Internet Marketing Blog

Christmas Season Search Engine Use

I did a bit of keyword research on Christmas-related searches just to see if I could glean any particular trends for these types of searches.

Christmas Eve Search Behavior

On Christmas Eve, the top Christmas searches were for the Norad Santa Tracker tool to track Santa's progress on Christmas Eve. These searches imply family search activity as kids and their parents follow Kris Kringle's gift deposits.

Additional family activity type searches include queries for Christmas carol lyrics and popular holiday entertainment such as "It's A Wonderful Life," and searches for Donna Reed and Jimmy Stewart.

Cooking-related searches are also very popular, so grocery stores and other recipe providers would do well to optimize their sites for these queries.

Other types of searches include queries for store hours for those last-second shoppers--demonstrating the importance of including your store hours on your web site and within your local online listings.

Christmas Day Search Behavior

Christmas Day searches, not surprisingly, are heavily populated with post-Christmas sale-related searches as well as store-, and especially restaurant-hours searches.

Cooking-related searches are also popular.

Christmas Day searches also give an early glimpse into the gifts that were popular. This year Zune and iTunes searches were popular, as were Guitar Hero 3 and Rock Band searches.

Christmas Searches Start Early, Real Early

When looking a historical search trends for Christmas-related queries, the one thing that stands out is that people appear to start thinking about and, presumably, then, researching Christmas gifts as early as August. That's when Christmas-related searches begin to spike upward.

This behavior is quite consistent from year to year, as this Google Trends chart of Christmas-related searches from 2004 to 2007 demonstrates:

This can be seen most clearly looking at at single year, as the following Google Trends charts shows:

And as the following Christmas searches chart from KeywordDiscovery.com confirms:

There is an obvious opportunity for online retailers in particular to engage customers long before the Christmas season even begins by examining and optimizing search campaigns targeted at these summer searches.

Black Friday Search Queries

I posted a piece yesterday examining people's Thanksgiving-related search behavior so I figure today is an appropriate time to examine people's Black Friday search behavior.

As you can see from the Google Trends chart below, a day after the 100 most popular searches are dominated by Thanksgiving-related queries, Black Friday is all about shopping; and about shopping for specific products in particular. Six of the top ten search queries are for specific products. Two of the top ten searches are for sales or coupons and only two queries are unrelated to shopping:

The obvious search engine marketing conclusion here, is that online store owners should do their keyword research and ensure that their individual product pages are search optimized and traditional retailers should ensure their sites are optimized for such words as "deals," "coupons," "sales," "shipping," "directions," etc.

Thanksgiving Day Searches

People perform Thanksgiving-related searches near that holiday, so we see predictable spikes in query volume for such searches.

Thanks to the magic of Google Trends, this is the search volume for the top Thanksgiving-related searches since 2004 (click on the graphic to get a larger size):

This is how the search volume grew for those same search terms within the past 30 days:

And this screenshot shows the 100 most popular search terms today:

Independence Day Searches By Minnesotans

It's no surprise that July 4th-related keyword searches spike heavily during the days before and after today's holiday and flatten out the rest of the year, but it is of some interest the exact searches people use to find that information. The following Google Trends chart tracks the search phrases "4th of july," "fourth of july," "july 4th," "july fourth," and "independence day" by Minneostans from 2004 to 2006.

If you visit this chart at Google Trends, though, you can dig deeper into this unremarkable data, you can see  which specific search terms were favored by Minneapolitans, Saint Paulites, Saint Cloudonians, Rochesterers, and Duluthiacs.

Residents of Saint Cloud, for instance, apparently do not like to use the search phrases "fourth of july" and "july fourth," while Duluth residents only prefer using numerals in their searches, using almost exclusively "4th of july" and "july 4th." Go figure.

Mildly interesting but irrelevant, huh? Maybe. But if you own a fireworks store in Duluth, this is important to know if you're doing any search engine marketing at all.

So there's my Independence Day Internet marketing information for you.

Happy July 4th (as a Saint Paulite, that's my preferred search phrase):