Online marketing and SEO company Inside Online recently released their Online Dating Sector Report.
The 20-page document highlights a number of factors that defined the industry in 2014, and provides solutions for companies to improve their SEO for 2015.
Their Seasonal Trends graph shows the UK weekly search volume for the term “Online Dating,” and compares the results over the last two years.
In 2013, the search term hit its peak popularity between Week 26 and 26 (June 17-June 30), whereas in 2014, the term was most popular between Week 8 and 9 (February 17-March 2), and Week 30 (July 21-27).
This data could prove to be useful for future online dating advertising campaigns or special offers.
Plenty of Fish came out top in the brand searches per month, notching 1,830,000, a considerable amount higher than Zoosk in second with 368,000 and Match.com with 301,000.
Zoosk came out top in terms of social media strength, bolstered by their huge number of Facebook likes and Google+ followers.
The top 5 social media influencers, according to Inside Online, were Zoosk, eHarmony, Plenty of Fish, Uniform Dating, and Sugar Daddie.
As Inside Online said: “We’re seeing a shift from basic “how many likes does a page have” towards engagement with the user. Active pages that promote great content and engagement have higher performance metrics than those who build pages purely with the motivation of having a well liked page.”
Another interesting section of the report shows each domain’s visibility from February 2013-2014.
The sites with the most positive search differences included Encounters Dating (96% increase), Free Date (64% increase), OKCupid (29% increase) and Zoosk (16% increase).
Inside Online also did analysis to identify keywords deemed “low hanging fruit” within the industry: “keywords which have substantial search volume, but with limited competition in the search results.”
Their Short Term Potential section also shows the number of unique keywords that each website has ranking, on page 2 or 3 of Google.
This is one way for a company to measure their site’s short-term potential, like ineffective keywords that they may not want to use in the future.
Other topics covered in the report include Keyword Competitiveness, Number of Keywords, Short Term Potential, Rate of Link Acquisition, Authority of Linking Domains, and Underperforming Sites.
Check out the full report here.