Chelsea may have won the Premier League title by a country mile, but they trail in 4th place in a study of Premier League football club’s search performance on mobile phones carried out by search and content optimisation firm, Searchmetrics.
The company analysed data on the search and social visibility of the top 10 UK Premier League football club web sites during w/c 25 May 2015.

Searchmetrics tracks the paid and organic search ranking of millions of keywords every week. It calculates the desktop and mobile SEO visibility scores based on several relevant parameters. These include the number of times a domain appears in the search engine results pages (SERPs) across the keyword set within desktop and mobile searches; its prominence within those SERPs (a higher ranking equates to a higher visibility score); the competitiveness of the keyword (higher search volumes equate to a higher visibility score); and the SERP click-through-rates (CTRs).

The mobile visibility score is an estimate based on national search performance (in reality Google presents localised search results on mobile devices that reflect the location of individual devices).The search volume and CTRs for mobile searches are different to desktop searches, however the Mobile Visibility score calculation uses the same search volumes and CTR as desktop searches in order to enable comparison.

While the visibility scores can relate to a websites real traffic, it is important to remember that traffic can come from many different places online. Therefore the visibility scores are only indicators of traffic that comes from a websites organic search channel.
The data for the study was taken from the global social media database which Searchmetrics operates to power its online software tools. This is a regularly updated store of data points related to web sites and their visibility on social networks.

Arsenal topped the Mobile Search Visibility table with an index score of 47,776, followed by Liverpool in second on 44,333 and Man United in third on 39,286. The remaining places in the top 10 were taken, in descending order, by Chelsea, Spurs, Man City, Crystal Palace, Stoke, Southampton and Swansea.

Searchmetrics carried out the same study for Desktop and Social Visibility. The top five clubs on desktop, in descending order, were Liverpool, Arsenal, Man United, Chelsea and Spurs. In the social table, the top five were Chelsea, Man United, Arsenal, Man City and Liverpool.

“Premier League football clubs face increasing competition to attract fans to their official sites, rather than seeing them visit broadcasters, newspapers or other online destinations,” said Searchmetrics CTO, Marcus Tober. “Having a higher search visibility means people are more likely to click on their sites, giving clubs the chance to engage with them, sell merchandise, tickets and hospitality.

“Our analysis shows that many clubs are successfully optimising their sites in order to be found in searches, but success on the football pitch doesn’t necessarily translate into high online or social visibility. Indeed, teams such as Liverpool top the league for visibility, despite underperforming on the pitch this season, while champions Chelsea can only finish fourth.”