It’s madness to predict a giant tourney outcome based on the numbers, right? Well, here at Searchmetrics, we’re all a little mad about March Madness. The betting pools have been filled, the brackets carefully (and not so carefully) chosen – and all that’s left now is the play. I partnered with our in-house data analyst, Burak Eker, to have a little fun and pick our winner based on the numbers of the SEO world.
Everyone knows winning depends a lot on preparation, players’ standout performances in a game – and just a little luck. In our competition, teams win only if they did their homework in the world of search engine optimization.
We started by checking the athletics web page of each university. All have unique domains, and many even have domains dedicated to their sports teams. For instance, the University of Miami has http://hurricanesports.com/ , while you can find out much of what you need to know about the teams at San Diego State University by visiting http://www.goaztecs.com/.
For each round, we pitted the teams against metrics we measure in the Searchmetrics Suite, eliminating laggards in each “play” until we had an ultimate winner. Our methodology started by looking at desktop Visibility, and then mobile Visibility ( as a percentage compared to desktop) in the second round. In each successive round, we looked at the number of total keywords each team ranks for, then the team’s total search volume, total traffic index and finally, overall SEO value in dollars. The results are most assuredly more scientific than the way most people fill out their brackets, but are we spot on? Read on to see how your team fared, and who wins the SEO cup in the NCAA.
The Winner Is..
