How MTV’s Voyeuristic Freak Shows Again Drive Traffic to MyNewPlace

December 30th, 2009 by Matt DiChiara| Posted in Celebrity Apartments | No Comments »

This morning we noticed that according to Google Webmaster, the phrase “jersy shore” had made our top ten keyword list for the day. It took about 5 seconds on Google’s search to determine that yet again, an MTV reality show is driving interest in rental properties based on the location of the stars of the show.

Dedicated readers may remember that last year, MTV’s west coast version of Jersey Shore, a reality show called “The Hills”, drove a large amount of traffic to our listing where the stars of that show resided. We were actually able to conduct some surprisingly in depth research on that keyword, our conclusions included the viewership of that show 1) watched television and surfed the internet simultaneously and 2) watched the season’s premiere and finale live, but recorded the rest of the season’s shows.

Also of note is that the keyword phrase “jersy shore,” though misspelled, nevertheless drove an anomalously high amount of traffic. Now, one may proffer the believable hypothesis that a majority of the viewership never made the podium at the Spelling Bee, but generally misspellings on popular terms generate a lot of traffic regardless of the demographic. (Just try and bid on www.cnnn.com)

So how is this MyNewPlace page that is driving all the traffic? First, let’s take a look at the off-site factors. First of all, overall searches for “jersey shore” and all related keywords skyrocketed when MTV’s show became popular. Secondly, the search results page (SRP) for “jersy shore” is much less competitive than the SRP for “jersey shore.”

The first 5 results on Google for the latter, correctly spelled term (jersey shore) are:

1. MTV.com’s Series Landing Page
2. NyDailyNews’ somewhat dated article on the upcoming show
3. ‘Jersey Shore’ Wikipedia page
4. Google News results for Jersey Shore
5. Google Image Results for Jersey Shore

For the misspelling in question (jersy shore):

1. Same as above
2. AboutNewJersey.com Vacation Guide
3. Visitnjshore.com Vacation Guide
4. Video Results for Jersy Shore
5. Njshoreirishfestival.com Irish Festival Guide

From the misspelling SRP page, it seems that Google is less sure of exactly what the searcher is looking for displays more a wide and shallow, buffet style SRP, whereas the correct spelling elicits more of a “Google’s feeling Lucky” SRP that shows a much more narrow and deeper top 5 results.

From here, we can turn to the page’s on-site factors; the biggest was that the submitted property name was “Live Close to Jersy Shore Beaches,” which placed the popular keyword phrase (jersy shore) in the page’s URL, title tag, meta-description and H1 (largest headline on the page), thereby focusing the 4 most important SEO on-site factors right on the misspelling of the searched term.

So before the show became popular, although our Jersy Shore apartment page was probably ranking above the fold (top 5) in Google’s “jersy shore” SRP, it wasn’t until the term experienced an unrelated traffic increase due to popular culture that SEO traffic really increased, despite being bumped down in the rankings.

Thus, our advice to Property Managers: if your property is the Michael Jackson Apartment Complex, get a little SEO traffic by throwing in a misspelling into your online apartment listing.