First up is the Alexa Popularity Ranking, (owned by Amazon) which in the world of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the industry standard popularity ranking tool. The Alexa ranking is a simple order of the most popular website, with Google at No1, followed by Facebook at No2 and so on, as seen here www.alexa.com/topsites. To find the ranking of any site, type the web address into the search box on the Alexa website.
When we enter www.cape-town-luxury-villas.com we see the global rank of 325,023 and 11,191 in the UK, as such in terms of popularity (visitors and pages viewed) according to Alexa, CTLV is the 11,191th most popular website in the UK, which is its primary marketplace.
Next, we see a comparison of CTLV (the dark blue line) against the best performing competitors in Cape Town. Staring in September, we see the infant CTLV website appear at ranking 7,794,782, the lowest position. After which within a month it had rose up to third place, and soon after it takes the No1 spot, overtaking its parent website www.capevillas.com (the light blue line)
The next graphic shows the exact Alexa positions, for the 8th January 2014, with only www.cape-town-luxury-villas.com's, www.capevillas.com and Capsol.co.za in the important “Alexa Million.”
Alexa Traffic and Engagement Statistics
Below the main graph, Alexa provides details about traffic to the websites, the most tangible statistic being the percentage of global page views for which CTLV has 0.0000589% out performing www.capevillas.com by a factor of five, and outperforming all competitors by a factor of 2.65. “www.cape-town-luxury-villas.com has had more traffic that all its competitors, twice over and change.”
If we consider CTLV and its parent website Cape Villas collectively, which we do in terms of property marketing mandates and STO discounts, we see the dynamic duo out performing there eight biggest rivals close to six times over.
Lastly, we have the Engagement Matrix, where we can see CTLV outperforming in all departments. It has an average of 22 page views per visitor, in comparison the next best, www.capevillas.com which has 4.8 page views.
The "Bounce Rate" is a measure of people who leave the site without looking past the first page, here a low score is best, and we see CTLV at 19.7%, Cape Villas at 38.3% with the rest all over 50%, or to significant to be calculated.
In particular please notice CTLV has the longest “Time on Site” statistics by a factor of ten, with Cape Villas in second place at 5.22 minutes, CTLV’s average visitor spent 58.27 minutes looking or working on the website. Indeed, in this department when compared to the top ten sites in the world, CTLV outperformed everyone including Facebook.
(It is easy to check, just type in Facebook to Alexa and look at the stats in comparison.)
We do not have a tool to compare all the Alexa Million statistics for "Time on Site," however we are off the opinion that currently www.cape-town-luxury-villas.com has the longest “Time on Site” stats for all websites in the Alexa Million. The SEO accepted ranking of the top one million websites according to popularity.
Since its outset CTLV (Cape Town Luxury Villas.com) has been designed to advertise in Google Adwords, in the highest position whilst paying less money per click that its competitors. On a number of occasions, it has been mentioned that its parent website www.capevillas.com must have a very hefty Google Adwords advertising bill, as it has been advertised in position one for phrases like “cape town villas” and “cape town luxury villas” for over a decade. Cape Villas campaign starting as an Overture account in 2002, before Overture was purchased by Google 2003.
However, for Cape Villas due to a 10/10 quality score (as seen below), it costs less for Cape Villas to advertise than competitors whilst it appears in higher positions. As such from the outset, www.cape-town-luxury-villas.com was designed specifically to Google’s SEO suggestions and in particular, the basic concept of creating an engaging useful website. The efforts put into doing so are accounted for in the high Alexa ranking, which accounts for visitors and development alike.
However, for www.capevilas.com whilst the cost per click is good for terms like “cape town villas” as soon as one added the word luxury, things got expensive. When examined in summer 2013 the cost for Cape Villas to advertise the phrase “cape town luxury villas” was between $8 and $17 per click. Hence, the target for CTLV was to see if by creating a site specifically optimised to include the word luxury, could we lower the cost?
Tests were first carried out on CTLV on the 26th December and to the relief of all, the experiment was a success, as the number one spot was achieved and maintained for under $4 per click. In addition, it was surprising how much traffic there was, in all about 20 searches a day for phrases that included "cape town" "luxury" and "villas"
Unlike its parent’s campaign Cape Villas, the CTLV data from Google Adwords has been analyzed using Google Adwords's stable mate Google Analytics. This has assisted is identifying that 90% of traffic originally produced, was of no use, in fact it was actually harmful, bringing in people who came to the site and left, increasing www.cape-town-luxury-villas.com's Alexa bounce rate and lowering the average page views and the length of stay statistics.
Through the power of GA (Google Analytics) for each client, we know the City they are from, the amount of time they spent on the site, the amount of pages they viewed, important pages they viewed, the minute that the enquiry was made, the computer, operating system, browser...... We can also see when they return and how many times they do. For potential clients who looked at the site and bid not enquire, we are currently starting a re-advertising campaign to display adds to them across Goggles display network, which we are informed is a economic way to advertise.
Over the coming months, we will be working with Google Developers to create a custom version of Google Analytics for our own purposes, displaying all the useful statistics at once, on a minute by minute time line, hopefully incorporating the cost per click from Google Adwords. However, we are using Google’s Universal Analytics, which is only destined to be connected to Google Adwords remarketing lists in February 2014. Hence, development on this API will only start after GA Universal is upgraded.
True to our estimations, whilst advertising any combination of the words “cape town,” “luxury” & “villas” is seemingly far cheaper than the same add would cost any other. Just advertising under the words “cape town” & “villas” is not as cheap; here No1 position bids were higher than Cape Villas, closer to $3.50. Some adjustments are being made to try to improve this, however in time we will be launching www.capetownvillas.pro which will be optimised specifically for the simple combination of words “cape town” & “villas” where we would hope to enjoy the No 1 spot for about $2.75 or less.
CTLV site development based on Google Analytics data
A useful lesson learned from GA was that the websites basic navigation and look and feel needed improving, regarding the look and feel, this was something we have know about for some time and had been preparing for. Regarding the navigation, we decided that the dropdown menu was two subtle and have created a simpler version, including search elements from the advanced search tool we have been developing www.cape-town-luxury-villas.com/rental-accommodation/search.php. Due to these changes, we have slowed the Google Adwords campaign to about $10 a day.
We expect the changes to take about two weeks, bringing us to the week starting the 27th January 2014, just in time for company’s financial end and bonus payments. At this point, we will increase the Adwords campaign and start the re-marketing.
The most surprising achievement of CTLV (Cape Town Luxury Villas.com) thus far, is its rise in natural (organic (free)) search engine placements. Until the end of November 2013, we had inserted a robots.txt file into our website, which told all legitimate search engines that we were not yet ready to be included within their search. Since removing the file, in Bing, Yahoo and Ask for the key phrase “cape town luxury villas” CTLV has risen to position three. We cannot test the exact position for Google as it changes due to previous engagements, but its there or there abouts.
For the term, “Luxury Villas in Cape Town” CTLV averages between positions six and seven, and for “cape town villas”, it is currently in the late twenties.
Our first enquiry, which if converted has a profit value of about $4000 did not come from the Adwords campaigns. It came from Ask Jeeves*, with a client typing in “camps bay 6 star villas” which oddly can’t be found in Ask Jeeves, albeit www.cape-town-luxury-villas.com shows at position No9 in Google. Either way the client came to CTLV for free, spent over 80 minutes on the site, looked at 58* pages and has been verified as a real life person.
The Cape Town Luxury Villas website itself has been specifically optimised for this search term, alongside others, and it is nice to see the work done on this back in March 2013 has borne fruit. As unexpected as it has been.
The reason the natural search placements are surprising, is that there has been no work on links, and the XML Sitemap has not yet been made. Which collectively account for a big percentage of organic search marks according to SEO companies and data freely available from Google. Indeed, Google directly say an XML Sitemap helps increase organic search. This claim was proved correct in summer 2013 when we adding one to CTLV’s parent site www.capevillas.com. This rescued it from a fall from position No3 in Google in 2010 to a placement on the third page in spring 2013. However, by adding the XML Sitemap, for keyword “cape town villas” it bounced back to No8 on Google and Number No3 on Bing and Yahoo. Moreover, for the keywords “cape town luxury villas.” Cape Villas is now No1 in all search engines.
For Cape Town Luxury Villas.com, it seems the position achieved so far, is a combination of the construction of the website, designed to achieve low cost Google Adwords campaigns. In addition, we can only presume the Alexa ranking is assisting as well, not that Google use it in their mathematics, but instead we expect Google, Bing and Yahoo have their own versions of the top million websites and are probably receiving much the same data as Alexa (Amazon) do. One thing we are sure about regarding Alexa ranking is inbound links, as of the 14 inbound links CTLV has, most are from popular websites that are simply linking to www.cape-town-luxury-villas.com reporting the Alexa status, and unusually half of these links have been set to “Do Follow” so giving CTLV a transfer of reputation with each link.
A bright future for Cape Town Luxury Villas.com
With work to come further improving the framework of the website, which will incorporate more usage of the terms “luxury villas in cape town” and “cape town villas” but also incorporating words from our attributes database, such as "swimming pool" in all relevant areas in organic search we should see an improvement.
During February 2014, we will create and complete a standard and a XML Sitemap, including the function to alert search engines of all page updates (something we did not do for www.capevilllas.com).
In progress at the moment is an initiative to make fist contact with potential candidates for Villa Secrets Ibiza. For now we shall be starting with a simple link partnerships. For such partnerships at great expense, we created this www.cape-town-luxury-villas.com/directory program, which as a backup for our client’s convenience has API’s with Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Facebook, Bing and U Tube fetching there search data and presenting a best of the best display. This exercise was a learning curve in itself, developed as a test website www.checkpoinnt.com that rose from PageRank three to four, just by optimizing the website to the links it already had. The lesson learned was that in any such directory program, we needed a human editor to give the best results. Now we have the opportunity to work property with the tool, finding and vetting the best villa companies in Ibiza and prioritizing there results.
To increase the importance of the Ibiza section of the directory, it shall become a main footer link, making the landing page for Ibiza Villas one of the top pages on the website and so a powerful link partner.
The long term plan for Ibiza is to follow the Villa Secrets business plan, creating new websites and API’s into the databases of all companies and new groups we collaborate with. As such, said partner providing a link to its potential new global partner is perfectly legitimate. If you consider the links created from Ibiza then consider the many other locations we are expanding to with Villa Secrets, it will not take long for Cape Town Luxury Villas.com to have a better link record, that any of its competitors, and so from results gained so far, and knowing of all that is left to come. We will be bold and say that we expect by the end of 2014 to be higher than any other site (not including other villa secrets sites) for the search phrases “cape town luxury villas,” “luxury villas in cape town” and be on the first page for “cape town villas.”
