jueves, 20 de septiembre de 2012

MoneySupermarket outperforms banks for key financial search terms

Posted 19 September 2012 11:20am by David Moth with 0 comments

New research shows that MoneySupermarket is outperforming the major high street banks in search visibility for many consumer financial products.

StickyEyes' Online Consumer Finance Intelligence Report shows that the price comparison site achieves the highest visibility in organic search for common financial products such as current accounts and savings, but also in more lucrative categories such as mortgages and loans.

While price comparison sites provide many of the traditional brands with the necessary means to advertise their products online, they also go head-to-head with the very same operators as they compete for premium positions within SERPs.

The report takes an in-depth look at several different banking sectors, but here we highlight the results for mortgages and credit cards.

Mortgages

According to the report, mortgage search terms are made up of a blend of phrase types including mortgages, mortgage rates, best mortgage deals and compare mortgages.

Looking at the organic click share results, MoneySupermarket is the top performer across the top 10 phrases with 32.98%. This position is underpinned by its strong average rankings across all of the top volume terms.

Price comparison sites obviously place great emphasis on paid search, with six of them appearing in the top 10 most visible websites.

MoneySupermarket again comes out on top with around 17% of click share, followed closely by HSBC and Barclays.

The aggregated results show that MoneySupermarket achieves a massive 36% of click share, almost three times Barclays in second place.

In total, price comparison sites outstrip the direct financial lenders by 55.12% to 44.88%.

Credit Cards

According to the report credit cards account for 75% of consumer lending so it's an important area for banks to focus on.

Volume within this category is dominated by short tail keywords, with 57.27% of all search impressions driven by the phrases credit cards and credit card.

MoneySupermarket is again the top performer, leading the organic click share index with 26.53%. The competition for second place is quite intense, as Tesco Bank and MBNA jostle for the keywords credit cards and credit card.

Although MBNA appears in the top 10 for 60% of the primary keywords, its total click share only puts it in third position overall. This can be attributed to that fact that it has lower average ranking for the keywords credit cards and credit card.

Looking at paid search visibility, it's interesting to note that Google's new credit card comparison service means that it is the third most visible brand.

Google has positioned its sponsored listings directly above the organic results and the use of images makes the ads stand out more than the normal paid search results.  

The launch of Google's comparison site was a controversial move and shows how dominant it could be if it decided to expand the service to include other financial products.

The aggregated results again underline MoneySupermarket's dominance of financial search terms, with little to separate the rest of the brands in the top 10.

It is interesting to see that Google comes in eighth place for the aggregated search rankings based solely on its performance in paid search.

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