Is Liposuction still popular? – Google trends reveals

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Google is like Swiss knife. Search engine, used as a map, you can browse shopping prices, read email, and even know what’s trending (Google trends)

We did a small research and looked at how popular the term ‘Liposuction‘ and some other related terms (smartlipo and cost). For a plastic surgeon or a marketing company interested in the cosmetic and plastic niche this can be of high commercial and strategical value. If you understand “what is being searched for”, “what people want to know about”, “where the buzz is” you can adapt your marketing strategy.

Using Google Trends to understand the Popularity of Liposuction

Looking at the interest for “Liposuction” over time (from 2004 to mid-2014), it is notorious how the popularity for Lipo was much higher back then in 2004.

graph-trends-01

After (2008) the popularity of the term “Liposuction” has remained relatively stable.

Over time the search and news interest term decreased slowly over time till 2008. After that year (2008) the popularity of the term “Liposuction” has remained relatively stable. You can see that between 2008 and 2014 the term moves up and down in yearly cycles, but maintains its level over a surface of (40).smartlipo-related
The above graphic shows the marked trends in a blue continuous “line”. The numbers don’t depict search volume (don’t let you get confused with it). It just shows the popularity at a given time of the term (using an index value of minimum 0 to a maximum of 100). Kind of like a percentage (from 0 – 100).

google-trend-02

The next table shows some attached searches. This attached searches or queries, are other terms that were also searched for when people searched for “Liposuction“. You can consider them as secondary searches. For example almost 100 % of the people who searched for “Liposuction” also searched for the term “cost of liposuction”.

google-liposuction-trend
This of course has logic behind it, if people search for a procedure they want to know how much it costs. Not many plastic surgeons feature the cost of the procedures they perform on their websites. Cosmetic and Plastic surgery prices are not exposed on a doctor’s page, and of course that is understandable, the price varies among patients. A Liposuction can vary from patient to patient, some might need it in a few areas, for others it can be more extended, while for others a special technique and a personalized treatment and recovery plan has to be followed.

SmartLipo and Smart Lipo “Google trends”

We repeated the same exercise for a more specific liposuction technology, “Smartlipo” and “Smart lipo“. Although the correct term is “Smartlipo” people often use also the spaced variation “Smart Lipo”. We took a look at both variations.

smartlipo-google-trends

The first curious finding is that the correct spelled term “Smartlipo” (the blue graph) was outperformed by the alternate term “Smart Lipo“. People are more familiar with the spaced term than with the correct one. You can see that the spaced term surpassed the original name on an average 20%. The top trending moment for “Smartlipo” was between 2008 and 2009, which is consistent with the records, especially during the time the procedure went popular in Europe (2008) and over the next months later (in 2009) when it was approved by the FDA.

smartlipo-related-terms

When going deeper in the data, people who searched for “smartlipo” also searched for “smartlipo cost”, “Smartlipo laser” and reviews. This shows again the importance of the “Cost” of a procedure for the potential patient.