Who needs mirrors to work out people’s heart’s desires anymore?

Now we have search data.

Today at work on a whim -and certainly not during billable hours- I typed “witches” into a couple of our keyword tracking tools. The returns were revealing in all cases and hilarious in more than a few.

I want to start with my favourite:

Am I related to witches?

What… Uhh… What answer were the 62 people last month who typed this in expecting to find?

“YeeEeeEEssSssS”

Other notables include:

• halloween witches brew sensory game
• what is the fear of witches called
• 4 elderly witches having tea
• how to make a witches cape out of fleece
• pattern for adult witches costume
• classic receipe for witches brew (note the misspelling.)
• witches and warlocks
• scary witches
• notable witches and wizards in history (gonna guess those 59 people are Harry Potter fans)
• what do witches use wands for (same again)
  

So a lot of search activity seems to be seasonal. But at least half of it is more on track:

• the witches alphabet
• witches jars
• witches woods
• witches runes
• yorkshire witches
• witches coven
• witches in china

Neat, huh?

After that it was a slippery slope into hilarity and childishness as we started looking up dirtier and dirtier words. (Did you ever do that with the giant dictionaries in the school library? It’s what we did before the internet/looking at porn in the labs at recess with ten of your closest friends.)

I have done a similar keyword look-up in the past using “spells” and you get the stuff you would expect: “do love spells work” and so on. But some of the results are a little more poignant. This makes sense when you think about it because:

1. People usually only turn to magic as a last resort.
2. You can ask search engines questions you can’t ask anyone else.

You get, from memory, things like “spells to turn a man into a woman”. And, a little bit more heartbreaking: “spell to turn a boy into a girl”. The kids typing that into a search engine are probably in for a rough adolescence.

So yeah… Keyword research. Way better than a magic mirror.