In terms of drama, the Vancouver Olympics had it all. There were early concerns about lack of snow, millions of people from all over the world visiting Vancouver, the tragic death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili and the elation at the Canadian hockey gold medal triumph over USA. Not surprisingly every twist and turn was wired, tweeted, blogged, re-tweeted, posted, emailed and discussed to death by experts, sceptics and people that thought the whole thing was a waste of money.
Now that the Olympics are over and with the recent meeting between VANOC and the Russian Olympic Organizers for Sochi 2014 and with the upcoming London 2012 Olympics, we can reflect on how the massive influx of tourists, media and Canadian gold medals affected Google searches worldwide, and how businesses can look to capitalize on future events.
With over 2 million visitors to the city, it isn’t surprising that Google searches for ‘Vancouver Skytrain’, ‘Vancouver Maps’ and ‘Stanley Park Vancouver’ got a major boost during the Olympics. Bigger winners, however, were names of the main shopping and entertainment districts of Vancouver. ‘Main Street’ was searched for 1,800,000 times, ‘Granville’ 800,000 times and ‘Robson’ 250,000 times in a month.
Surprisingly ‘Vancouver 2010′ or ‘Vancouver Olympics’ failed to come out as the top search term. Instead, according to Google, the most popular keyword was simply ‘Vancouver’, attracting almost 56 million local searches in February. Surrounded by the media attention and hype, keyword extensions were not necessary. When internet users wanted an update on the latest Olympic news, why type in ‘Vancouver 2010′ or ‘Vancouver Olympics’ when ‘Vancouver’ pulls up a list of relevant news, image and video results in Google?
Cashing in on such a general term is not so easy, however in saying that there were a host of well-established news and tourism sites that dominated the top 10 on page one of Google during the Vancouver Olympics 2010. One of these sites, tourist information site Vancouver.com, saw 15,000 to 21,000 unique visitors per day a healthy increase from their previous 3,000 unique visitors per day, according to Alexa.com.
So what does this mean for the businesses looking to capitalize on upcoming global events? Although it’s too late to invest in search engine optimization for the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, there is still hope for the London Summer Olympics 2012 and the Sochi Winter Olympics 2014.
‘London’ when Googled returns us with 643 million webpage results, for this reason it may be futile to aim for the first page of Google for ‘London’. It may be a wise investment for businesses who are looking for tourist trade, to spend some time and money optimizing for keywords like ‘Covent Garden,’ ‘Leicester Square’ or even ‘Buckingham Palace’ and ‘Tower of London’.
For businesses in Sochi, there is a higher chance to get to the first page of Google using the general term ‘Sochi’ with a Google result of 3.1 million webpage results. However, this in no way means that businesses in Sochi can relax and figure out their search engine marketing for later. For international events, the internet is the first place foreign visitors go to for information about venues, hotels, restaurants and so on.
As there isn’t a one size fits all strategy, it is of high importance for businesses to pay attention to their search engine marketing well in advance in order to capitalize on their target market and direct traffic towards their site. This exercise can take time, requires a committed effort, strategy and investment towards building an online presence.
