Content Case Study

A case study evaluating the content of a particular web site.

Boston Red Sox Fan Page

For this example I won't be referring to a specific web site but to a group of web sites I have seen - web sites about about a person's favorite sports team. For this case I will pick the Boston Red Sox. I've seen plenty of these exact sites on the web that have a few static pages about the team but thats it. So here we have a situation where the webmaster clearly hasn't realized the benefit of great content. I am going to illustrate some steps these webmasters could take to elevate the quality of their sites.

Add more static content - specialized content

By adding specialized content I mean put up more specific pages within each topic. On most of these sports team fan sites there is one page about the team but instead of stopping there, the webmaster should put up a page about EACH player on the team. This added content does two things. First, the wider variety of subject matter will make it more likely visitors will find the site useful because they get more information. And, secondly, it increases the probability the visitor will come back because it is possible that no other page has such specific information or possibly because the visitor didn't finish reading it and will come back to it later to finish. In other words, there has been an increase in both the quantity and quality of the traffic.

Not only does this added content improve the experience of the user but it helps the users get to the site in the first place. This is because the pages about the individual players' are more specific than the team page so they will be more likely to show up in Google searches. When it comes to SEO, the more general the subject matter then the more competitive those keywords will be when it comes to trying to get your content high up in searches. No matter what you read about search engines and SEO, you will have almost no chance of getting a good ranking on a search term as popular as "Boston Red Sox". But the search term "Time Wakefield" (a pitcher for the Red Sox) would be much less competitive. Look at the comparison of the 2 search terms when run through the Search terms suggestion tool. There are 85 times as many people looking for "Boston Red sox" as there are for "Time Wakefield". The probability of you getting a good search engine ranking for the phrase "Tim wakefield" is much higher than on "Boston Red Sox". This means that most of the time you will actually get more traffic from less-popular searches. Sometimes it is better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond.

For more ideas on specialized content, there could be profiles about some of the past Red Sox players. You could pick recent players from the past 10 years who got traded to other teams or players from a long time ago like Ted Williams. I think you could probably pick about 50 more players. You could put up a page on the Red Sox minor league team (the Pawtucket Red Sox) and different Red Sox prospects like SoxProspects.com does. You can put up a page about Fenway Park and it's history. You can put up a page showing the schedule of games for the year. You could put up a Salaries page showing the salaries for each Red Sox player, the top salaries of all baseball players, and how the team salary ranks compared to other teams. You could put up a page on book reviews of different books and DVDs about the Red Sox and another page showing what team merchandise you can buy .

Add more static content - generalized content

Now lets take it to the next level and think of even more ideas for more content. This time we are going to add content that is still closely related to the main subject matter but will be looking at information that is more broad instead of more specialized. To do this we will add content about baseball in general or about other teams. You could put up new categories like a list of all the players in the Hall of Fame, famous baseball quotes, reviews of baseball movies like "Fever Pitch" or "The Natural". You could extend previous categories like an overall baseball history, schedules of games for all teams, or profiles of players on other teams. This opens the door to literally thousands of more pages that you could put up. but keep in mind that these pages would take a lot of time to crete but the content would not be as effective because the subject matter is getting more and more away from the Red Sox. If it were my page I might put up some general baseball pages but not get too specific because you don't want to - and couldn't - become a baseball almanac.

Add updated content

For updated content you could update the schedule and write in scores of the games that are over. You could even put in a 1-paragraph summary of each game if you wanted to get more in depth. Another great idea would be updated statistics for each player for the season to date. Another good thing would be to write articles and commentaries, like overthemonster.com or survivinggrady.com does, on different team issues like your opinions on different trades or a player thats in a slump (that could be 10-20 more pages). If you don't want to write your own articles you could link to other articles. It would be best to link to sites like The Boston Globe Red Sox page because you don't want to link to competitors sites that are better than yours because they might leave and not come back. Another thing is that you could add in statistical analysis of all the players, like RedSoxStats.com did. For example, you can do things like find out which players are the best bargains by taking how much they are getting paid and that their RBIs. Another possibility is signing up at the Topix.net Red Sox page to have Red Sox news updated on your pages. This may cost money though.

Add interactive content

In this case, the first obvious idea that comes to mind is to add a forum about the Red Sox like SonsOfSamHorn.com did. Another idea would be polls asking visitors who their favorite player is, whether they will win the World Series, etc. If you can get your hands on a quiz script you could put up quizzes about Red Sox trivia, which is especially useful in this case because sports history is very factual and sports fans like trivia. Another good example is adding commenting ability to static pages like the profiles of the different players so visitors can leave their opinions on each player.

Add some revenue sources

Since you at least want to try to make money you should add some items that will make you some money. The biggest thing you could do would be to add some Google Adsense for keywords like "Boston Red Sox". Other specific things you could do are: on each page with a profile of a player you could put up an affiliate link to their baseball cards selling on Ebay, you put up affiliate links on each player page to sites like FinishLine.com or MLB.com that sell the each players' uniform. You could put up affiliate links to sites that sell memorabilia and autographs and stuff. You could put up affiliate links to ticket sellers - if they have affiliate programs. If not then you could just put in a link to Ticketmaster on the schedule page as a courtesy. You could also add Amazon affiliate links to different books and DVDs about the Red Sox and baseball in general.

Conclusion

So just by doing some quick brainstorming we took a site that was basically 1 page and generated enough ideas to expand it up to well over 100 pages. By adding these pages you will hope that some of them will end up in Google searches and bring you free, highly-targeted traffic. The increased traffic brought about by expanding the content will also increase the ranking of the pages - so the increase the traffic/SEO relationship become a self-reinforcing process.

Taking a look at the web there some site, like fenwaynation.com, that look like sites hosted on a free server that are not serious web sites. Redsoxdiehard.com does a pretty good job with static content (especially the individual players pages) but has no updated or interactive content so there is no reason for visitors to come back. And it's design is also really bad. Redsoxconnection.com also has some great individual static content but also not much dynamic or interactive content. Some of these sites that could use the ideas we illustrated to take their site to the next level.