SEM (Scanning Electron Microscopy) Demand Skyrockets

Colored SEM image of Tradescantia pollen and stamens by Heidi Paves. It's bright yellow and light green and looks like some alien plants.

Google Trends is a wonderful tool to find out what the market really demands. One problem is ambiguity though. It happens when a term means more than one thing.

It happens to acronyms quite often. I compared SEM to SEO demand to find out that the Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) industry is booming it seems.

The demand for SEM has skyrocketed recently.

It grew so much that it surpassed the number of queries for SEO everywhere, the US, UK and Germany where I work as a SEO consultant.

Then of course I compared the results for SEM in the three countries and respective local Google versions to make sure that Scanning Electron Microscopy is really that popular.

 

Scanning Electron Microscopy or Search Engine Marketing? The winner is…

I wanted to make sure that not something quite negligible like Structural Equation Modeling or Search Engine Marketing is the real driving force of this boom.

As you might test yourself in Google.com Scanning Electron Microscopy is obviously the most important kind of SEM.

Viewed from the US three results deal with the scientific topic, while Search Engine Marketing is only found twice for [sem].

Using Google.com from Germany you’ll only find one instance of Search Engine Marketing SEM as compared to 3 results for Scanning Electron Microscopy.

In Germany the people are kind of behind the times, they don’t deal much with Scanning Electron Microscopy yet.

When I searched Google.de for SEM I got mostly Search Engine Marketing related results. Another reason might be that the German acronym may be a different one altogether.

Please take a look at these charts comparing the demand for SEM in:

  • USA
  • UK
  • Germany

US demand for SEM vs SEO:

seo-sem-google-trends-2007-2008-usa.png


UK demand for SEM vs SEO:

seo-sem-google-trends-2007-2008-uk.png



German demand for SEM vs SEO:

seo-sem-google-trends-2007-2008-germany.png


To be honest, if I’d be in Matt McGee’s shoes I’d put the SEM acronym in his title to rank higher for SEM. This way he even might be able to sell some Scanning Electron Microscopes.

You might reply that most people rather search for full phrases instead of acronyms, but they do not.

You can check it yourself with Google Trends. They’re all by far less popular, even search marketing.

*(CC BY-SA 3.0) Creative Commons licensed image by Heidi Paves

Last updated: May 3rd, 2018.