What Google Search Data Tells us About Homophobia and Pride Month

During Pride month, it’s amazing to see everyone being so out and proud and celebrating who they are during parades, it’s easy to forget that not everyone has it so easy. Unfortunately, homophobia and pride do go hand-in-hand for some.

Given that I work in SEO, and keyword research is a regular part of my job, I wanted to do some research into this. I wondered if it’s possible to use keyword data from 2018 to see how many people search for ‘homophobia terms’ or even ‘gay pride’ terms. This is a subject that has always been close to my heart, and as someone who has experienced a degree of homophobia simply for walking down the street with my girlfriend, I was curious to see whether others experienced the same reactions year-round, or if it was seasonal.

 

I’m going to be using SEMRush to find the average search volume of terms people searched for on Google last year. It’s worth noting that the number will demonstrate the average search volume for the year and any spikes in search volume would be higher than the volume I’ll be reporting here.

 

Looking at the search data for ‘what is homophobia’ we can see this has an average monthly search volume of 1,900 with a large spike in searches in the middle of the year. This is much lower than I would expect, but at least it shows we’re moving in the right direction and the fact that there are 45 million results for this in the search results at least shows there’s plenty of information available for those in need of answers.

 

 

 

Similarly, ‘black homophobia statistics’, ‘dealing with homophobia at work’, and ‘homophobia articles’ (each with 90 monthly searches) all experience large spikes in their searches during June. There’s no way that there are no instances of homophobia at work other than during the month of June. The question here is why these terms experience such an increase during Pride month, surely this information should be readily available and talked about throughout the rest of the year too not just during one month.

 

 

In looking into Pride terms, ‘gay pride London’ has over 3,600 searches per month, whereas ‘gay pride flag’ has 4,400 searches. London Pride is a timely event so I’d expect a large spike in searches for this and an increase in searches for the flag is also predictable as people search for the meaning behind each of the colours in the flag.

 

 

Of course, the one term that dwarves all of these are ‘gay pride’ itself which has an average monthly search volume of 12,100 with a whopping 267 million results available.

While these are just some examples of the changes in search volume, they illustrate the amount of work we yet have to do to bring visibility and equality to all members of our community. People should feel safe and supported at any time. It’s the responsibility of all people, whether you’re LGBTQ+ or not, to help all of us get the information we need, exactly when we need it, not just when it suits a popular hashtag or yearly event.