Number of people in the UK searching for natural and alternative health on Google drops 30% since 2004

It’s true, people aren’t searching on Google for natural and alternative medicine the way they were in 2004. But don’t panic – it’s not as bad as it looks! And I’ll tell you why.

First of all I though I’d introduce you Google Insights. It may well turn out to be your new best friend. This is an amazingly underutilised free tool provided by Google that shows you search trends over time and even forecasts on future search trends. Here’s a screengrab of the report I just pulled:

I didn’t use a keyword search term, I just used Google’s own industry category ‘Alternative & Natural Medicine’ and kept the time period at its default of ’2004-present’. Voila, the report was made.

So what can we glean from this report?

1. The top ten keywords for this industry vertical over the last 6 years are as follows:
(feel free to click on any of the keywords to be redirected to Insights where you’ll find a deeper analysis of that particular keyword’s search trend)

2. 30% fewer searches are performed today than were performed in 2004 for keywords related to alternative and natural medicine.

So why the drop? There are a number of possible reasons: people aren’t as interested in this type of healthcare as they used to be, the media has scared people off, people are healthier and don’t need treatment etc etc

But industry research actually shows the contrary: people are increasingly interested in alternative and natural medicine despite media assaults. Whatsmore the general wellbeing of the British public is slowly improving!

That leaves one alternative. Rather than focusing purely on what is going on offline, it’s also important to examine consumer behaviour online. Due to social networks, people are less and less reliant on Google to gather information these days. Thanks to social media, our friends filter much of the information we read. We share common interests with our peers and create networks around these interests. We now find out about special offers provided by therapists in our area via twitter. We know whose friends are acupuncturists because they join their fan pages. Today, thanks to Cocoon Health, you can even find out which therapists your loved ones recommend to you personally and who the industry as a whole recommends. In short, social media is the new gatekeeper of information today. Rather than Google providing us with a filter to sort out what is relevant to us, our networks filter everything for us instead.

So if you’re a therapist, I strongly urge you to start using free tools like Twitter and Cocoon Health. People are using Google less and less to find you, they’re now using social media.