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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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Postcode searches and SEO

June 03, 2008

One of the more curious and unexpected fast moving search terms that we spotted on Monday was ‘b78 3tw’. As you can probably guess, this is a postcode. Specifically, it is the postcode of Drayton Manor Park, a popular theme park in the West Midlands. The reason for the sudden surge was the number of parents that went online to search the web for directions during half term. As you can see from the chart below, searches for the term increase notably during school holiday periods.

uk internet searches for b78 3ts drayton manor park postcode 2008 chart.png

Of all the people searching for this post code over the last 4 weeks, 16.7% ended up at Drayton Manor Theme Park’s official homepage, but the majority (63.1%) went to Google Maps. In fact, ‘b78 3tw’ was the highest ranked search term that didn’t contain either ‘google’, ‘map’ or ‘maps’ last week. This illustrates the success of Google’s universal search policy - when searching for a UK postcode on Google, one is invariably presented with a Google Maps entry at the top of the search results - but also highlights an interesting area for search engine optimisation (SEO), or potentially even paid search.

To understand this a bit more, we looked at the search term suggestions for three central London postcodes, EC1 (City), WC1 (West End), and SW1 (Westminster). For the last 12 weeks we recorded, respectively, 311, 250 and 539 unique search terms containing these three postal districts. The table below lists the top 10 search term suggestions for each, and these range from searches for specific buildings, hotels, tourist attractions and businesses to more generic ‘open’ search terms such as ‘hotels ec1’, bars in london wc1’ or ‘sw1 restaurants’.

top 10 searches for ec1 sw1 wc1 london postcodes table may 2008.png

Interestingly, many of these terms have low success rates – i.e. people are not finding relevant content, pointing to a gap in the market. For example, just two thirds of people searching for ‘sw1 restaurants’ clicked through to a relevant link, while the success rate for ‘buckingham palace road sw1’ was even lower. The top level generic terms actually experienced the worst success rates: 46% for ‘ec1’, 54% for ‘sw1’ and 60% for ‘sw1’.

Returning to amusement parks, we’ve noticed that postcodes aren’t the only area of navigation search to present SEO opportunities. The table below lists the top 20 search term suggestions for ‘alton towers’ during April. Four of these (highlighted in blue) refer to location of destination, while a further four (highlighted in red) refer to hotels in or near Alton Towers. Again, a number of these terms have low success rates, including ‘alton towers address’ (62.7%) and ‘where is alton towers’ (65.4%). Once you include the number of searches for offers, tickets, prices and deals, it becomes clear that the volume of related search terms for this and other attractions is significant.

This final table is taken from a travel webinar that I presented last week. This covered a number of topics including search habits in the industry and the impact of the economic downturn. You can view a recording here.