What a difference the weather can make, particularly after last year’s miserable summer! A week of sunshine has lifted the spirits of everyone in the UK, and also had an impact on their internet searching and shopping habits. As the graph below illustrates, searches for summer essentials – in this case BBQs and lawnmowers – shot up last week. In fact, searches for ‘bbq’ and ‘lawn mower’ have already reached a higher peak this year than at any point last summer

With these sudden surges in searches for particular terms, it’s always interesting to see who benefits. As you can see from the table below, for the terms ‘bbq’ and ‘lawn mower’ it has primarily been smaller niche and specialist sites that picked up traffic, particularly in the in the BBQ market. Traffic from searches for ‘bbq’ was consolidated into fewer hands, although that is primarily a result of aggressive paid search tactics. For example, www.justlawnmowers.co.uk paid for 28% of its traffic from the term ‘lawnmowers’ and 47% from ‘lawn mowers’; whereas Flaming Barbecues paid for 95% of its traffic from ‘bbq’ and 87% from ‘barbeque’.

Another interesting lesson from this surge is the importance of bidding or optimizing for all variations and spellings / misspellings of popular terms. The table below illustrates the top 10 terms currently sending traffic to Flaming Barbecues. As you can see, it is picking up traffic from a variety of terms, including; ‘bbq’, ‘gas bbq’, ‘barbeques’, ‘barbecues’, ‘barbeque’ and ‘bbqs’. And while much of this traffic is paid, Flaming Barbecues is also picking up significant organic traffic from most of these variations.