State of the market and current search trends

There are thousands and thousands of different search terms that consumers could use when looking for help with a personal injury or medical negligence case. Broadly most of these terms fall into key category groups, but how do these terms fluctuate and what does it mean for marketing activity?

As part of our ongoing analysis of the market we have grouped search trend intent data for key search intent for the last three years to see what trends there have been and more importantly if we can see any changes and what it means when marketing online.

The graphs below outline search trends to give a frequency of how often a search term is used. The more often searched then the higher the number. The graphs don’t show exact searches but rather an overview of popularity to give a measurable trend.

Regardless of search term type we can clearly see when the pandemic arrived and the impact it had on search within our industry.

All subsectors saw falls of varying magnitude, but the general trend was to bounce back fairly quickly with another less severe drop as the second lockdown kicked in.

Med Neg and RTA were probably the two areas that took the biggest hit. Med Neg primarily because of the positive sentiment we saw for the NHS and the incredible job they had to undertake to help people. RTA because there were fewer vehicles on the road.

RTA is a more interesting search term as its popularity doesn’t necessarily correlate with what is happening in the market. The Compensation Recovery Unit (CRU) figures show a general decline in RTA claims over the last few years but you can see from the graph that RTA searches were seeing a steady increase prior to Covid-19. This is because of the relevance of a lot of the searches. People will be looking for information on a car accident or road traffic accident because they may be looking to avoid it when travelling and in 2014 there was a film called Whiplash released that still garners a lot of interest.

Looking more specifically at other areas we can see that only accident and injury and personal injury were seeing any defined growth in search trends with other areas seeing a gentle decline or more fluidity in demand.

It is worth remembering however that just like the RTA example some trends can be very misleading. No Win No Fee (NWNF) for example saw quite a strong increase in trend growth in the third quarter of 2020, but much of this was for employment advice related NWNF searches. Therefore, it is really important that you not only keep a close eye on your account in general but specifically around what your broad and exact match terms are doing. But that’s an entire blog in itself… 

Contact our head of business development, Nick Delaney, if you have any questions or require any information about joining our Personal Injury or Clinical Negligence panels.