The Power Of Holidays Over Search

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

St. Patrick’s Day is the perfect illustration of what a good holiday can do for people’s search habits, let alone their withering souls. With a 940% increase in the search for green (fill in the blank), that means March is full of leprechaunic investigations and one-color rainbows.

You should expect these kinds of increases and spikes in searches at all of the search engines for every holiday, whether the holiday is a local one like the Japanese Iwakuni Festival or a global one like Kwanzaa. The search engines always see a spike in certain search prior to these days.

The question is, how can marketers capitalize on that data? First, you’ve got to be a couple of weeks ahead of the crowd. If you are just preparing for St. Patrick’s Day then you are too late. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still get in on the search action, but your best bet at this juncture is to target important holiday-related keywords with through pay per click and search engine marketing campaigns.
But what do you do?

In other words, how do you research those holiday-related keyword trends?

The best way to prepare for a holiday is to look at the search trends for the two or three years. Look to see if there are any general trends across the spectrum of several years. Then look to see if there are any specific trends for single years. You’ll likely want to rule those out. For instance, Christmas will often see a surge of interest in specific toys that die after the holiday due to a strong marketplace interest at the moment. What you want to do is look for the mainstays and target those in your search engine marketing. Then you’ll want to look at current year trends to see if any of those might affect the present holiday. If so, you have your search engine optimization and marketing opportunities laid out before you. Now it’s just a matter of capitalizing on the holiday opportunity.