As January draws to a close many of us will be facing the reality that we simply weren’t made to stick to resolutions. What started as a zealous passion to get fit, drink less or simply leave the office on time inevitably dwindles to half-hearted promises to “do better next year”. With this in mind, I thought it would be a good idea to look at the trends for one of the top January resolutions – giving up smoking.

As with my blog on dieting, searches for smoking cessation are very seasonal and always peak around the first week of January. You can see that this year searches for all terms to do with giving up smoking peaked on the week ending 8 January 2011. Since Christmas Day, searches related to smoking cessation have increased by 377%.

Interestingly, searches this year are 14% down on last year’s peak for the week ending 9 January 2010, but this year’s figures are still a good 30% ahead of searches conducted in January 2008 and 2009.
In smoking search behaviour there are two main keywords related to cessation which are ‘stop’ and ‘quit’. Overall, the top three smoking cessation keywords for the 4 weeks ending 22 January were ‘quit smoking’, ‘stop smoking’ and ‘giving up smoking’ in that order. However, despite ‘quit smoking’ being the most popular search term overall, 37% of all search clicks for smoking cessation terms included the word ‘stop’ whereas 29% contained the word ‘quit’. What this shows is that long-tail search volume for ‘stop’ was greater than for ‘quit’.

For online marketing picking the right keyword is essential not only to generate volumes of traffic to your website but also to generate the right kinds of traffic. Using our Search Term Sequence tool reveals some fascinating differences between people who search for ‘quit smoking’ and those that search for ‘stop smoking’.
Looking at the top searches conducted immediately after a search for ‘quit smoking’ you can see that many of the terms have little to no relevance to giving up smoking. People might arguably be searching for ‘britney spears’ because of her multiple attempts to quit, but searches for ‘bedroom furniture’ and ‘uk snow warning’ have no relation to stopping smoking.

Compare this to the Search Sequence for the term ‘stop smoking’ and the results are very different.

Searches before immediately after searches for ‘stop smoking’ are all on topic, including the number one search term ‘champix’ a smoking cessation product. For marketers looking to target smokers who want to quit, ‘stop smoking’ is a much more refined search term, leading to more relevant follow up searches.
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