Car rental brand names are typed into search engines every day, but many travelers don't realize there is an online battle over those words fought by the largest rental car chains in the US, Britain, France, and Germany.
The winners of this battle can expect their websites to rank higher in Google search for specific search terms.
The current winners in the rankings for paid and organic search have been identified in a report by Searchmetrics, a Berlin vendor of analytics software.
Enterprise leads in the US, with users having far and away more likelihood of seeing Enterprise links in search results for commonly entered terms.
Enterprise's name appears in organic search results twice as frequently as Expedia, the next-best search engine optimization (SEO) champ for rental car terms. Google won't say whether Expedia's performance is helped by having more than 1.5 million backlinks (or links on other websites that link back to them) -- more than any other travel brand.
Also in the US market, Expedia led in keyword rankings, managing to to be found on the first results page for 276 search terms, or 89% of the common keywords studied.
In Germany, the nation's largest rental car comparison portal, billiger-mietwagen.de, has the most outstanding SEO visibility, wihth its name appearing in organic search results in Germany twice as often as Enterprise does in the US. Rental car company Sixt comes in second, half as good as the leader.
In France, Europcar holds a clear lead in the list of results at Google.fr. Hertz is a distant number two.
In the UK, Enterprise.co.uk is the champ in Google.co.uk search rankings, though there isn't much SEO work being done in the market.
Paid search for car rental
Searchmetrics analyzed which sites rank in the pole positions in Google’s paid search results, too.
The company checked the visibility of car rental company web addresses when entered into Google’s advertising field, using a set of 360 popular keywords. Search volume and ad positions were placed in relation to each other and, based on their position, weighted.
In the US, Enterprise competed with metasearch site Kayak at the top of paid search results. The two companies are clearly spending more on Google Adwords than their competitors.
In Germany, billiger-mietwagen.de is tops in paid search, while a rival price comparison portal, Check24.de, follows in second place. Other companies are significantly behind them.
In the UK market, rentalcars.com led in AdWords spending effectiveness, with twice as much visibility as the next best performer, Avis.
In France, Europcar dominates again, with Auto Europe pacing neck-and-neck with it.
Searchmetrics will publish its whitepaper on its website on October 28.
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