July 05, 2007

Global Warming UK Traffic Goes to US Sites

We issued a news release last week about the increased interest online in global warming, recycling and carbon footprints. I wanted to highlight and delve further into one of the points from that release. The increased interest in global warming raises interesting challenges for policy makers and those seeking to influence public opinion within the UK, as traffic is largely being directed to US websites.

The top website receiving UK traffic from the term "global warming" is Wikipedia, with the online encyclopaedia receiving one quarter of visits from searches for "global warming". After Wikipedia, the top sites are globalwarming.org, the US Environment Protection Agency, Royal Society and climatehotmap.org.

As the table below illustrates, the sites visited by US and UK internet users after searching for “global warming” are very similar with four of the top five websites receiving traffic from searches for “global warming” the same in the two markets.

Similarly, UK searches for “carbon footprint”, which recently soared on the back of David Miliband’s announcement
about the government website to help consumers calculate their own carbon footprint, sent 69% of UK visits to www.carbonfootprint.com, a US environmental website.

Google, which accounts for 79% of UK searches, largely dictates the flow of UK web traffic and this is reflected by the similar sites visited after searches for "global warming" in the US and UK. Google determines the websites that appear at the top of the listings largely based on inbound links. On global issues such as global warming, UK websites compete with US websites for those links and the attention of search engines.

With searches for "global warming", only two UK websites (BBC and Royal Society) appeared among the top 25 websites receiving visits from searches for "global warming". With searches for "carbon footprint", traffic again went to a US website.

Whilst this undoubtedly poses a serious challenge to UK organisations and policy makers seeking to influence public opinion, the door is not closed. Wikipedia can be edited by those anywhere in the world. Also, sponsored listings present an opportunity to get a message across the top of the search results and as they are regionally targeted, can be effective for those in local markets trying to influence a policy agenda.

Posted by Heather Hopkins at 06:00 AM
Posted to Search

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/554.

Comments

Post a comment

Name:

Email Address:

URL:
Remember Me? YesNo

Comments: (you may use HTML tags for style)