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This is the SEO Premier League Table; a blog series with the intent of uncovering which premier league club websites have the best approach to SEO, and those that have the worst! By examining each club website with a miniature SEO audit of sorts, we’re going to slowly work our way through every single club in the league. In Part 1, we took a look at the SEO capabilities of AFC Bournemouth (my hometown club), Arsenal FC, Aston Villa, and Brentford FC. In today’s Part 2, we’ll be examining Brighton Hove Albion, Burnley, Chelsea, and Crystal Palace.
The SEO metrics we'll be using
As in Part 1, we’ll establish the core metrics and key performance indicators that will be relevant for this mini SEO audit series. For each premier league club website that we’ll be examining, the following key performance metrics will be utilised:
Keyword performance (using UK data only)
Site Speed
EEAT Content analysis
General Page Structure analysis (Header Tags, Metadata)
Each football club will receive a mark out of ten across all four of these categories, and the team with the most points will top the table at the end of the blog series. The 3 lowest placed teams will face the ignominy of relegation; not to the Championship, but to the digital marketing scrapheap! This blog series is all in the name of fun; there would ordinarily be more complex issues highlighted in a regular SEO audit, but these mini audits should give a decent insight into these sites' general levels of performance. You can consult my SEO Services guide for more information on what would be included in a full SEO Audit. Now, on with the analysis.
Brighton & Hove Albion
Brighton & Hove Albion have undergone something of a renaissance in recent times, moving from relegation fodder, to apparently everyone’s second-favourite team. With brilliant on-field performances that are eclipsed only by a sparkling off-the-pitch strategy, do Brighton take a similar approach to their marketing and SEO?
Brighton's Keyword Performance
To start with, we’ll take a look at Brighton’s current level of keyword performance across a few of their most valuable, most relevant keywords. Brighton are a premier league club, which inherently means that their brand will have a strong domain authority score and organic presence. Brighton should rank very highly for most, if not all, of their exact match search terms. According to Ahrefs’ keyword ranking checker, the Brighton Hove Albion club website performs as follows for these keywords:
Keywords | Ranking |
brighton ha | 1 |
brighton ha news | 2 |
brighton ha shop | 1 |
brighton ha tickets | 1 |
brighton ha matches | 1 |
Brighton is performing well for all of these search terms (as you would expect), appearing in the top 2 positions for all five of these standard, most broad search terms - and appearing in the number 1 position for all but one of these terms. Brighton’s site makes use of two subdomains for ticketing and their online shop; these subdomains are what rank highest for the relevant keywords above.
Score: 9/10
Brighton's Site Speed
By using Google’s own PageSpeed Insights tool (which grades mobile and desktop speeds across a variety of KPIs), we can see that the Brighton website has a performance score of 68 on desktop, and 38 on mobile. This isn’t among the worst scores seen in this blog series so far, but it carries on the disappointing trend of football sites having very poor mobile site speeds, and subpar desktop site speeds. There is definite room for improvement here.
Score: 4/10
Brighton's EEAT Content
This was covered in my first blog in this series, but to recap, EEAT Content is simply how Google wants a website to approach its content. Google wants all its ranking content to exhibit Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust. To analyse a football club's approach to content, we should look at how much valuable, informative content is being produced by the website, and how often. As a club, Brighton produces a fairly large amount of content, all housed neatly in different hubs that are easy to navigate to from the homepage. Content ranges from detailed about-the-club guides, blogs and recent news hubs, and a variety of hosted video content.
Across all of Brighton’s written articles and content, there is an average word count of 640 words per page. A longer word count doesn’t necessarily equate to having EEAT content, but it is indicative of a level of effort being put into content. An average word count of 640 is pretty solid, and shows that they aren’t just writing simple write-ups of news. Another feature of EEAT Content is it being regularly updated and uploaded, and the site is consistently producing around three blog and news articles every single day. Overall, this combined with their multitude of other content offerings, gives the Brighton website a decent score for providing EEAT Content.
Score: 8/10
Brighton's Page Structure
For general page structure, we’re going to be analysing some of the more common issues that can crop up here; H1-H2-H3 header structure, and metadata. Regarding their header tag structure, 19% of their pages have missing H1s, and 61% of their pages have two H1s; both having a missing H1, and having multiple H1s on a page, are one of the worst things a site can do in terms of helping search crawlers like Google to better understand your website (and individual page) structure. The Brighton site also has H2s across their pages which are duplicates 94% of the time.
In terms of their optimisation of metadata, the Brighton site is pretty poor, with 221 of their meta titles not being of the appropriate character lengths, as well as 184 of them being duplicates. Regarding meta descriptions, 72% of their pages have missing descriptions, and 15% of them aren’t of the appropriate character lengths.
Overall, this is an exceptionally poor level of optimisation across some very basic (and easy to optimise) SEO metrics, and showcases a real lack of care on the Brighton site for some of the core basics of SEO. There is a lot of room for improvement here.
Score: 2/10
TOTAL: 23/40
Burnley FC
We move from one of the most fashionable clubs in the Premier Club, to one of the least fashionable. Well, we would have been, but Burnley have undergone a transformation of their own in recent years, becoming a stylish outfit under Vincent Kompany and leaving the bruising, Brexit football long behind. But are they also ahead of the curve when it comes to their SEO?
Burnley's Keyword Performance
We will first take a look at the current level of keyword performance across Burnley’s most important keywords, just as we did for Brighton. As one of the newly promoted sides, though still having a strong brand overall as a team with top flight heritage, could there be an expectation for Burnley to have slightly poorer keyboard rankings performance, when compared to other teams in the league? According to Ahrefs’ keyword ranking checker, the Burnley club website performs as follows for these keywords:
Keywords | Rankings |
burnley fc | 1 |
burnley fc news | 4 |
burnley fc shop | 2 |
burnley fc tickets | 1 |
burnley matches | 1 |
Burnley, as to be expected really, have strong keyword rankings for the most part, across these very basic terms. Somewhat surprisingly, they rank a little bit lower in comparison to other teams so far for burnley news as a term, ranking outside of the top 3 positions here. Football teams in the top two divisions come ready-made with a very strong brand, so to not be completely dominant across the board for these terms shows that there’s a little bit of room for improvement, in my opinion.
Score: 7/10
Burnley's Site Speed
By once again using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool (which as discussed, grades mobile and desktop page speeds across different KPIs), we can see that the Burnley FC website has a performance score of 69 on desktop, and 8 on mobile. That’s a very mediocre score for a desktop website, to be honest. And I said in my last article in this series, that Arsenal’s rank of 10 on mobile was the worst that I’d ever seen. Step forward Burnley football club, with a literal single digit score. Absolutely pathetic stuff! Could we see a sub 5 score in this series, potentially!? There is no reason whatsoever for a website with this kind of potential to have a technical performance score that low. That is, a new low.
Score: 1/10
Burnley's EEAT Content
Being a football club, with regularly updated news stories and pieces to publish, Burnley do a solid job at producing regular content for their fans. I quite like their News hub structure, which comes with a simple system of tags and archives that filter content and link together quite well. The same structure applies to their Clarets+ hub, which houses all of their video content that can be accessed via a signup. Nothing groundbreaking, but there’s a simple structure to everything that is quite refreshing to see; even if the content output is fairly limited and average.
Burnley’s site has an atrociously formatted XML sitemap, which made it way more time consuming than it was worth to try and figure out the average word counts across all of their many news articles. Their articles at a glance seem decently well-formatted, with a word count on the middling end of the spectrum; a pretty consistent pattern across all of these websites, really. How all of this content is presented to the user on the UX end, with the easy-to-follow system of tags, hubs and relevant articles, gives Burnley some brownie points for me.
Score: 9/10
Burnley's Page Structure
When looking at Burnley’s H1-H2-H3 header structure, we can see that all of their pages have the exact same H1 title tag - “Burnley FC”. and that 35% of their pages have two H1 tags instead of one, a really unnecessary own goal from an SEO perspective. Regarding meta titles and descriptions, 49% of their meta titles are duplicates, as well as 73% of their pages being of the wrong character lengths. In terms of meta descriptions, 18% are missing, and 33% are also of the wrong character lengths recommended for descriptions.
Overall, this is again another example of low-quality optimisation across these SEO and page structure metrics. The issues uncovered here would be very easy to fix, and could have a big impact on the performance of the website if actually given the time of day. I’m starting to wonder if any of these club websites will have an acceptable level of optimisation!
Score: 2/10
TOTAL: 19/40
Chelsea FC
Moving from a club that’s experienced a more positive, exciting transformation, we can now examine English football's newest basket case: Chelsea. Shedding the hefty weight of previous owner Roman Abramovich’s insidious ties to the Kremlin, Chelsea have taken the newer, funnier, and more embarrassing look of being hotshot American plonker Todd Boehly’s newest plaything. With seemingly no idea how English football works anymore, and some new lows on the pitch, have Chelsea managed to figure out how proper SEO works?
Chelsea's Keyword Performance
We will first take a look at the current level of keyword performance across Chelsea’s most important keywords, just as we did for the others. Despite recent form indicating otherwise, Chelsea stand out as being one of the most recognisable, influential, and widely supported clubs in all of Europe - with a brand and iconography to match. They should therefore be handily dominating all of their most relevant and broadly valuable keywords. According to Ahrefs’ keyword ranking checker, the Chelsea club website performs like so for these keywords:
Keywords | Ranking |
chelsea | 1 |
chelsea fc news | 4 |
chelsea fc shop | 2 |
chelsea fc tickets | 1 |
chelsea matches | 1 |
Chelsea’s keyword rankings performance, ironically enough, is an exact match of Burnley’s across the similar terms (a pattern that they won’t want repeating on the pitch for the second half of this season). Considering how strong of a brand Chelsea is globally, let alone nationally, they could definitely be performing better for the terms that are relevant to their content (news) and shop, so for me this is a bit of an underperformance to be quite honest.
Score: 7/10
Chelsea's Site Speed
Utilising Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool (as discussed, grading mobile and desktop page speeds across different KPIs), we can see that the Chelsea FC website has a performance score of 57 on desktop, and 33 on mobile. I’m starting to get the impression that the technical health and UX of football club websites isn't very high on the list of priorities. Pitifully, that score of 33 on mobile is something of a high watermark. It’s still shit, mind you, but it’s not embarrassingly so. But they still end up pairing it with one of the lower desktop scores of 57, which is not very good at all. Websites need to be aiming for at least a score of 80 in both, and while it’s definitely quite hard to get mobile site speeds up to this standard, it really shouldn’t be for businesses like football clubs.
Score: 2/10
Chelsea's EEAT Content
Chelsea, like most of these clubs to be quite honest, has a very solid output of regularly written and published blog and news articles, alongside an impressive library of videos (that each fall under different categories and cover different topics). I wouldn’t say that the content is structured all that brilliantly, with a system of tags and hubs that is slightly confusing, but Chelsea’s club website follows the familiar pattern of providing more than enough different types of content to be considered as fulfilling EEAT criteria.
As with Burnley’s site, Chelsea’s site is constructed in a way that doesn’t play nice with my web crawling tools, so analysing the mean word count of all of their content is more trouble than it’s worth. At a glance, their articles of content are on the lower end in terms of an average word count, with a reliance on imagery and videos to bulk out their content (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, actually). There’s a bit of a lack of a consistent, SEO-friendly structure to their content, with little to no usage of headers or things like schema, but all in all Chelsea have some pretty good examples of supplementary content on their website.
Score: 8/10
Chelsea's Page Structure
As already alluded to, Chelsea’s site doesn’t allow for my tools to crawl it, which means the bulk lists of data I usually work with are unavailable to me. What’s more, their XML sitemap is rancid and completely devoid of structure, meaning I can’t effectively upload a manual list of URLs into my tool to analyse either (which is incredibly irritating to say the least). To compensate, I’ve taken a few examples of core pages to see the state of their metadata and header tags.
From the nine pages that I chose to analyse, the Chelsea website has no H1s or H2s, 4 pages with missing meta descriptions, and 4 pages with meta titles of the wrong character lengths. At the very least, their meta titles seem to have a uniform structure to them (a rarity in the course of this series), but having no H1s anywhere it all is the final death knell in this section, finalising a predictably meagre attempt at optimising structurally for SEO.
Score: 2/10
TOTAL: 19/40
Crystal Palace
We finish on a pretty boring note with Crystal Palace; a team that might one day threaten to do something remotely noteworthy in the Premier League (though I wouldn’t count on it). One of a cohort of clubs based in the capital, Crystal Palace is technically enjoying one of their most successful stints in the club’s history, with over a decade in the top flight, and occasional flirts with relegation or top half success in tandem. With such a safe and secure foundation to sit on, does the Crystal Palace website stand on equally sturdy ground when it comes to SEO?
Crystal Palace's Keyword Performance
We will of course now look at the current level of keyword performance across Crystal Palace's most important keywords, just as we did for the other clubs. Being a more middling premier league team, Palace does still stand out as being a very recognisable name in the world of football, with continued “success” and stability in the top flight granted them a degree of reach and brand recognition. According to Ahrefs’ keyword ranking checker, the Crystal Palace club website performs as follows for these keywords:
Keyword | Ranking |
brentford | 1 |
brentford news | 5 |
brentford shop | 2 |
brentford tickets | 1 |
brentford matches | 1 |
The Crystal Palace website.has very solid rankings across the board when it comes to these generically valuable keywords; with not one placement outside of the top 3. Which as it should be, really, and something that should be expected as a bare minimum in my opinion when analysing a premier league club’s website for metrics such as these. They could be ranking a little higher for their own club shop as a term, but since this exists as its own subdomain anyway, it’s not bad going at all.
Score: 8/10
Crystal Palace's Site Speed
Utilising Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool (as discussed, grading mobile and desktop page speeds across different KPIs), we can see that the Crystal Palace website has a performance score of 56 on desktop, and 36 on mobile. We have a new high mobile score for site speed, reaching the dizzying heights of 36 (still absolutely, inescapably entrenched in the red), but a sign of hope perhaps that one of these sites might end up having a somewhat passable mobile site speed score. A score of 56 on desktop is quite terrible, however, and again this is something that is completely avoidable for brands of this size, with so many in-built SEO advantages to make use of.
Score: 2/10
Crystal Palace's EEAT Content
Crystal Palace offers up the standard collection of written blog and news articles, and exclusive video content - in line with the style of other football websites that have already been discussed at length. They do however have one of the better layouts and overarching structures to their content, from the sites we’ve reviewed so far. Both their blog content and video content hubs have clear layouts and tagging systems, while also featuring a number of internal links and CTAs across these overview pages and the blog articles themselves.
Across all of Crystal Palace’s written articles and content, there is an average word count of 675 words per page, which is indicative of a decent level of effort being put into their blogs and supplementary content. The Crystal Palace website is also producing at least one blog and news article every single day, on a pretty consistent basis, which helps to satisfy another aspect of EEAT content (producing regular content and refreshing the level of content on a website).
Score: 8/10
Crystal Palace's Page Structure
When looking at Crystal Palace’s H1-H2-H3 header structure, we can see that 14 of their pages have missing H1 title tags, while over 22% of their H1 titles are duplicates. Regarding meta titles and descriptions, 24% of their meta titles are duplicates, as well as 41% of their titles being of the wrong character lengths. In terms of meta descriptions, 50% are missing, and 33% are also of the wrong character lengths recommended for descriptions.
This is yet another example of a football club’s website having little to no care for SEO optimisation; relating to metadata and general page structure. With a modicum of effort, the Crystal Palace website could have had no missing meta titles, meta descriptions, or H1 title tags - which would already be a massive step up from the competition so far. Alas, they didn’t, and it isn’t.
Score: 2/10
TOTAL: 20/40
That concludes this second instalment of the SEO Premier League Table. Were there any surprises for you personally? Be sure to check back in for part 3 very soon, where we’ll be taking a look at the SEO performance of Everton, Fulham, Liverpool, and Luton Town. If you’ve been inspired by this article to take a gander at your own site’s technical and onsite SEO performance, then be sure to get in touch with me here, or have a look through my pricing and services guides; for a detailed insight into how I can improve your site’s SEO.
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