With the Royal Wedding just nine days away, online searches have been turning very Wills and Kate centric in the UK. Of all the searches conducted by UK Internet users which contained the word ‘wedding’ over the last four weeks, 18.95% of them also contained the word ‘royal’.

Using our Individual Keywords tool you can see the top keywords contained within a search phrase, in this case ‘wedding’. Apart from the introduction of the search term ‘royal’ this year you can see that most of the key terms have remained the same as people search for dresses, shoes, cakes and venues.

The word ‘cake’ appeared in 2.56% of all searches for ‘wedding’ in the last four weeks. Looking at the top variations for wedding cakes the three biggest search terms were ‘wedding cake’, ‘wedding cake toppers’ and ‘royal wedding cake’. The Royal Wedding has had quite a pronounced effect on searches for wedding cakes, which usually spike in May and June, but this year have shown significant traffic spikes in February and March.

Not only has the Royal Wedding inspired increased searches for wedding cakes, visits to online alcohol retailers are also up by 7% in the last four weeks. Perhaps unsurprisingly Champagne has been particularly popular, with the premium Champagne brands Bollinger, Moet and Dom Perignon all showing significant year-on-year increases in search clicks. Searches for ‘bollinger champagne’ have more than doubled for example since April 2010.

Whilst well-wishers for the happy couple might be tempted to buy a bottle of Champagne as a wedding gift, William and Kate have asked that all gifts be donated to The Prince William and Catherine Middleton Charity Gift Fund. In the last week visits to the gift fund website have increased by 200%, making it the 24th most popular website in our Community – Humanitarian category, and the fastest moving charity website.

It was also announced this week that the Royal Wedding will be streamed on YouTube for people to watch online. There is clearly huge demand for this from UK Internet users as in the week ending 16 April 2011 3% of all searches for ‘royal wedding’ went to YouTube. This may be in anticipation of videos of the happy couple, or it could be due to the excellent viral video posted by T-Mobile, which I’ve included below for your viewing pleasure.

If you want to see how the Royal Wedding is affecting online search behaviour outside of the UK I thoroughly recommend Heather’s blog which has some great insight.
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