On the web, athletes are still leaving money and influence on the table

With often Googled names, they’re letting other people capture the internet traffic

Photo by Chris Briggs on Unsplash

I first wrote about this ten years ago and it’s still true today.

Google your favorite athlete and see what comes up. Chances are the first few results are for stats and bios on the big sports sites — ESPN.com, Yahoo! Sports, Baseball Reference — or for Wikipedia pages. Sometimes the top results are recent headlines about the athlete.

But, what you don’t see a lot of in the top results are personal websites for these athletes — their own pages, where they can grab the web traffic and control the content. Some sports figures have them, but many do not.

Instead, other websites are collecting the clicks, followers and dollars because they show up in the top Google results instead of a page owned by the athlete. Someone else is cashing in on their name when it comes to web traffic.

Musicians have provided a model to follow

Athletes need to look to musicians on what to do here. Search for the name of your favorite band or artist and you’ll likely find their website is among the very top results, not just sites like Rolling Stone, TMZ and Wikipedia.