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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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What comfort food recipes tell us about UK search behaviour

October 28, 2008

Last week Heather Hopkins pointed out that food sites are weathering the financial storm in the US. We like to encourage (internal!) plagiarism at Hitwise, so in that spirit I decided to carry out some similar analysis of the UK market. The chart below illustrates traffic to our three Food and Beverage sub-categories over the last 12 months and, as in the US, the Lifestyle and Reference sub category has grown over this the period. Elsewhere traffic to the Brands and Manufactures category is petty flat, but the Restaurants and Catering category is increasing.

The growth in traffic to restaurant websites may seem counter intuitive given the economic downturn, and this is something that we analyze in another post. Here I wanted to focus on the largest Food sub-category, Lifestyle and Reference, which includes a combination of TV-related pages (e.g. BBC Food, Channel 4 Food, UKTV Food), celebrity chef homepages (e.g. Delia Online, Jamie Oliver), and independent sites.

The majority of content on these sites is recipe related, and searches for recipes are a big traffic driver. Consequently, I expected the growth of Food and Beverage - Lifestyle and Reference sites to have gone hand in hand with an increase in recipe searches. I was therefore surprised by the following chart, which illustrates the breadth of searches – i.e. the percentage of search terms that containing a keyword – for both ‘recipe’ and ‘recipes’ over the last couple of years.

As you can see, the breadth of recipe searches decreased between 2006 and 2007. While the number of searches has begun to increase again this year, search growth has still been slower than traffic to the Food and Beverage - Lifestyle and Reference category. The reason for this discrepancy seems to lie in the way that UK Internet users are changing their search habits. Here is a list of the top 20 non-branded search terms (i.e. excluding all terms containing brands, plus the names of TV shows and celebrity chefs) sending traffic to the category over the last 12 weeks (note the skew in favour of credit crunch-defying comfort foods and winter warmers):

1. recipes
2. apple crumble
3. green tomato chutney
4. cocktails
5. cake recipes
6. toad in the hole
7. soup recipes
8. fish pie
9. pumpkin soup
10. bread and butter pudding
11. apple crumble recipe
12. butternut squash soup
13. carrot cake recipe
14. leek and potato soup
15. cheesecake recipe
16. apple chutney
17. yorkshire pudding
18. pancake recipe
19. tomato soup
20. beef stew

Of these 20, only 6 contain either ‘recipe’ or ‘recipes’ – and one of those is the generic term ‘recipes’. It seems as if UK Internet users are searching for recipes online, but they feel confident the search engine will return the right results even if they don’t include ‘recipe’ or ‘recipes’ in the search string. This is nicely illustrated by searches for variations on the popular seasonal term ‘apple crumble’ below.

Follow Hitwise UK on Twitter and keep an eye out for a follow post on restaurant searches next week.

Tweet Posted by Robin Goad at 03:00 PM | (6) | (0)
In Categories Food | Search

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