Leveraging the seasonality of BOTOX searches to promote your practice
Promoting BOTOX® year-round can make sense for a lot of practices and medspas, especially if your pricing is very competitive.
But there are a few times a year when Google searches for BOTOX® spike dramatically.
The biggest spike happens right around Thanksgiving, as people get ready to reunite with family for the holidays.
The second-biggest annual spike started in February, and may continue into March and April.
Historical Search Trends
The chart below shows historical weekly trends for BOTOX searches on Google, over the last 5 years.
The trend line spans a range of 0-100 and represents the popularity of a search term relative to the absolute peak popularity during the period.
If we look closely, we can see that the week of November 12-18, 2023 had a score of 100. It means that during the time period shown on this chart, this particular week had the highest volume of searches, relative to all the other week.
On the other hand, if we look at the week of March 29 – April 4, 2020 (the beginning of COVID-related shutdowns), we see that the score for BOTOX is only 22. This means that during this week the search volume for BOTOX was only 22% of what it was a the highest peak (November 12 – 18, 2023).
We’re in the First Month of a 3-month Volume Uptick for BOTOX Searches
If we look carefully at the trends over the last 5 years, we can see that there is a clear uptick in BOTOX searches the week before Thanksgiving.
Although the Thanksgiving stands out, it’s actually quite short: just a week. That’s one of the reasons why it is so noticeable.
There is a much longer seasonal uptick in BOTOX search volume that occurs in February through April. It lasts much longer; 10-14 weeks, and provides a great opportunity for practices offering neuromodulators.
Increased Demand Improves the Competitive Landscape
Because Google Ads is an auction system, it means you’re competing with other practices for clicks.
When search volume is seasonally low, the competition will be stronger, because you and your local competitors are competing for a piece of a smaller pie.
A seasonal uptick in search volume can be a good opportunity to promote your practice to more patients (especially if your competitors haven’t ramped up their budgets). There is simply more demand to go around.
Search Trends of Other Neuromodulators.
Dysport and Xeomin also have some seasonality, but of lower magnitude.
And DAXXIFY® hasn’t been around long enough to show a meaningful trend.
In this chart, we can see a slight seasonal uptick in volume during the months of February – April for both Dysport® and Xeomin®. But it’s not nearly as clear of a pattern as that of BOTOX®.
More importantly, BOTOX® has a lot more sarch volume than either Dysport®, Xeomin® or DAXXIFY®.
It means that if your practice is going to take advantage of this year’s seasonal uptick in BOTOX® searches, you may need to focus more on keywords that contain “botox” (“botox”, “botox near me”, “botox cost”), and less on other neuromodulators.
This doesn’t mean that the other, non-BOTOX®, keywords won’t be profitable. But BOTOX® searches are the ones that experience a clear seasonal spring uptick of a meaningful magnitude.