Halloween Search Marketing

If you are like me, you love to study keywords and search behavior. Ok, I am not so self-absorbed to assume you are like me, but please understand knowing how people search is what I love to do.

Anyway, I was poking around in the keyword planner and Google trends, something I sometimes do for fun, and I found some interesting points relating to Halloween search terms.

Finding 1. Searchers for Halloween terms are predominantly in the United States with Canada and Guam following.

Seeing the geographic areas of searchers certainly assists the potential content owner in determining the regions to advertise. Viewing geographic data also provides clues to help understand the culture in each region and when other search terms might be popular or desirable. Finding 2: Search demand for Halloween costume and party terms are declining.

What this graph is telling us in terms of overall trending is interesting. Even more fascinating would be to overlay search trending for these keywords from Facebook, Pinterest, eBay and Amazon. The likely results would show keywords searches increasing for several of these other sites as users move away from organic search to channel and branded searches. What this means is that growth for a presence (paid or organic) on Facebook, Amazon or even Pinterest could mean the difference between company sales growth or stagnation but this is the subject of another blog post.

Finding 3: Top search terms from Halloween and generic costumes move to specific costume types.

What we see in this data is the value of the specific costume is probably higher due to the fact the searcher for the specific costume is a likely buyer. This user interest and intent shows up in the high level of “paid” competition for these keywords.

And look at the search results page for “wonder woman costume”. Google has effectively pushed the first organic result to just above the fold. Search terms with a high level of paid search bidding get more of the page dedicated to ads. On this specific page there are 9 organic listings and 19 paid listings.

These are just a few ways to view search term popularity and user intent. To potentially rank higher, select more specific or long-tail terms with much less search demand. This approach will mean far less traffic. However, if you have great content, you can get more desirable targeted traffic more quickly. Do you have plans to create Halloween Search Marketing content?