Glenn,
Great idea and is something I want to run by Mannish. I see it as a collection of Niches that as a collective can cover the field rather than including portals trying to cover the field by themselves.
Cheers
Glenn Batten
I think with some planning your could make a great network that everyone could benefit significantly from in their sector
Setup some ad serving software for cross promotion and setup a linking protocol to provide each other thousands of links.
If you get enough members you could setup three way linking but that may cause some issues. ie.. A links to B, B links to C and C links to A… So waterside properties only links to members that are do not link back to them and receives links from members that you dont link to yourself. Since none of the links are reciprocal you will get more value from them but as different member sites have different seo values you might find some inequality creeping in. It may be better for everyone just to link to everyone.
Just make sure you do deep linking to internal pages, not just links to the front page.
businesses for sale
Hello everyone
Latest update, Business2Sell.com.au is now rank#1 for keyword “business for sale” too
In January our Traffic was 1800/ day. Last week our traffic went up to 2196 visitors as of Yesterday. 29th Feb 2012 Wednesday.
Will keep you posted, nor the new updates soon.
thanks
Manish
James
What ever happened to this site?