If you take a look at the graph of Google Trends for a search on the word “Portugal” you’ll see that there are peaks every couple of years.
Portugal in Google Trends
The peaks just pop in the middle of the year… what is this all about? Well Obviously it is the Soccer championships that Portugal participates in. Euro 2004, World Cup 2006, Euro 2008 and World Cup 2010 in South Africa.
One can also see that in the past year Portugal has been known also for the economic crisis, and the possible European Bailout, but the volume isn’t has strong as soccer. Obviously Portugal doesn’t want to be noticed because of negatives things, and rather prefers positive ones, but what other things can we put on the international agenda to make Portugal noticed?
There’s another interesting aspect in the graph that is the end of year decline. Do you in the picture that every year in the last months of the year the volume of search about “Portugal” diminishes? Is this because Portugal is known for being a summer holiday country with good beaches and great hospitality? Why don’t we attract search during October, November and December? Consistently we see the searches go down every year. Is this a global phenomena of online search or is it just national?
I investigated this and curiously Spain, our neighbor has the same (maybe even more pronounced) behavior:
Google Trends Spain
But the problem is that France seems to not have the same tendency, but if you think about it… Paris in November is probably PERFECT.
Google Trends France
My explanation about the behavior of these graphs is purely speculative. I don’t really know what’s going on in the global search panorama to tell you that we are seeing this or that. Take it as a curiosity to think about during the next few days and if you have a theory please leave a comment below.