The World Cup is literally about to begin, and here at HP Group we couldn’t help but bring you another blog post about it. And yes, we’re going to tie it in with SEO just so you feel like you’re doing something productive by being here. The big news as regards the World Cup and search is that, you guessed it, lots of us are searching for World Cup stuff. But which search engine is bringing us the most information about our favourite team’s fixtures?
SEO
The search engines have a great deal of power when it comes to these special events. The little touches they add to their engines over festivals or during the Olympics are always appreciated. In terms of SEO, these engines do not have to work their own algorithm to bring us what they want – if they want a list of scheduled World Cup games to appear when you type in ‘world cup’, they they’ll simply appear. And it looks like Google have been a bit slower to bring their users football related goodies.
Yahoo Score Against Google
According to Experian Hitwise, in the USA most World Cup traffic found itself at the Fifa website (50%), with the second most going to Yahoo (11%). Pretty good for a non football specific site. Now, searching for the main soccer related terms will bring up a schedule of matches with associated times (although they haven’t made these local to the domain, which surely can’t have been that hard?), Google does this, but lagged behind Yahoo and Bing.
Social Media
Apart from the main search engines, Twitter will be taking a great deal of the digital soccer traffic – and some say will begin to creak under the sheer weight of new footie hashtags. It will certainly prove to be one of the best ways to gauge reactions from fans – especially if something controversial happens – eg. someone mentioning a Frenchman’s mother.
Search engines like Google have become like a national broadcaster might have been 15 years ago – by adding these touches they help bring the global village together. They are, whether they like it or not, a public service – and providing highly relevant search results is just one of their jobs.
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