Today I was exploring some keyword ideas related to Halloween costumes. In past years, this had been an interesting but competitive niche to go after if you were an affiliate marketer or provided marketing services to retailers.
Halloween searches explode starting in September and into October, for obvious reasons. In the past, most people search “halloween costumes,” “adult halloween costumes,” “halloween costumes for women”, etc. in order to find something specific. This would result in a typical SERP display with Google shopping ads, regular ads, a map pack if there happens to be a local retailer, and organic results.
This year however I noticed an interesting feature, which I am nicknaming “semantic drill down” – where you can start with a high level query such as “halloween costumes” and Google will actually suggest categorized searches.
For example, let’s search “halloween costumes.”
If you scroll to the bottom, Google will actually show you a few buttons that you can click to help refine your search, in a sort of categorical manner. Here is the first – “refine by age group:”
If you click one of these, say “Adult,” this process continues. Funny, they completely whiffed on generating a men’s picture in this example!
Once you select a gender, such as “Women’s,” it actually keeps going!
I selected “Superhero” but it did not suggest any further categories from there.
This is very interesting to see, and it also appears in mobile search. Could this be a product of Rank Brain? Is this a new developing “semantic web” advancement that might appear more and more as time goes on for a number of different topics in which the original query could be made more specific via a common suggested search? Only time will tell…
Contact me if you have some interest in local search optimization for Halloween.