Yesterday everybody wasn’t talking about much else other than the royal wedding, even in the SEO/SEM context. So I thought I’d look at the SERPs for the “royal wedding” and see what interesting can an SEO learn from these.
First of all, you can imagine that with the amount of attention the even has received, and the amount of memorabilia sold, these would be pretty competitive SERPs. But even after a quick look, one could clearly see what a lost online opportunity this was for the vendors. Here is the comparison of the first pages of Google.com and Google.co.uk for the query “royal wedding”:
| # | google.co.uk | google.com |
| 1 | officialroyalwedding2011.org | news block |
| 2 | bbc.co.uk | officialroyalwedding2011.org |
| 3 | telegraph.co.uk | theroyalweddingwilliamkate.com |
| 4 | news block | royalwedding.aol.com |
| 5 | theroyalweddingwilliamkate.com | wikipedia.org |
| 6 | wikipedia.org | wikipedia.org |
| 7 | royalwedding.aol.com | telegraph.co.uk |
| 8 | guardian.co.uk | people.com |
| 9 | direct.gov.uk | royalwedding.yahoo.com |
| 10 | dailymail.co.uk | time.com |
| 11 | abcnews.go.com |
The SERPs are a librarian’s dream (and Google AdWords’s dream too, obviously). In both Googles, the official site is placed prominently, as one would expect. Wikipedia is also present, in case of Google.com both the old page and the new one it later got redirected to. The other results are the media covering the event, and the only commercial site in these SERPs is theroyalweddingwilliamkate.com.
The domain has been registered last year, right after the official engagement announcement. The company behind the site, Igniyte, said on their site:
Our team have been working hard on TheRoyalWeddingWilliamKate.com avid link building and on site SEO undertaking extensive research and with just a couple of weeks work behind this professional website we have already reached page one on Google for certain relevant key words.
Very impressive link building job indeed. The second and the third page of the SERPs have no other commercial sites either. Igniyte’s site’s backlinks feature all the range from directories to blogs. I must note, however, that they are not as social media savvy as the official royal wedding site, featuring a Twitter account, a Facebook page, Flickr photo album and the YouTube channel.
In the meantime, there’s no shortage of AdWords ads for merchandise vendors. So those vendors do run sites and do realize the value of online traffic. I wonder why they haven’t been more active in terms of SEO? 5 months is enough of a timeframe to be able to achieve decent positions should one wish to.