Scottish Power was the first of the major utility companies to raise its average gas and electricity bills last week in response to the increasing costs of wholesale gas price. Other providers are likely to follow suit, which in turn is likely to send consumers searching online for new deals to get the cheapest energy bills online.

Visits to the Scottish Power websites doubled between 6 June and 8 June 2011 and in tandem visits also spiked to other gas and electricity providers and to the energy price comparison sites.

UK Internet visits to rival energy providers increased by 19.35% between 6 June and 8 June 2011, whilst the energy price comparison sites like uSwitch saw a more dramatic spike of 230% increase in visits.
What’s interesting is that after the dust had settled and the flurry of activity going to energy providers and price comparison sites had subsided, there was a spike in visits to websites specialising in smart meters. On 9 June (the day after the spikes for the energy providers) visits to smart meter specialists increased by 15%, and this group of websites was also up by 111% since the previous week. Not only are consumers looking to find the cheapest deals on their utility bills, they are also clearly interested in researching online for items like smart meters which can help to reduce expenditure on energy bills.
Scottish Power’s average gas bills are reportedly set to increase by 20% and electricity bills are set to increase by 10%. With the focus very much on gas bills, it’s not surprising that searches for all terms relating to gas prices increased by 130% between the week ending 4 June and the week ending 11 June, whereas searches for electricity prices were up by 60%.

Looking at the downstream websites that received traffic for all terms relating to gas prices during that week of growth, the sites which saw the greatest growth week-on-week were price comparison sites energyhelpline.com and uSwitch.com along with sites like Which? and Which? Switch.

Consumers were clearly shopping around already for better gas prices, but what’s interesting here is the diversity of websites that were receiving traffic, from price comparison sites, to information based content driven sites, news sites and energy providers – Internet users are consuming information on energy prices from a huge variety of sources. In this increasingly competitive market, this highlights the importance of optimising a website with relevant content in order to receive more traffic from top search terms.
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