Online visibility management and content marketing Saas platform, SEMrush has analysed the data around Google search queries from Australian users for popular TV series and reality shows and has discovered that Game of Thrones is still highly sought-after, particularly as it approaches its final series.
“Our recent Australian TV study showed that the most searched for TV show was Game of Thrones, with about 250,000 Google searches coming from Australia per month and since it takes the crown as IMDb’s top-rated TV show, this is no great surprise,” said Olga Andrienko, Global Marketing Director, SEMrush.
This is followed by The Handmaid’s Tale and Stranger Things with about 170,000 monthly searches each. In fourth place is Riverdale, whilst in fifth place were The Walking Dead and Suits on equal search numbers. This was followed by Outlander, Lucifer, Black Mirror and 13 Reasons Why (see all of the search data below which is rounded to the nearest 5000.)
| SHOW | MONTHLY SEARCH VOLUME (APPROX) |
| Game of Thrones | 250,000 |
| Handmaid’s Tale | 170,000 |
| Stranger Things | 170,000 |
| Riverdale | 135,000 |
| The Walking Dead | 90,000 |
| Suits | 90,000 |
| Outlander | 75,000 |
| Lucifer | 75,000 |
| Black Mirror | 75,000 |
| 13 Reasons Why | 75,000 |
The noteworthy takeaways SEMrush identified were the co-googled words Australians searched for. GOT is often searched for along with the ways people can watch the series, including, “download”, “putlocker” and “leak”. The Handmaid’s Tale, based on the famous award-winning novel by Margaret Atwood, seems to drive more interest to the book and explanations of the symbols’ meaning, including, “review”, “quotes” and “wiki”. Whilst Stranger Things was searched for along with its main characters: “Will”, “Eleven”, “Dustin”, “Bob”, “Billy”, and even “Barb” and “Nancy”.
Network of co-googled words with top-3 series in Australia for the last year
According to the research, those series classified by IMDB as adventure, including Doctor Who and Once Upon a Time, as well as comedy, including Shameless and Orange Is The New Black, are in less demand than those labelled as action: GOT, crime: Riverdale and Peaky Blinders, and also drama: The Handmaid’s Tale and 13 Reasons Why.
SEMrush’s research also explored the popularity of different reality shows in Australia. My Kitchen Rules and MasterChef lead the way among the cooking shows with 50,000 searches each per month. This is then followed by Hell’s Kitchen, Great British Bake Off and Oliver Twist with about 25,000 Google queries for each of them.
Australians love following celebrities’ lifestyles and whilst Keeping Up with the Kardashians only ranks 2.8 on IMDB’s index, it still tops the Google searches for lifestyle shows and has about 30,000 searches for it per month from Australia. This is followed by Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and Life of Kylie, which is all about Kylie Jenner. Another interesting finding of the SEMrush study regards the dating shows. The Bachelor was searched for twice as much as the Bachelorette.
The research is based on SEMrush data, collected from June 2017 to June 2018.
Photo Credits: Katja El Sol Cemazar, Kathy Hutchins, S. Bukley