The Reflection Business Development Team
December 10, 2015
This post was originally published on August 14, 2013.
In the summer of 2013, the Perfect Search team was struck by curiosity--curiosity over what online products and services people searched for in their day-to-day life. Check out our data and infographic below.
Discover what online products your 2013 self might have been searching for below. Maybe you were really into Daft Punk's "Get Lucky" and you wanted to stream it. Perhaps you wanted to buy movie tickets to Iron Man 3, Fast & Furious 6, or The Hangover Part 3. (Man, 2013 was a year of sequels.) Read on to find out the most-searched online products and services on Google as of July 2013.
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Think of how many online products and services have been created in the last 10 to 15 years. Not only is the Internet an incredible medium to market products, it also allows hundreds of thousands of businesses to create new online products and services.
As an online marketing company, we work with businesses who deal with services like plumbing and pet retail. However, we also work with businesses who offer online products and services. It's important to note the difference between businesses that offer an offline product or service that you can learn more about or even purchase online and businesses that offer an exclusively online product or service.
With the rise of online products and services, our research team became interested in finding out which ones people are the most interested in. Are there any trends in the kinds of online products and services that people search for most? Our curiosity got the best of us--so we decided to find out once and for all.
How We Performed Our Research
Step 1: Keyword research. We began with keyword research, or, the process of generating a list of real search terms that people enter in search engines. We used SEMrush to search for "online" keyword phrases. With this tool, we can view search volume, the number of results, and the cost per click for each keyword phrase. This generated data on 656,533 keyword phrases that include “online.”
Instead of going through every one of these phrases, we analyzed a statistically significant portion of the data. Our team used 600 of the most-searched keyword phrases (out of the 656,533) to use as our data set.
The Two Key Metrics for Our Keyword Research
–Average Search Volume. The average search volume of each keyword phrase is the monthly average number of Google searches for that keyword phrase over the past 12 months. This metric is important because the number of searches for a keyword phrase directly relates to the interest in an online product or service.
–Number of Keywords Per Category. The number of keywords per category signifies how many different search queries fall into a given category. This metric is important because the number of different queries per category suggests how many different products or services people are searching for. A high number of keywords per category implies vast interest in that category of products or services.
Note: Keywords phrases may contain duplicate terms. For example, “Wells Fargo Login “ and “Wells Fargo Bank” are counted as two separate keywords. However, they suggest interest in the same branded service.
Analysis
After careful analysis of the 600 keyword phrases in our data set, average search volume and the numbers of keywords per category, we determined that the most popular online products and services fell into 7 different categories:
- Entertainment
- Banks
- Tools
- Shopping
- Education
- News
- Other
Using color-coded lists, we analyzed and identified each keyword’s category. Through this process, we recorded the search volume of each keyword as it was placed into a category. Then, our star designer Anna created the infographic below. Check out the most searched online products and services in July 2013 below.
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What online products and services do you typically search for? Do you think these trends have changed since 2013? Tweet us @Perfect_Search or email us at [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you!