You may remember that back in June last year, we took a look at how OnTheMarket.com was faring six months on from its launch. Now over a year on it’s time to analyse how well (or otherwise) it’s performing against main rivals Rightmove and Zoopla.

OnTheMarket (OTM) joined the portal party in January 2015, and had an instant impact with Zoopla reporting an 11% fall in clients over the previous year. However, has it managed to become the “number two property portal within the year” Chief Executive Ian Springett said it would?

The organic traffic for each site tells an interesting story.

Unsurprisingly, Rightmove are some way ahead of the competition, with a peak in the organic traffic levels at 14.7m in July 2015, compared with Zoopla’s 53,000.

As OTM’s organic traffic falls some way short of the other two portals, we’ve put it on its own graph.

Traffic to OTM got off to a relatively slow start between January and May last year, however it rapidly increased after then. Naturally, still being a relatively new site, they are a considerable way off the other two portals, but to go from no traffic to this amount in such a short space of time is impressive.

Next, we turn our attentions to the number of keywords each site is currently ranking for inside the top 20 results on Google.

As we expected, Rightmove are the number one site in terms of keywords as well, with over 160,000 rankings, which shows they clearly dominate the market. Having said that, the number of keywords Rightmove are ranking for is now back at the levels which they saw in May and June, prior to an uplift over July, August and September.

Where Rightmove have been on a slight downward trend, Zoopla have been gaining ground, although do still remain behind the market leader. Zoopla saw a similar uplift in the summer months, and saw a downward trend in October, however by the following month, rankings for keywords were on the rise again.

With OTM, there is a clear increase in ranking keywords over the past year or so, and to go from 0 as a new site to over 2000 within a year is a considerable achievement. However, despite slowly closing the gap to Zoopla, they still remain a considerable distance away from their competitors. If they were to continue increasing their ranking keywords at the same rate, it would be likely to take them over three years to catch up with Zoopla.

Overall, it would be a fair assessment to say that OnTheMarket.com have had a good first year for a new business in such a difficult market. However, there is a considerable way to go before they reach their target of being the number two portal.