Growth in online commerce has impacted many holidays in the United States, perhaps none more so than Valentine’s Day. According to a recent Google Consumer Insights study, Valentine’s Day searches have increased 35% year over year, with an expected $210B on the line for web-influenced sales in 2012.

…Valentine’s Day searches have increased 35% year over year, with an expected $210B on the line for web-influenced sales in 2012.

In late January 2012, Conductor analyzed over 1,700 high-volume local and non-location specific keywords in our SEO platform Searchlight, to determine domains that appeared most frequently for Valentine’s Day queries.

Our analysis showed gifts.com was the overall winner, appearing in the top five search results for 6 out of 10 non-geographic ‘Gifts’ keywords.  The SERPs for local search, ‘geo’ queries were less competitive—of the ten domains with the most appearances, eight appeared in the top five less than 10% of the time–but yelp.com and gayot.com appeared consistently at the top of the results.

Check out our nifty infographic summarizing the study’s key findings and download both the full study and infographic for more insight into the Valentine’s Day search landscape.

Let us know how you optimize your site for seasonal searches below in the comments, and don’t forget to download the full findings of our study in our resource center.