What the Public Calls Radio, Online
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There are many things that come into play when trying to make an internet radio station successful. Building an audience, selling avails, analyzing metrics for programming improvement and advertising sales, graphics, widgets, song selection... the list of minutiae goes on.
One of these minute details is wrapped around how a station gathers its online audience. We're not just considering pure-play stations here, but also the thousands of terrestrial radio stations that stream. Everyone is fighting for the same audience.
We've mentioned the importance of a high rank on search engines many times. One topic that's not been discussed much, though, is how to target the keywords that will do the most good. What is it that audience members search for when they want to hear an online station? Maybe this demonstration will help show what heavy thought needs to be given when/if your station makes a play to reach one of those coveted top-ten positions on Google, Yahoo! or Bing.
This gets a little complicated because a lot depends on the audience you are chasing. Radio industry mindset is to pursue a US-only audience. Pure-plays tend to reach out to the world.
The following two graphs represent Google searches conducted for the keywords internet radio, online radio, radio online, radio stations, and internet radio stations. They represent a "relative" analysis of keyword search volume for each. Google does not give hard numbers.
From the audience perspective, radio is radio whether it's online or over-the-air. What is different for audience members depends on where individuals live, and how one refers to radio while trying to find an internet station to listen to. According to Google Trends, it appears that the term "radio online" is a runaway leader in search. ("Online radio" is considered a juxtaposed term, and it is automatically searched under the same query as "radio online.")
A quick conclusion is that in attempting to list high at search engines, a rock station might try for the keyword "rock radio online" or "online rock radio."
Look at the remaining keyword selections. If you are targeting a U.S. audience, your next choice would be to shoot for "rock radio stations," based on what term the U.S. audience uses to identify your station. Globally, it's a tossup between "internet radio" and "radio stations."
How important is the use of search engines to help gather audience? Current radio industry practice is to rely only on over-the-air mentions of a radio station's URL. Here are a few facts from Audio Graphics' RadioRow.com that may sway you to chase search also. In the last thirty days, with slighly less than a quarter-million page views:
- 81.9% of users came directly from search engine queries
- 69.8% of these were "new visitors"
Breaking this down farther, to show how precise geo-targeting is and how you may use it to define your audience...
- 48.7% came from the U.S.
- 5.2% came from California
- 0.79% came from Los Angeles
- 0.61% came from San Francisco
The top-two search terms sending traffic to RadioRow are "internet radio stations" and "radio stations." The latter, if you add a prefix of the format you wish to reach (i.e: hip hop radio stations or country radio stations) adds considerably to the flow of RadioRow visitors.
What the audience calls radio is very important in how you approach gathering an internet radio audience through search. And, if you study these next charts it becomes evident that the audience continues to seek more of the radio industry online. Each chart shows a very steady audience increase through the years - a minute detail, but one that confirms internet radio growth is not slowing down.
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