I’ve been using Google Trends for many years to help demonstrate the examples of seasonal searches on the Google search engines.

It would make sense that there would be more searches for “Easter” around March/April time than at say September and the good thing is you can see these trends of searches in a graphical form. Take a look at this graph.

It depicts the peak in searches since 2004 right up to present day. You can see that the peaks are at almost exactly the same location each year.

So what’s the use in this Kev? Its obvious people would search for things related to Easter around Easter time!

This is true, but what if you weren’t focussing your business around Easter related products, but more like weight loss, or muscle building products? When would be the best time to pump all your hard earned money into Google Adwords to get the best results possible?

Let’s try it. Below is a graph of searches for “lose weight” in “All regions”.

Trend depicting "lose weight" searches

Each year depicts an almost identical trend. Look from September onwards – it’s almost always on the way down, right up until January of the following year.

This tells me that the couple of month’s coming up to Christmas there’s less searches being made for “lose weight” and this is probably because, for the majority of us, we are thinking “I’ll start exercising in the New Year”.

It’s not until we have our big Christmas feed that we start thinking “Wow, I’ve put on a bit over Christmas. I must start losing some weight”. And so January arrives and the searches begin. Shortly after January the search increases slow down considerably, and this is probably due to the fair-weather effect exercise has on so many of us!

Summer time seems to have some activity in searches for losing weight – people probably have time off, school holidays etc and so the searches pick up. But then, in comes September and the whole cycle begins again.

Now, if you were running Google Adwords campaigns, radio, newspaper or television campaigns, I would think the best time to spend your money, from looking at these trends, would be January. There seems to be more people looking to lose weight in January – so there’s more likelihood someone will pick up on your advert.