Super Bowl Keywords Score Big in Google

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Bacon wrapped tater tots

Cookie dough dip

Chipotle guacamole

Brown sugar smokies

Hot pizza dip

Slow cooker pulled pork

What is the one day of the year when all of this can be on the same table?  Super Bowl Sunday!

The Super Bowl drives people to do Google searches. Recipes drive people to do Super Bowl searches. When you put the two together, you have an endless list of potential keywords searched.

What do people search for around the Super Bowl? We did a little digging and found that some of the most searched Super Bowl keywords, in respective order, are about: score, game time, winners, commercials, halftime, tickets, odds, food, city, MVP, and rings. If you want to know a score, you don’t look a newspaper, you Google it. If you want to know kick off time you don’t look at a TV guide, you Google it! If you want a tasty new recipe with the Super Bowl minimum 1,000-calorie requirement, you don’t look in a cookbook, you Google it!

Let’s put some numbers to this. In the United States, on Google, the keyword “Super Bowl” was searched more than 7 million times last February. “Super Bowl commercials” was searched for more than 670,000 times. Finally, “Super Bowl food” was searched for almost 370,000 times last February.

Let’s keep in mind that 370,000 searches in a month were for one keyword phrase: Super Bowl food. What about Super Bowl recipes, Super Bowl snacks, Super Bowl appetizers, Super Bowl dips, desserts, nachos, drinks, where does it end? When you add up all the Super Bowl food-related keywords, we are talking about well over a million Google searches alone in the month of February.

Google auto-complete is usually good for a laugh. Ever noticed that when you start typing something into the Google search bar, it will make suggestions on how you should finish your search? Those suggestions are based off of highly searched phrases by Google users. This gives a glimpse into the rest of the world, and sometimes it is helpful, or funny, or frightening. When I typed in Super Bowl recipes with, Google finished my sentence with “bacon”. In fact, the top 3 suggestions were all meat. Bacon is going to be big this year.

There is another food theme popular this time of year: healthy recipes! ‘Tis the season for New Year’s resolutions. From December to January, the keyword healthy recipes goes up almost 124% in searches. You would think with everyone on a health kick, this might roll into Super Bowl planning. Not the case. Healthy Super Bowl recipes was searched just more than 5,000 times last February. This is thousands less than most of the top Super Bowl food related keywords. For example, Super Bowl dips was searched more than 22,000 times last February.

Many times, really large recipe sites dominate for keywords such as Super Bowl food. For example, foodnetwork.com and delish.com are some of the top sites raking in traffic for that keyword. Although these sites are wonderful, many people search with vague terms like Super Bowl food, find these large sites, pull ideas, and then refine their searches.

Longer phrases, such as Super Bowl recipes for the slow cooker, Super Bowl recipes in 10 minutes, or Super Bowl recipes for Reese’s lovers, may not get searched as often, but definitely reach an audience further down the purchasing funnel that are looking for exactly what they want! Brands finding their magic list of keywords to use in their strategy will help them spend less but reach their audience at the right time.

Every day, brands need to find the perfect keywords. It is about so much more than what is searched the most. What specifics are they looking for? What keywords have too much competition to have a chance at a good ROI?

How does your audience search?

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