In the past few weeks, I’ve had a handful of people tell me, “Kristi, you should call your bathroom a primary bathroom instead of a master bathroom.” So the time has come for me to address this topic, and explain why I won’t be switching from master bathroom to primary bathroom (or master bedroom to primary bedroom) anytime in the near future.
I don’t know exactly when this change happened, but it seems like it was around 2020 that I started seeing the terms primary bathroom and primary bedroom. All of my life, these rooms have been called master bathrooms and master bedrooms, but all of a sudden, someone decided these terms were not appropriate anymore, and we all needed to change our language.
I started seeing these new terms in real estate listings, blog posts, social media posts, etc. And while I personally thought the change was unnecessary, I also know that as a blogger who relies on Google for a whole lot of the traffic to my blog, I’ll go with the flow.
But what I quickly realized (and continue to realize even two years after I began hearing these new terms) is that this change in terminology seems to have only happened in a relatively small echo chamber of social media pertaining specifically to the home/garden/DIY/decorating niches, and then it spilled over to some people who work in real estate. Other than those small niches, this change in terminology has not reached the nation at large.
As I mentioned above, bloggers like myself rely quite a bit on Google to send us traffic. That means we have to know what search terms people are typing into Google in order to find information, and then we bloggers can use those search terms in our blog posts (if and when they fit naturally) in order to try to get some of those people who are searching for those terms to land on our websites, where they’ll hopefully find some useful information regarding the term they searched.
We bloggers and website owners have different tools that we can use to see what terms people are searching in Google.
So let me show you what people are searching for.
First up, when I see how many people are searching for information about “primary bathroom”, this is the information provided by Google.
This shows different search terms that include “primary bathroom” that people have searched for in Google. The key info provided, besides the specific search terms that people are typing into Google, is volume. Volume is simply the monthly average of Google searches for those specific key phrases over the past 12 months.
So over the past 12 months, there have been an average of 140 searches per month in the United States for primary bathroom. And then you can see other related search terms there, and their average per month over the last 12 months.
Here are a few more related to primary bathroom.
Now let me show you how that compares to the people searching for information regarding master bathroom.
I mean, there’s simply no comparison.
There’s an average of 27,100 searches for master bathroom ideas every month in the United States, compared to 110 searches for primary bathroom ideas each month. The fact is that the average American simply has not yet gotten the memo. The memo is stuck in a relative small echo chamber online, and it just hasn’t made it to the broader public yet.
As you would imagine, those same trends hold true with the terms master bedroom compared to primary bedroom. Each month, on average, there are 27,100 searches for the term master bedroom ideas in the United States, compared to 320 searches for primary bedroom ideas.
So when will I switch over? I’ll do so as soon as I see the trend change, and I see that the average American has started using these new terms. But I’m not looking to be a trend-setter in my use of the English language. 🙂 I just simply want to write some blog posts about my house and my DIY projects, and hope that the average American who stumbles across my blog finds them helpful and useful. But they can’t find them if I’m using terms they’ve never heard of, don’t use in their daily life, and would never even think to search for in Google. 🙂
Addicted 2 Decorating is where I share my DIY and decorating journey as I remodel and decorate the 1948 fixer upper that my husband, Matt, and I bought in 2013. Matt has M.S. and is unable to do physical work, so I do the majority of the work on the house by myself. You can learn more about me here.
I hope you’ll join me on my DIY and decorating journey! If you want to follow my projects and progress, you can subscribe below and have each new post delivered to your email inbox. That way you’ll never miss a thing!