Food And Flowers Top The List As UAE’s Online ‘Delivery’ Searches Grow Faster Than The UK And India

The convenience evolution of delivery aggregators and brand-owned delivery apps is directly impacting online searches for ‘delivery’, according to a new data released by SEMrush, the award-winning digital marketing suite.

Homing in on UAE residents’ online search trends, the SEMrush report data reveals that online searches related to ‘delivery’ continue to rise across the country, with fast food and flowers yielding the highest number of searches on average.

Online search rates for ‘delivery’ in the UAE grew 9% in 2019 compared to the previous year, comfortably ahead of India at 2.17% and the UK at 3.39%, respectively. Looking further back, there were nearly a quarter of a million UAE-based searches related to ‘delivery’ between February 2016 and December 2019.

Analysing online search trend back-data for ‘delivery’ over the last four years in the UAE highlights the country’s resident’s penchant for fast food brands, with McDonalds, KFC, Pizza Hut, Burger King, Subway, Jollibee and Chowking amongst the most common searches.

Other than the fast food, flowers and cake delivery searches were noticeably high in UAE. As Valentine’s Day fast approaches, SEMrush predicts a continued uptick in non-food ‘delivery’ searches.

“Online search trend analysis offers valuable data to marketers about the what, where and how of consumer interests; it is clear consumers are increasingly choosing convenience and fast food delivery dominates the results as consumers become more time sensitive,” commented Olga Andrienko, Head of Global Marketing at SEMrush.

UAE residents are also increasingly keen to arrange groceries to their door. Among the top-ranking ‘delivery’ searches, ‘Carrefour delivery’ ranked high on the list. However, the Majed Al Futtaim brand was the only listed supermarket in the top searches, evidencing that UAE residents still favour physical grocery shopping. ‘Cash on delivery’ also received high search queries, indicating a preference for companies that cater for cash payments on delivery in the UAE market.

According to the 2019 yStats.com E-commerce Report, the Middle East’s online retail market is expected to more than double in size between 2019 and 2022 – a trend anticipated to positively impact continued growth in online search interest for ‘delivery services’.