Following from a blog post from my colleague from across the pond, Robin Goad, I looked at where consumers went in the final weeks of the election when searching for election coverage. The analysis reveals that news and media websites are missing opportunities to attract readers through generic, non-branded search traffic. Search engines account for more than one fifth of traffic to News and Media websites, but the vast majority of this traffic is from branded search queries such as “cnn” or “ny times”.
The highest volume search terms used to find news and information about the election were searches for the candidates (by name) and searches for poll data. After conducting these searches, most people continued to a politics website, rather than a News and Media website.
For the analysis, I created a Hitwise Search Term Portfolio of queries that included variations of searches for the candidates’ names. 10.59% of these searches sent a visit to a News and Media website. But remove Google News and Yahoo! News and that number drops to 1.49%. After the candidate Web sites, Wikipedia, Google News, websites devoted to dispelling urban myths and Biography.com were the top destinations. You would expect the candidate websites to top the list, but I expected to see more news websites in the downstream websites.

The top search terms relating to political polls (such as “presidential polls”, “election polls” and “polls”) sent more visits to Politics websites than to News and Media websites. Politics sites offering aggregated polling results were the top destination for these queries.
News and media organizations are missing an opportunity to attract “free” or organic search engine traffic by optimizing articles to appear in search results. Using the words consumers type into search engines in titles of articles and content of pages are factors that affect search engine optimization. A quick look at leading news and media websites shows words such as “President Map”, “Voter Surveys” and “Interactive Map” to headline sections displaying poll results, rather than “presidential poll” or “election polls” – the words consumers use to find this information.
News and media websites are being hard hit by the economic downturn as advertising budgets are cut. Opportunities abound to better optimize stories and sections to increase “free” search engine traffic.
For an update on the most visited news and media sites on election day, visit this post from earlier today.