15 May 2009 | Author: R. Falconer SEO Consultant

Search engine use increases after penalties

There's nothing more dramatic than a penalty shoot out in a football match. Penalties in football are always followed by huge surges in search engine traffic after the drama has unfolded and everyone knows the outcome of the game. And our friendly bigmouthmedia search experts want you to know that knowing about search surges like this can help you drive more traffic to your site.

Penalties during the match are often the main talking point of the game. Afterwards everyone wants to see the incident in more detail. Was it actually a penalty? Was the commentator mistaken? Did the player take the shot well? There are so many questions and even those least qualified to judge want to have their opinion heard.

It happens on both small and large scales. During a recent Scottish Premier League match between Hibernian and Hearts, the main incident was a penalty for Hibernian striker, Derek Riordan. During the players' goal celebration he was subject to an attempted assault by an opposition fan. High drama indeed. Searches for terms such as "derek riordan penalty" increased massively afterwards as people searched for video clips and reports of the incident.

Obviously, the bigger the club and profile of the player, the more search traffic there will be. England is no stranger to botched penalty shootouts and few players have a higher profile than David Beckham. We can see below, in a traffic graph from Google Insights for Search, searches for "david beckham penalty" after Beckham's infamous miss in the last European Championships where he lost his footing whilst attempting to kick the ball.








In that same penalty shootout, John Terry managed to score his effort. 4 years later though, he was to become the name in everyone's Google search box after missing the most important penalty of his career to lose Chelsea the Champions League final to rivals, Manchester United.









So how can this help your site? Well, the sites that benefited from this traffic were set up to exploit time-sensitive searches. When a search term grows suddenly, Google recognises the fact that people are looking for up to date information on a news event and presents a larger number of temporal results. Google News results will often be shown near or at the top of Universal Search results, newly released news, message board and blog posts temporarily rank far higher than they would normally and Google Blog search results (similar to the News results) now show too.

Being first to release an optimised story about a player's penalty miss can potentially drive huge amounts of traffic to your site, especially if you release high quality articles on a regular basis and perform well in Google News. This technique transfers to almost any website - if you stay on top of what is happening in your industry and write about it first and often, you will see results. If you are smart and target terms that people are likely to search for as the news breaks, you will occasionally see avalanches of traffic. Provided your stories or content is of a high standard, the added bonus for your SEO efforts will be the additional inbound links you will receive to these pages.

The keys to making a success of this strategy are knowing your market inside out, optimising your site for news content (Google News and Blog Search), producing quality content and most importantly agility - the ability to move quickly enough to write and publish before your competitors. Sometimes though, just like when taking penalties, a little bit of luck will make all the difference.

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