Google Knows All Our Secrets

Google searches are revealing. To creative agencies, to everyone. They’re the questions you are too embarrassed to ask your friends… or anyone. Maybe even the doctor. They’re the words you type in the middle of the night, shielding your phone from wandering eyes. They are the last thing that you want anyone else to know you are searching, and they are SEM (search engine marketing) and SEO (search engine optimization) gold for advertising agencies in Austin.

Looking at the list of the top 100 keywords from 2017 you can see everything from the year’s top trends to more evergreen annual events like college football. There you can see the music pirates looking for how to change “youtube to mp3” (#7) and online “youtube converters” (#42). You can see the school kids looking to bypass their school’s firewall with a hopeful search for “unblocked games” (#16). You can see the rise in drug abuse by the common search for “pill identifier” (#26), where a list of photographs and matching pill IDs can be casually browsed.

There are the more innocent (or obnoxious, depending on who you are) searches for “love quotes” (#22), “inspirational quotes” (#76) and “happy birthday” (#39) as well. You can see frugal Millennials searching for “cheap tickets” (#35) and hoping to score big by winning the lottery. The most popular lotteries being the “ny lottery” (#27) and “nj lottery” (#29), meaning that New York is an oddly gambling prone state. Or just super expensive and full of more people desperate to not be broke than your average state.

Looking at these seemingly simple terms can really paint a picture of what is trending in different areas and what people are thinking about. This information is real, and more valuable than any survey out there, which can be heavily biased based on how the recipient would like to portray themselves. Whether you are marketing in Austin or advertising somewhere else around the world, paying attention to search terms is invaluable for advertising agencies.