If you’re in marketing or business, you know all about “keeping your finger on the pulse”. Mostly because you’ve heard it time and time again from digital agencies that can’t stop talking about fingering that pulse.
It’s all about staying up-to-date with what your audience cares about, and one way we do that is by getting to grips with clever tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and the ever-free, ever-handy Google Trends.
So for a bit of fun (and because there’s not much to do in the UK’s third national lockdown), I decided to do some digging to see what got the UK talking in 2020. Most may come as no surprise, but it’s cool to see a snapshot of the year in search.
I wrote a similar piece for my client Roomi, on the definitions people in the US searched for the most. There are some golden nuggets that seeped into our vocab that year.
Here’s a hint:
Top searches in 2020
It should come as no surprise that “coronavirus” tops the list for most searched terms in 2020. Some further research finds that the term hit peak popularity in mid-March and then interest quickly levels out throughout the rest of the year. On average, the keyword “coronavirus” was searched an average of 925, 021 times per month.
What we wanted to learn in 2020
The year we got more self-sufficient. Well, tried to anyway. Never before have so many millennials rushed to the kitchen to bake their own bread - and apparently make their own beauty treatments and hand sanitiser. We were cutting our own hair, self-isolating, trying to get healthier to ward off the virus. And...cooking more eel (??).
Okay, I had to find out more about the cooking eel thing. Turns out we only really cared about it in mid-November. It seemed to follow an episode of I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here where contestants were faced with the task of cooking the delicacy.
The celebrities that got our attention
We all got slightly obsessed with Joe Exotic, with an average of 4,107 searches for his name per month, which was obviously highly skewed around March and April. It was a true “phase” of the pandemic and it kept us occupied - and in disbelief - for a short time. We saw a number of brands use light-hearted pop culture references in their marketing, and many, many Tiger King mentions, to latch onto what was significant and try to give their customers a laugh. Something we all needed in 2020.
Other celebrity names made it into Google’s Year in Search 2020 because they either shocked us, burst onto the scene, left the royal family, or contracted coronavirus.
We stayed home & had the...essentials delivered to our doors
Afternoon tea delivery turned out to be the most searched in this category in 2020. How very British of us. Wine delivery came in above essentials like milk, and fruit and veg, with an average of 2243 searches each month. Interest in wine to our doorsteps was highest in March, but did continue throughout the year.
It’s nice to see online users embracing their green thumbs in 2020, too. With nowhere else to go, we decided to get our gardens looking fresh. Then probably gave up and drank wine instead, but the intention was there.
We were always asking “when?”
For the first time in our generation, we collectively felt like our fate was no longer in our own hands. Visiting family or going to the gym became illegal, and we were generally confused about what Boris was and wasn’t allowing us to do.
It’s a pretty sobering end to the blog, because these questions are stark reminders of the suffering so many people went through. When will lockdown end? When will schools reopen? When does furlough end? Basically, when do we get our freedom, education and financial security back?
It seems that, for now, the end is not in sight. But I’d just like to say (like those 200 mailing lists you’ve subscribed to, ever) that we’re in it together!
