There is an outstanding audience development opportunity that’s being overlooked by many broadcast television companies. The official websites of various television programs haven’t kept pace with the rest of digital media.

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Outranked

Broadcast network sites like CBS.Com, NBC.com, and ABC.go.com have been losing Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP) ranking to popular websites like Wikipedia, TV show Wikia sites, and IMDb.

This is according to a study by RankAbove, a company that provides Search Engine Optimization (SEO) recommendations to clients. RankAbove used its search software to determine the top 50 keywords for the most popular programs on television and the overall SERP rank for those keyword searches.

Keywords analyzed included television program names, episode names, and the names of the show’s cast and characters. All of these keywords were weighted based on search volume. RankAbove then collected the top 100 ranked sites for each keyword and used its software to determine how often a site appears and where it appears relative to other sites in the search results.

As it turns out, people who use one of the search engines to search for information about a show usually end up on sites like Wikipedia, Wikia, or IMDb. However, sometimes people land on fan sites as well. These sites offer little to no advertising.

Social media show-specific sites also have excellent SERP rankings. Those sites tend to be fan created as well, though.

An Open Opportunity

Why is this information significant to broadcast companies? Because advertising on these smaller blogs and creating promotional content viewable by people who follow social media fan sites is an opportunity for effective promotion.

For example, the hit TV show “The Voice” recently advertised on the CountryWeekly website. That website doesn’t receive as much traffic from music enthusiasts as other sites like Rolling Stone or MTV.com. Still, the marketing folks at “The Voice” found that advertising on CountryWeekly gave them a way to target a smaller audience at a lower cost.

The bottom line is this: There is an open opportunity for broadcast companies to promote televisions programs online. Lesser known websites and even fan generated sites can be used to generate more publicity.