Chelsea Football club may have topped the Premier League tables, but the Blues are trailing behind the rivals when it comes to search visibility.
That’s according to a study by Searchmetrics, which analysed the online visibility of Premier League team official websites that finished in the top-ten position in the 2014/15 season.
Football clubs face increasing competition to attract fans to their official sites, rather than seeing them visit broadcasters, newspapers or other online destinations, commented Searchmetrics CTO Marcus Tober.
“Having a higher search visibility means people are more likely to click on their sites, giving clubs the chance to engage with them, sell merchandise, tickets and hospitality”, added Tober.
Scoring in search
Having finished sixth in the Premier League, Liverpool’s www.liverpoolfc.com website beat all its rivals with 44,395 points based on the scoring system- which takes into account the number of times a domain appears and its prominence in results pages across various keyword sets.
Arsenal were runners up scoring 44,075, followed by Manchester United, who finished third with a score of 41,465.
Looking at results across devices, Arsenal led on mobile search, an increasingly sought-after merit following Google’s algorithm change, while Chelsea redeemed itself by leading in a separate analysis of social media visibility, based on the number of links to the official club websites that are shared by people through networks.
The analysis shows that many clubs are successfully optimising their sites in order to be found in searches, but, Tober concluded, “success on the football pitch doesn’t necessarily translate into high online or social visibility.”
“Indeed, teams such as Liverpool top the league for visibility, despite underperforming on the pitch this season, while champions Chelsea can only finish fourth.”
The top-ten ranking of desktop SEO visibility can be viewed below:
Club, Desktop SEO Vis Score, League Position
- Liverpool (liverpoolfc.com),44,395, 6th place
- Arsenal (arsenal.com) 44,075, 3rd place
- Manchester United (manutd.com) 41,465, 4th place
- Chelsea (chelseafc.com), 23,909, 1st place
- Tottenham Hotspur (tottenhamhotspur.com), 15,627, 5th place
- Manchester City (mcfc.co.uk), 13,690, 2nd place
- Crystal Palace (cpfc.co.uk), 3,351, 10th place
- Stoke City (stokecityfc.com), 2,732, 9th place
- Southampton (saintsfc.co.uk), 2,213, 7th place
- Swansea City (swanseacity.net), 1,295, 8th place