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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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Israel football searches

November 20, 2007

Thanks to Israel’s unexpected victory over Russia on Saturday, the England football team now only need a point against Croatia to qualify for next year’s European Championships. With England fans praying for a favourable result at the weekend, searches for Israel shot up last week. In fact, they reached their highest level since March, when England drew 0-0 in Tel Aviv. Those searches were also football related, although England fans probably had a somewhat different opinion of Israeli football back then

UK Internet searches for Israel.png

As the table below illustrates, 4 of the top 5 search terms containing ‘israel’ over the last 4 weeks were football related.

This next table illustrates that different websites received traffic from the four different variations listed above. My initial assumption was that these sites were paying for this traffic, but in each case the top recipient was 100% organic. However, some of the same sites were paying for various combinations of Italy / Scotland – so I wonder whether this was a case of clever SEO, or of people missing the trick by not bidding on the Israel / Russia terms?

Sites receiving traffic from israeli football searches.png