Hitwise Intelligence - LeeAnn Prescott - US
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June 01, 2006
Net Surfing Between Broadcast Network Sites, SEO Opportunity
Today's press release on the broadcast television networks' online performance showed that NBC.com leads the way, with the exception of Fox's American Idol site, which eclipsed all the network sites in market share of visits during the week of the show's season finale.
When researching this release, one of the interesting things I found was that visitors to network sites tend to surf between the networks' Internet sites just as they do with television channels. An average of 34% of downstream visits to the four major network sites (ABC.com, NBC.com, CBS.com and Fox.com) went to another site in the Entertainment - Television category for the week ending May 27, 2006. About a quarter of those visits went to one of the other three networks. So for example, 24% of visits leaving NBC.com during that week went to another Television site, which included 6.75% going to one of CBS.com, ABC.com, or Fox.com.
Another interesting point about television networks online is that search engines are their largest traffic driver, which underscores the importance of SEO and SEM for the networks as they build out their content offerings. For the week ending May 27, 2006, an average of 31% of visits to the four major network sites came from search engines. The list below shows the leading search terms to the four network sites with the navigational terms filtered out. There were over 5,000 terms in this list over a 4 week period, which related mostly to show titles. It seems that the networks have an opportunity to drive more traffic to their sites by optimizing for additional terms like actor names, episode titles, and other show related terms. A quick search term analysis report on some leading actor names, including Dominic Monaghan and Evangeline Lilly from 'Lost', and Hugh Laurie from 'House' revealed that the respective network sites did not appear in the most visited sites for that term, as shown in the example below.
Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 06:15 PM
Posted to Television
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