With the start of a new academic year in September parents and children have been searching online to get ready for going back to school.

Back to school searches are up 17% year-on-year (August 2011-2012) in the UK with the top generic search terms being ‘back to school stationary’, ‘back to school hairstyles’ and ‘back to school clothes’. One of the trends that we have seen this year is the increasing number of visits going to social media sites for back to school searches. 13% of searches for ‘back to school hairstyles’ for example went to YouTube, as girls looked for video demos of how to style their hair ready for the new school term.

One of the key back to school items for parents to search for every year is school uniform. In the last week school uniform searches have increased by 16%. Looking at the top websites receiving traffic from school uniform searches you can see that the big department stores and supermarkets dominate the rankings, particularly M&S, Tesco and ASDA.

Two things to note from this chart. Firstly, M&S has improved its performance from last year to become the top recipient of traffic for school uniform searches. Last year George at ASDA and Tesco were the clear market leaders online for back to school products but this year M&S leads the pack.

Secondly, www.yourschooluniform.com stands out as the only retailer within the top 10 websites to receive virtually all of its traffic from organic clicks. All of the other retailers in the top 10 have paid for a significant proportion of their traffic through PPC but yourschooluniform.com has managed to receive more traffic than Bhs, John Lewis and Debenhams all through strong search engine optimisation.

This time of year is also a good benchmark to see what is trending with kids before we get into the run up for Christmas. The most popular searches for lunch boxes for example reveal that Batman, Angry Birds, Moshi Monsters and One Direction are all highly sort after right now.

Football teams are clearly also able to jump on the bandwagon of lunch box merchandising. What’s interesting here is that Barcelona was the top football-related lunch box being searched for in the last four weeks, more so than any English team. Given that this is UK data you would expect that some of the big English teams would have been higher on the list although Liverpool was ranked eighth in the lunch box search list.

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