I did a bit of keyword research on Christmas-related searches just to see if I could glean any particular trends for these types of searches.
Christmas Eve Search Behavior
On Christmas Eve, the top Christmas searches were for the Norad Santa Tracker tool to track Santa’s progress on Christmas Eve. These searches imply family search activity as kids and their parents follow Kris Kringle’s gift deposits.
Additional family activity type searches include queries for Christmas carol lyrics and popular holiday entertainment such as "It’s A Wonderful Life," and searches for Donna Reed and Jimmy Stewart.
Cooking-related searches are also very popular, so grocery stores and other recipe providers would do well to optimize their sites for these queries.
Other types of searches include queries for store hours for those last-second shoppers–demonstrating the importance of including your store hours on your web site and within your local online listings.
Christmas Day Search Behavior
Christmas Day searches, not surprisingly, are heavily populated with post-Christmas sale-related searches as well as store-, and especially restaurant-hours searches.
Cooking-related searches are also popular.
Christmas Day searches also give an early glimpse into the gifts that were popular. This year Zune and iTunes searches were popular, as were Guitar Hero 3 and Rock Band searches.
Christmas Searches Start Early, Real Early
When looking a historical search trends for Christmas-related queries, the one thing that stands out is that people appear to start thinking about and, presumably, then, researching Christmas gifts as early as August. That’s when Christmas-related searches begin to spike upward.
This behavior is quite consistent from year to year, as this Google Trends chart of Christmas-related searches from 2004 to 2007 demonstrates:
This can be seen most clearly looking at at single year, as the following Google Trends charts shows:
And as the following Christmas searches chart from KeywordDiscovery.com confirms:
There is an obvious opportunity for online retailers in particular to engage customers long before the Christmas season even begins by examining and optimizing search campaigns targeted at these summer searches.
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