Are you ready for Selection Sunday? As a college basketball fan, this is undoubtedly the most electrifying time of the year. To honor this momentous day, we’re updating our popular March Madness post from last year with some SEO insights from the 2023 tournament and discussing how experts believe this year’s tournament will be even bigger.
March Madness is Big Money and Big Interest
In 2023 alone, an estimated $15.5 billion was wagered on March Madness in the United States, a fivefold increase from the 2022 tournament. With more states legalizing sports betting since then (38 and counting!), those numbers are likely to be surpassed in 2024.
This doesn’t even take into account the regular season. Division 1 men’s and women’s basketball have over 350 teams each. While it is hard to discern the exact number of total games each season, there are at least 5,000 (normally more) games in the men’s league. As the popularity of women’s sports continues to surge, companies need to be covering NCAA women’s college basketball, too. We can assume about the same number of games for D1 women’s basketball, as there are approximately the same number of teams. This means there are around 10,000 games to cover each season!
In addition to the $15+ billion March Madness betting handle from last year’s tournament, ad inventory sold out. This trend is expected to continue this year. There is also massive online interest in the tournament. According to Google Trends, online searches for both the men’s and women’s NCAA tournaments have been steadily increasing over the past 90 days, leading up to Selection Sunday.
Source: Google TrendsMarch Madness Keywords are a Goldmine
The image below only accounts for a handful of search terms driving people to 2023 NCAA Tournament content. This is just the tip of the iceberg, but you can see that March Madness-related queries drive millions of online searches. Keep in mind that the monthly search volume is averaged over 12 months, meaning that most of that traffic comes in less than a one-month period between March and April. You multiply those totals by 12, and it is a lot of traffic in a short amount of time.
Source: SEMrushWhy does this matter? Whether it is driving new traffic to a website, increasing fantasy pool signups, attracting new first-time depositors, or conducting OTT subscription trials, March Madness is big business and critical to any company that covers sports on its website.
When the time comes to plan, editorial teams and online content marketers must ask themselves, “What am I doing to capitalize on this huge, yearly event?”
With 68 teams, many more hopefuls, and additional smaller tournaments, there is generally some level of investment (financially or emotionally) in all corners of the country and beyond. What makes it even more unique is the universal level of interest in the entire tournament, not just local and hometown teams.
The problem is that there is so much to cover. With a staggering number of regular season and conference tournament games, plus another 67 March Madness games, it might feel like there is no way to cover everything. It takes a lot of time and resources to try and cover fascinating feature stories, classic rivalries, heartwarming underdog stories, exciting Cinderella picks, game previews, game recaps, betting previews, and more. This is where Data Skrive can help. Don’t take it from us; check out how we’ve helped our customers drive traffic and coverage during this valuable time of year.
Data Skrive 2022-2023 College Basketball Success Stories
Customer A
This website is relatively small, with less than 70,000 indexed pages and a SEMrush Domain Authority score of 48. Most of the site covers a major metropolitan area’s professional sports teams. We added national sports coverage to a subsection of their website.
Between Selection Sunday (March 12, 2023) and the day after the tournament ended (April 4, 2023), Data Skrive-generated March Madness men’s game preview articles drove ~201k organic clicks (according to Google Search Console), accounting for ~22% of the total traffic to their site over that time.
This is a lot of fan engagement in one short tournament. However, it is essential to remember that while covering March Madness is important, the competition for regular season games is much less. Everyone tends to cover the North Carolina vs. Duke championship game, but not everyone covers the Alcorn State vs. Belmont game. And while the search volume for the latter game is much less, the obtainable piece of the search volume pie is much larger. Imagine driving qualified traffic for all 10,000 college basketball games throughout a season.
Customer B
Customer B is a major media company with a large number of local news websites. Most sites have over 100,000 pages indexed on Google, with varying degrees of domain authority. The sites mainly cover local sports at all levels. Aside from the local teams in the tournament, March Madness was an afterthought.
Data Skrive began working with this customer in February 2023, which was more than enough time to get college basketball content up and running. Between Selection Sunday (March 12, 2023) and the day after the tournament ended (April 3, 2023), Data Skrive was able to generate more than 1,900 men’s and women’s March Madness-related articles across the customer’s websites, which drove nearly a half million page views (498,466).
We know how important it is to prepare for the next NCAA basketball season and March Madness. We can help you attract fans and generate revenue through engaging content tailored to your local audience. This includes game previews, betting previews, prop bets, futures predictions, team stats, player stats, and more. Sports never stop. We’ve got you covered.
About Data Skrive
Data Skrive is revolutionizing how the world’s leading sports, media, and betting brands drive fan engagement through online content. With our nationwide Fan Engagement Network, sponsors can directly interact with sports fans through captivating, relevant, and SEO-friendly content that fosters loyalty, encourages repeat visits, and improves engagement. For more information, email us at info@dataskrive.com. For press inquiries, email press@dataskrive.com.
