SEEK Commercial is a business portal showcasing businesses and franchises for sale across Australia and is owned and operated by SEEK the largest job portal in Australia.
A few stats I found from back in July:
- SEEK Commercial holds #1 position for Google search term “business for sale”
- Potential buyers spend an average of 10 minutes on SEEK Commercial – more time for you to engage with them
- More than 6,300 genuine enquires about a business for sale were received in July 2011
- 744% YoY growth in Google impressions (July 2011)
- Over 100,000 business buyers visit SEEK Commercial monthly
Source: Nielsen
From their site you can read:
SEEK Commercial captures 50% of overall online market visits, when evaluating franchise and business for sale websites. This is two and a half more visits than our nearest competitor. This means more people choose SEEK Commercial to buy & sell their business.
– On average there are 110,000 visits to the site every month
– Our business buyers choose to spend more than 7 minutes2 on the site
– Every day, on average 1000 of enquiries are submitted to business advertisers
When I first heard about SEEK Commercial last year, I was sceptical as to whether a non real estate based online company could enter this space and successfully compete against Domainbusiness (Fairfax) and Realbusinesses (REA). But these guys have had an impact on the sector. In the eyes of business brokers, SEEK Commercial are as important as the other 2 portals and should be included in a successful marketing campaign.
They’ve been pushing advertising relatively hard along with paid SEM so this could explain some of their success. But if you think about the SEEK job portal then this could provide a major source of traffic for SEEK Commercial for users looking for business and franchises.
You’ll also notice that the search and way listings are displayed is a lot different than the other two portals. I feel the business portals operated by REA and Domain are styled on real estate portals, whereas the feeling and style of SEEK Commercial is more closely aligned to Seek.com.au and a job portal. This is very interesting, as from a site browser your experience is very different.
What’s also interesting about SEEK Commercial is they charge business brokers a pay per listing/bundle model rather than a flat monthly fee for all you can list. Pay per listing/bundle is how Seek.com.au charge for job ads. The integration of this into their business portal has proved to be a success.
I admire SEEK Commercial for taking a different approach and look forward to following their success.