How Did Trulia Beat Zillow?

The mantel of "The Little Search Engine That Could" for Real Estate has passed from Zillow to Trulia. In December, 07, Trulia had 1.7MM unique visitors to Zillow's 1.4MM. Maps now beat valuations, at least for Real Estate.

But how could Trulia do it? How could Trulia, with their small $17.7MM in VC funds, out rank Zillow with all their $87MM in VC lucre? Do maps really trump valuations? Lets play "Rock, Map, Valuations".

To find a home on Trulia, you type the address into Trulia's Search Box.

To find a home on Zillow, you type the address into Zillow's Search Box.

Trulia's URL (domain) is optimized for the home's street address. Zillow does have the home's address in their URL, but it's hidden in their coding and isn't read well by the Search Engines, yet.

Trulia's, presentation of the street address in the domain for each home is optimized for the Search Engines. With Zillow, the home's address isn't optimized.

Once you know the home's address, or just the street and town, you can search on that address in Google.

Trulia is search engine optimized for every address in their data base. If they were Zillow, they'd be optimized for over 63MM searches. And Trulia gets 1.7MM unique visitors per month.

Google (verb,transitive) the address: 220 Sandringham Rd, 14610. The top listing on Google is for Trulia, even above the listing Realtor's placement. And Coldwell Banker pushes their listings out to Google.

In all my other address searches for local homes for sale, Trulia is number 1, on most first pages of Google, and at least in the first 5 of page 1. Zillow is nowhere to be found.

Trulia often has more than 1 placement on Google's first page, too. Search engine optimizers call this the Theme Approach for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), getting more than one of your Websites on the first few pages of Google searches.

Is this the reason Trulia is beating Zillow? Maybe not the only one. Zillow is still ahead of Trulia in market share by over 2 to 1 (But Yahoo still has more visitors to its Website than Google does too. Which stock do you want to own?).

As I've learned with my own site, WebHomeUSA.com, it's better to build SEO in than to rework it after the fact and after you've branded yourself and your site. Or as Edwards Deming said: "You can not inspect quality into the product; it is already there.” Quality (and SEO) should be built in, not added on."

Give 'em hell, Trulia.

Happy Searching.

Posted by: Cliff Jacobson

Adapt Or Die!

WebHomeUSAblog: The Blog of Online Real Estate Marketing

Comments

[Drew Meyers from Zillow]

Hey Cliff. Drew from Zillow here. Not sure where you got your traffic numbers, but they are flawed. According to internal numbers tracked by Omniture, Zillow had 4 million uniques in December and 4.7 in January.

[Hi! I'm Rudy from Trulia. Nice to meet you...]

Hi Cliff!

We certainly do care about our SEO and are really pleased with the results thus far. It's great for the real estate agents that have profiles on Trulia too as it helps them rank high in the search engines. But what's really interesting is that the fastest growth of traffic we are seeing on the site is not from the search engines, but in fact from direct and returning users.

Stay well Cliff.

Rudy
Social Media Guru at Trulia

[Cliff Jacobson]

Hi Drew and Rudy,
I met Pete Flint of Trulia at Inman's Real Estate Connect this past January. He said in 12/07, Trulia had passed Zillow in terms of unique visitors. Later, I saw an article in Inman on 2/14/08 about the HitWise numbers. Inman just gave the market share, where Zillow still beats Trulia. An article on Realtor Online from the NAR had more numbers. I think they were also HitWise numbers (Trulia 1.7MM vs Zillow 1.4MM).
As I said in my most recent post, Total Traffic, not Unique Visitors, is what's most important for ad-revenue-model businesses like Trulia and Zillow.
Cliff

[Jonathan Cardella]

Let's face it, SEO is the determining factor. This is a great post because Trulia did build SEO into their business strategy and website architecture; for example, their url rewrite, their internal link structure, their widget approach to obtaining back links, their highly optimize city, neighborhood, state, and property pages, their market trend reports, etc. Zillow did not build SEO into their corporate DNA and is now struggling to bolt it on and catch up, after the fact. This is a great modern day david slays goliath story. Here are the hard facts:

Pages indexed by Google:
Trulia - 1.8M pages
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.trulia.com&btnG=Search

Zillow - 774K pages http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Azillow.com

Links Indexed By Google:
Trulia - 245K in links
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=link%3Awww.trulia.com&btnG=Search

Zillow - 6,020 in links
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=link%3Awww.zillow.com&btnG=Google+Search

A similar analysis in Yahoo will show Trulia at least 100% better positioned than Zillow in both number of inbound links and number of pages indexed.

Add to this the fact that Trulia makes it easy to find a home for sale whereas Zillow still seems to fail, it make sense that Trulia is probably trending well in repeat visitor growth and taking market share from other real estate portals and search websites.