Last month I had the pleasure of speaking at the Digital Editors Network forum, an event organized by Francois Nel from the Journalism Leaders Program at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN). One of the topics that came up during the session was the importance of local Internet usage and search data. And not just for local media companies either, but also classifieds sites (jobs, property, motors, etc.) and retailers – essentially any website or business that takes the time to localize their products, services, content or marketing.
Fortunately, at Hitwise we have been developing our reporting capabilities in order to provide more localized online data. Our current product provides online usage information on a regional basis (for example by UK region – such as North West or South East – and state in the US), but we now have the capability in the UK to drill down to postcode area (i.e. the letters in the first half of the postcode, such as SE for South East London, or G for Glasgow). This enables us to see how Internet usage, including search, varies across the 124 different postcode areas in the UK.
As an example, we carried out some analysis of UK Internet usage in Liverpool / Merseyside (all postcodes starting with L) during March. Looking at the online categories visited by our sample, we could see that general Internet patterns in Mersyside were similar to UK population as a whole – Entertainment was the most popular category, followed by search engines and social networks – but that differences did appear. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the popularity of the local football teams, people from Merseyside were 32% more likely to visits Sports sites, for example.

The top 1,000 websites in Merseyside accounted for just under two thirds of all visits in the area during March. Of the traffic to the top 1,000 sites, 3.2% of visits went to what we defined as ‘local’ sites (see the table below for the top 20). The most popular categories of local sites were Education (which accounted for 28.8% of all Merseyside visits to local sites), Sport (27.4%) and News and Media (14.6%).

A couple of things jumped out at me from the table above. The first is that the Liverpool FC homepage received 44% more visits from Merseyside than the Everton FC homepage. However, the latter over-indexes more on Merseyside – implying that Everton’s support is much more ‘localized’ than their rivals. The same is true of the fan sites, with Red and White Kop just beating ToffeeWeb.
The other interesting thing wass the Liveerppol Echo’s position. It was the fourth most visited newspaper websites in Merseyside during March, whereas on a national level is ranked 83rd. Only the Daily Mail, Guardian and Times received more visits from Merseyside. ‘liverpool echo’ was also the most popular local search term on Merseyside, ranking 23rd overall. Second and third positions went to ‘liverpool’ (43rd) and ‘everton’ (52nd).
Of the top 1,000 search terms in Merseyside during March, 83 were local. These accounted for 5.5% search volume, greater than the 3.2% of traffic that went to local sites. A good proportion of people searching for local content (e.g. ‘jobs merseyside’, ‘sefton council’, ‘liverpool one odeon’ – all of which appeared in the top 1,000 Merseyside search terms during March) are ending up on national rather than local sites. To me, this implies that there is a great opportunity for local content providers in the UK to close this gap by gaining a better understanding of their audience – something they can now do with our new local data.
Follow Hitwise UK on Twitter.