Digital Insights from the Latest Market Research on Real Estate in India

The Real Estate industry in India is on a constant upward trend with residential and commercial inventory showing no signs of waning or slowing down. Great strides in household income, urban mobility, social culture shifts towards nuclear families, and lower costs of borrowing, have all contributed towards the rise of the construction industry, which ranks third in terms of the effect it has on the Indian economy.

While the average property buyer is spoilt for choice, it is a different perspective from the property developer or construction company’s point of view. There is intense competition, as a result of which only the smartest and most data-driven of all companies will be able to turn over their inventory quickly enough to generate consistent profits.

Online visibility and analytics tool SEMrush has come up with a detailed report titled Digital Real Estate: Winning the Indian Market with Data based on in-depth data gathered from the top 50 real estate companies in India. This ebook is chock-full of data on how various real estate brands fare in terms of visibility in search engines, traffic to their websites, and the effectiveness of their online marketing efforts.

SEMrush has shortlisted the top 20 sites in the Real Estate sector based on their monthly web traffic. Here’s how they line up on the leaderboard:

     1. Lodha Group
     2. Sobha
     3. Prestige Group
     4. Godrej Properties
     5. Mahindra Lifespaces
     6. Kalpataru Group
     7. Brigade Group
     8. Sunteck Realty Ltd.
     9. Oberoi Realty
     10. Puravankara
     11. Pacifica Companies
     12. DLF
     13. JLL India
     14. SD Corp
     15. Kolte-Patil Developers Ltd.
     16. L&T Realty
     17. Supertech Limited
     18. Century Real Estate
     19. Rohan Builders
     20. Omaxe

Let’s delve into the highlights of the study, divvied out by various factors that affect the overall digital marketing strategy of a real estate firm.

Web Traffic Analytics

Analyzing the current traffic to a website gives a marketer a lot of information about the visitors, the source of their visits, and ultimately their intent. SEMrush found that even though India has 500 million people with access to the internet, the actual number of visitors to any of the top 50 construction companies’ websites never exceeded 1 million visitors – the highest monthly traffic went to lodhagroup.com with around 70 lakh visitors.

Another interesting finding was regarding the sources of traffic. Traffic to any website comes from five different ways:

• Direct – visitors type the URL of the site directly into their browsers
• Organic search – visitors arrive after clicking through one of the results of a Google search
• Social media – visitors come by clicking on a link in a social post
• Referral – visitors arrive via a link to your page on another website
• Paid search – visitors come after clicking on a search engine ad

The unsurprising discovery was that 51% of all visits to the websites came via Google search.

This has some clear conclusions. One, referral traffic has great potential. Probably, the property developers are getting a lot of traffic from the online aggregators and real estate portals. Both categories can focus on how they can forge better partnerships with each other in order to build a better online ecosystem.

Two, channels like paid search and social media are clearly under-utilized. It is up to the brands to realize the potential opportunities quickly and steal a lead before their competitors do the same. There is a great first-mover advantage here to be had before others jump into the fray and the cost of advertising shoots up.

The SEMrush Traffic Analytics tool helps you gather such data for your site yourself. You can get break downs on the devices, geographies and channels from which your traffic is coming, as well as your competitors’ traffic sources.

Search Advertising

As mentioned above, PPC (pay per click) advertising is one of the channels that none of the real estate companies seems to effectively leverage. One of the quickest ways to start generating leads in any industry is advertising on Google.

Considering the value of a single sale of property, it is a remarkable opportunity for Real Estate companies – their potential spend is lower than other industries such as Insurance, Internet & Telecom, Education, Marketing & Advertising, and Travel. Given this opportunity, if they fail to budget for PPC, it only leads to serious dearth in brand awareness and lack of qualified leads for them.

While CPC data for the whole industry might not be a good indicator of the target audience, the SEMrush study also provides a breakdown of CPC by states for the entire country.

Such precise data helps real estate marketers identify regions with growing demand, target the audience in those regions better, and set marketing budgets accordingly.

Once you’ve identified the precise regions you want to target and outlined your ad spend, you’d want to know the exact strategy on how to approach Google ads, how to tweak your ad copy, how to create your landing pages, and the range and type of property to hard sell.

This is made possible by the SEMrush Advertising Research tool, which helps you take an inside look at your competitors’ strategies by revealing the amount they’re spending on ads every month, their ad copies, the keywords for which their ads show up, the positions at which their ads are ranking, the web pages they’ve built for each project, and so on. What’s more, all this data is available in real-time as well as for any given period in the past few years, enabling you to estimate trends and plan upcoming campaigns better.

Natural Rankings with Correct SEO

As we saw that more than 50% of all web traffic to real estate websites comes from Google search, it is absolutely necessary to get your search engine optimization (SEO) strategies right. The SEMrush study ran each of the top sites through 120 factors that influence their crawlability and indexability in Google, including mobile friendliness, page loading speed, https implementation, and so on.

SEMrush’s SEO Site Audit tool is built for checking your whether you’ve implemented the basic functionality that enables Google to properly crawl and index all the pages on your site. It performs a lot of checks such as:

• Whether your titles and meta descriptions are unique and of the right length
• Whether any of the links on your site lead nowhere (broken)
• Whether your pages return any HTTP error codes

It then assigns a score to the website – sort of a grading on a 1 to 100 scale. Astonishingly, only a fifth of the top 20 sites managed to score over 70% (and none scored above 80%) highlighting the rampant gaps in knowledge and implementation of basic SEO practices in the industry.

Search engine visibility is a result of two critical facets of SEO – on-site and off-site. Technical SEO changes to the code and content of the site make up the former, while the latter depends on a crucial factor: links.

The SEMrush report found that backlinks to most property developers’ sites came from a mix of low-value sites, or those owned by themselves, suggesting that they aren’t spending enough time building high authority and high-quality links. The more links from credible and relevant sites that you get, the more Google values your site as a trustworthy entity in your niche. The study found huge gaps in this area, which clearly need to be addressed with a long-term link building strategy.

Over to You

The Indian property market offers a high-value consumer base to construction companies. However, data shows that the buyer is far more informed and internet savvy than the brands themselves. The SEMrush real estate study has proven beyond doubt that companies need to make full use of data and analytics if they hope to meet the demands and requirements of digitally smart customers. If you’re a marketer working in the real estate sector, you can make use of this research to create ROI-intensive strategies that will help increase (and speed up) property sales for your company right away.