Here at Figment, analysing search data to inform our clients’ SEO strategies and take advantage of trends is all part of the job.
But when we learnt last month there was a National Tea Day, it sparked a conversation amongst the team about tea trends. Naturally, bubble tea topped the conversation, having become such a talking point over the past year or so.
It inspired us to delve into our favourite data sources to check out exactly what was going on with bubble tea in the world of search. And our findings were quite a surprise!
So tasty – what’s been driving the UK bubble tea trend?
Invented in Taiwan in the 1980s, bubble tea – also known as boba tea or pearl tea – first hit the UK in 2011 when the first bubble tea shop opened in London’s Soho.
3.7 million Instagram posts and 1481 bubble tea shops later, and with the UK market predicted to grow 225% over the next 10 years, it’s clear to see this latest phenomenon has become a firm favourite on the British beverage menu.
Bubble tea has a lot going for it. The endless array of flavours. The boundless customisation possibilities. The flamboyant colours. The trendy image. And of course its natural social media shareability which has led to almost half a million posts on TikTok.
So it’s no surprise it’s been thrust it into the limelight.
But what may come as a surprise (it did to us!) is where in the UK bubble tea is being slurped the most. And how consumers are now searching more for bubble tea than anything else tea-related.
Who’s leading the way in the UK’s bubble tea craze?
We started by using Semrush to identify the keywords tea lovers were typing into Google to find places to grab a bubble tea.
Then we looked at monthly web search volumes for bubble tea-related phrases. Finally, we homed in on Google Maps to count up the number of bubble tea locations UK wide.
This allowed us to calculate the number of bubble tea searches and locations per 100,000 people. So now we could compare bubble tea popularity per city. And this is where we got our first surprise…
Hopefully we can be forgiven for making assumptions. But we all believed that London would be the Bubble Tea Capital of the UK. But that was not the case!
The locations being searched the most for bubble tea were ALL university cities. But the one that came out on top with the highest search volume per capita wasn’t London. It was Cambridge! And in fact, out of the top 12 cities searched for bubble tea, London came in 9th!
So despite London being the birthplace of the UK bubble tea phenomenon, and having the highest volume of bubble tea shops out of all the nation’s big cities – and the biggest population – it’s was trumped by a string of notably smaller cities.
What we uncovered about Cambridge and its love for bubble tea:
- Almost one in every hundred people in Cambridge search Google for bubble tea every month
- There are 7.5 bubble tea shops per 100K people in Cambridge
- Bubble tea searches per capita in Cambridge are 34% higher than runner up Brighton, and almost double Nottingham in third place
- Cambridge University has its own bubble tea society
And there’s more… what else we found out about bubble tea and tea searches in general
We were also interested in how popular searches were for bubble tea compared to other tea-related phrases. So we tapped into Ahrefs for some insights. And that gave us yet another surprise…
Looking at Google UK searches containing the word ‘tea’, we discovered that ‘bubble tea’ beat a chain of other phrases by a mile.
Bubble tea had more than twice the number of searches as afternoon tea. And almost three times as many as plain old ‘tea’!
And finally… we came away with a couple more interesting facts:
- We discovered that Brits have been searching for bubble tea online since as far back as 2015, and
- That Google predicts a growing trend for bubble tea searches over the next 12 months.
The power of search data
Our research uncovered all sorts of intriguing facts and figures about the growing popularity of bubble tea, and where in the UK it’s being guzzled the most.
But it also demonstrated the power of search data in predicting trends and analysing consumer behaviour.
Whether you’re assessing market demand for a new product or service, planning a new business location, creating relevant content or cultivating social media tactics – or developing an SEO strategy with a trusted London SEO agency, the facts, figures and insights you can glean from search data can be hugely valuable.
If you’d like to talk to Team Figment about your next move towards increased visibility in the search engines, you are welcome to get in touch.
If you would like to to get more details on our Bubble Tea study for the UK, please also use our contact page to make a request.
