The UAE residents, as per the government guidelines, are practising social distancing while the majority of the schools, and workplaces remain closed as well.
A digital marketing suite, SEMrush, did a survey to figure out what are the most Googled searches amongst UAE residents during the pandemic and it came up with some interesting results.
The most searched term was “news”, which amassed over 390,500 related online searches. In second place was “movies” with 310,500 searches.
It is worth mentioning that this search volume is from January, when the news about COVID-19 first broke until March 2020.
The organisation also deducted that streaming services Netflix and Amazon Prime saw an online search increase of 124% and 123% respectively.
Additionally, famous Arabic channel MBC also saw a 50% increase in its website traffic during the pandemic.
When it came to entertainment, the UAE residents were keen on watching scary movies. The search term “horror” registered the biggest surge with a 90 per cent search growth, followed by ‘romance’ and ‘nature’, which both saw 83 per cent climbs.
Everyone who was putting off focusing on their fitness also took time out which led the an increase of 1,983% for the search query of “home workout”. Interest in online quizzes also jumped over 122%. The terms “board games” and “puzzles” also saw a massive rise of 326% and 313% respectively.
Olga Andrienko, Head of Global Marketing at SEMrush, said:
Web traffic indicates growing interest in well-known entertainment websites with search data breaking this down further to show a high-level of search interest in specific genres such as news, music, romance, nature and documentaries. Gaining insights into search interest at specific times and locations can be invaluable to marketing efforts, especially at this chal-lenging period for businesses globally.
This is a direct insight as to what people in the UAE are searching during the lockdown and maybe, you can also take some motivation and do everything that you had been putting off.
