Carrentals.co.uk, part of Expedia Inc’s Hotwire Group, was the most visible car hire web site during September, according to Greenlight search agency
Comparison site tops natural search charts
Carrentals.co.uk was the most visible car hire web site during September, according to Greenlight search agency.
Based on Greenlight’s analysis of car hire search terms, carrentals.co.uk appeared on the first page of Google natural search results 54% of the time in September. In total, 1.5m searches were carried out in September using the top 3,800 key words.
Another price comparison site travelsupermarket.com came second with 40% with a broker, easycar.com, ranked third.
Car hire firms’ brand dotcom secured the fourth to seventh places, with Enterprise, Hertz, Avis and Europcar getting 24%, 21%, 19% and 17% respectively.
The study also breaks the results down into generic, domestic or worldwide keywords. Greenlight estimated that 446,000 searches were carried out using generic terms, with “car hire” accounting for 45% of searches. easyCar was the most visible on these searches, appearing on the first page 79% if the time.
CarRentals.co.uk appears more focused on destination searches, regaining the top slot for domestic and worldwide terms, with 62% and 53% respectively.
The study also looked at paid search in September. Using a different methodology to come up with a share of voice ranking, the most visible site is carhire300.com, part of Manchester-based Jigsaw Travel. It achieved a share of voice in September of 73%.
For the paid search, Greenlight looks at the 90 most popular keywords and found that carhire.com bid on 69 of them, achieving an average ad position of four.
Carhire3000.com has only 2% visibility in the natural search rankings for September. CarRentals, which topped the natural search rankings, only had a 12% share of voice for paid. Taking into account natural and paid, the top site overall was travelsupermarket.com.
There were a total of 5.8m car hire searches in the third quarter of the year – 2.3m in July, 2m in August and 1.5m in September.
