Opening Times – Is Your Site Open For SEO Business?

The Hitwise Intelligence blog is a great example of how a corporation can use proprietary info to attract customers.  I just saw this post by Robin Goad on the growing popularity of “opening times” searches, particularly around holidays, in the UK.

Last week the three fastest moving search terms for retailers were ‘tesco opening times’, ‘tesco opening hours’ and ‘asda opening times’; while ‘sainsburys opening times’ and ‘sainsburys store locator’ also featured in the top 10.

Robin has a lot of good data on this trend, but this was the most interesting point for me:

The generic ‘opening times’ related searches also represent missed opportunity for retailers and affiliates. Currently just 64.7% of ‘good Friday opening times’ searches are successful, meaning that a third of people searching for the term last week didn’t click on a link from the search engine results page (SERP). Further evidence of a content gap / SEO opportunity is provided by sites that did manage to pick up traffic from the generic terms. The top to recipient of traffic from ‘good Friday opening times’ searches last week was The AnswerBank, while Yahoo! Answers was top for the term ‘easter opening times’.

As Google starts to localize more generic searches, I wouldn’t be surprised to see these generic “opening times” searches start to surface local sites that target these terms.

There are a lot of search queries like “opening times” that are likely uncontested in your market(s).  Are you going after them?