About Hitwise
Hitwise is the leader in online competitive intelligence. Contact Hitwise to maximize your online marketing programs.
Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK
Analyst Weblog
« Festival fever and a good week for the NME | Interest rates: the relationship between online and offline behaviour »
Shop opening times searches: an SEO opportunity?
April 14, 2009
While perusing this week’s fast moving search terms (i.e. the search terms in each category that experienced the biggest increase in volume between last week and the week before), the list for our Shopping and Classifieds category caught my eye. Last week the three fastest moving search terms for retailers were ‘tesco opening times’, ‘tesco opening hours’ and ‘asda opening times’; while ‘sainsburys opening times’ and ‘sainsburys store locator’ also featured in the top 10.
I was curious to see whether these searches had increase year-year on year, and how they compared with Christmas time, so I created the chart below. As you can see, search volumes for a range of supermarket-related store opening times terms were higher during Christmas, but increased this Easter when compared with last year. As the biggest of the three retailers, Tesco receives the most searches - followed by Asda and Sainsburys
Looking at the search term variations reports for the terms ‘opening time’, ‘opening hours’ and ‘store locator’, all are popular queries. Last week (w/e 11/04/09), UK Internet users searched for 12,100 distinct terms containing the phrase ‘opening times’, 7,200 containing ‘opening hours’ and 500 containing ‘store locator’. As with searches containing the word ‘sale’, the most popular terms are those including shop names. The supermarkets top all three lists, while other popular searches include ‘post office opening times’, ‘b&q opening times’ and ‘b&q store locator’.
Generic – i.e. not shop-specific – ‘opening times’ related searches are less popular, but still significant. ‘good friday opening times’ was the seventh most popular search term to contain the phrase ‘opening times’ last week, while terms such as ‘tesco easter opening times’ and ‘asda easter opening times’ were more popular than generic terms such as ‘easter sunday opening times’ and ‘easter opening times’. It was a similar situation for variations on ‘opening hours’.
Although there were more shop-specific ‘opening times’ related searches over the Christmas period, there were more generic searches in the run up to Easter. As the chart below illustrates, there were four times as many searches for ‘good friday opening times’ last week as there were for ‘boxing day open times’ during Christmas week.
The generic ‘opening times’ related searches also represent missed opportunity for retailers and affiliates. Currently just 64.7% of ‘good Friday opening times’ searches are successful, meaning that a third of people searching for the term last week didn’t click on a link from the search engine results page (SERP). Further evidence of a content gap / SEO opportunity is provided by sites that did manage to pick up traffic from the generic terms. The top to recipient of traffic from ‘good Friday opening times’ searches last week was The AnswerBank, while Yahoo! Answers was top for the term ‘easter opening times’.
Tweet
Posted by Robin Goad at 12:00 PM
| 
(9)
| 
(0)
In Categories Christmas | Easter | Fast moving search terms | Retail | Search | Shopping and Classifieds
Comments
Nice follow up article from eConsultancy, testing the performance of the various store locator tools / Google search results for the main supermarkets.
http://econsultancy.com/blog/3668-supermarkets-missing-out-on-an-seo-opportunity
Robin
Posted by Robin Goad | April 14, 2009 02:29 PM
Interesting article. I found that searches for opening times this Easter had nearly doubled compared to last year, where as Christmas/New Year only increased slightly.
http://blog.opening-times.co.uk/2009/04/easter-versus-christmas.html
I think there is a lot of potential to increase this search term once I can find a good way to increase the amount of opening time information I have on my site.
Posted by Julian Burgess | April 14, 2009 03:44 PM
Looks like you pipped me to the post with the analysis on your blog, Julian!
Posted by Robin Goad | April 14, 2009 04:26 PM
LostInSeattle.com is already hitting a home run with this. Their traffic is pretty amazing and I'm guessing it's all SEO on "____ hours" and "____ opening hours."
Posted by Galen | April 14, 2009 08:04 PM
You're right, Galen.
I looked at the US search data for Lost in Seattle, and the site's top 100 search terms included: 'gnc hours', 'ross hours', 'ivar's 15th seattle hours', 'home depot seattle hours', etc... As you would expect, most of the site's traffic was local search.
Thanks, Robin
Posted by Robin Goad | April 15, 2009 08:49 AM
I'm guessing it's all SEO on "____ hours" and "____ opening hours
Posted by seo | April 18, 2009 08:02 PM
We've updated these figures in a new blog, and searches continued to increase over the Christmas period:
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2009/12/christmas_shop_opening_times_searches_up.html
Thanks, Robin
Posted by Robin Goad | December 30, 2009 11:10 AM
Did think about building a directory of opening times because of the number of times I've struggled to find them myself. Bit of a big undertaking though!
Posted by John Mellor | April 14, 2009 01:03 PM