Seasonal relevancy of search results
Some search queries enjoy seasonal spikes, for instance those related to holidays or recurring events like film festivals or sport tournaments. Searchers could be interested in information about those topics at any time of the year, but statistically there is a visible increase in search volume when the event is getting nearer.
During Thanksgiving, searches related to Thanksgiving will increase and in the US, Americans will look for information on how to cook turkey and celebrate the holiday enjoying a delicious meal.
Google Trends shows a clear spike in searches about “thanksgiving” and “turkey” in USA, while in Italy for instance, since we don’t cook turkey that day and don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, only searches about the American holiday will increase.
We can expect that Americans will be interested in “turkey recipes” and “turkey cooking times” more than Turkey as a country, maps and travel information during Thanksgiving.
The majority of search queries (the long tail) are phrases longer than two words, and 20-25% of the queries are new for the search engines, they have never been entered before. Nevertheless, seasonal spikes are easily predictable, and especially Bing users rely on short one-two word phrases when searching. This could happen because many Bing searches are performed by typing directly in the browser search box, that is considerably smaller in size compared to those on Bing.com and Google.com homepages.
Normally users will type more words to refine a search, especially when the first results don’t seem to comply with user’s intent.
From a search engine point of view, trends in searches have to be considered in order to satisfy users’ intent and show relevant results. If we were to search for “turkey” last week, we could expect an increased presence of “turkey recipes” results instead of “turkey maps” in Bing, or Thanksgiving related queries in suggested searches and related searches in Google.
What happens instead is that rankings in SERPs aren’t subject to seasonal relevancy, and even the suggested refinements of the query don’t always seem to depend on trends in searches.
Side by side comparison of Google and Bing results
Both search engines (settings localized on United States) show results about the country and the bird, with Wikipedia pages and useful resources (including maps) for travel and tourism.
Google is showing two results about recipes (the 4th and the 5th).
Google strives to offer variety in the SERP and seems to rely more on data about related refined searches (search queries that are entered after the first, unsuccessful generic query), but related searches are shown at the bottom of the page.
Bing isn’t showing the same variety of Thanksgiving related searches: There are no pages about turkey recipes in the SERP. It’s hard to determine whether this is intentional, but sponsored results’ relevancy (especially those about cooking) benefits from it.
Specific results about Turkey (map, tourism, travel, etc.) are shown below the main results, but none of them is related to cooking and Thanksgiving.
0
Loading ...