WITH interest rates starting to rise, home owners—especially those with large mortgages—are looking for ways to protect themselves, while prospective buyers and investors are keeping a close eye on the financial institutions that offer the cheapest interest rates.
People looking for financial information on the Web are more than likely to visit a leading search engine. In fact, 87% of people online use search engines as their primary research tool to find Web sites.
The tables show which financial institutions are performing well in search engines as opposed to those that aren’t.
We analysed and compared well-known brands that offer mortgage services by seeing how well they ranked in search engines for keyword phrases that relate to cheap mortgage services and “cheap interest rates”.
We limited our search to the following keyword phrases: “low interest rate”, “low home loan interest rate”, “best home loan interest rates”, “lowest home loan interest rate”, “low mortgage interest rate”, “cheap mortgage interest rate” and “cheap home loan interest rate”.
Aussiehomeloans.com.au was the winner of the well-known brands with 4.98% reach within Australia’s most popular search engines. Top rankings included: “number one in Ninemsn and Anzwers for “best home loan interest rates”.
Moneymanager.com.au was number one through Alta Vista for “cheap mortgage interest rate”, and number one through both Alta Vista and Anzwers for “cheap home loan interest rate”.
Yourmortgage.com.au was number one through Anzwers for “cheap mortgage interest rate” and number one through Ninemsn for “cheap home loan interest rate”.
Surprisingly, Moneymanager and Yourmortgage reached more of the active Australian online community searching for our keyword phrases that relate to interest rates, than top brand financial institutions.
Why? One reason is that although top brands provide robust Web sites that offer content rich and user-friendly Web sites, there is a lack of promotion of these products and services on search engines.
Another reason is that Web sites that scored highest were able to rank well in the top five search engines.
The top five search engines used to search the Web by Australians include: Google (39.18%), Yahoo (10.35%), Alta Vista (7.72%), Ninemsn (5.30%), Anzwers (3.62%). (Source: Nielsen//NetRatings August 2001 combined home and work, Australia-only data, page views requested via search queries).
Next month’s column will look at which taxation-based Web sites users were able to find online as well as updated search engine popularity statistics provided by Nielsen//NetRatings.
John Bolakis is manager of his joint venture company BMCOptimise, with BMCMedia. BMCOptimise caters to the online marketing and e-commerce industry in Australia via search engines. Look for this monthly update about search engine optimisation which will appear in the E-marketing pages of B&T Weekly.
