Here at Vertical Leap, we’ve been noticing recently that the number of searches is down for some of our customers’ key terms. This obviously affects how much subsequent traffic they get to their sites. Some of these trends are seasonal and depend on the client’s business, but some appear to be an overall shrinkage in demand.
Now it is very easy to blame this on the economy at the moment. If business and consumer demand is down on the high street then it is likely to be down on the internet too. People’s attitudes don’t change just because they are sat in front of a screen.
However, there are other factors that might well come into play. In a previous job, I used to track open rates on emails against the weather. You are most likely to get someone to open an email straight away, the longer they leave it unopened, the more likely they are to skip opening it altogether. If the weather was good, our mainly consumer audience was far less likely to be reading their personal email addresses, and open rates were generally lower.
And the weather in the UK (which is the primary market for many of our SEO clients), has been particularly clement recently. Whist this increases some search terms (like searches for garden furniture and kites), many of the other terms are reduced in volume. So weather does ultimately affect the amount of traffic reaching a website. People out enjoying the weather use their computers less. So if you are an online company, you should be looking forward to the fact that it is due to rain tomorrow.
So is performing a rain dance always going to be good for business?
Seasonality is big in web search terms, and it is important to remember that this also affects your business. Everyone recognises that for consumer focussed sites, Christmas is huge. What they don’t always connect is that for B2B sites, December sucks.
And February is a short month; so comparing it with other months can make it always look bad, even when on a day by day basis it could have the same level of traffic.
Likewise, occasionally, because of the way that the days fall, some months have five weekends. For business sites, this can mean a drop in enquiries for the month, because there are relatively less working days than other months.
Oh and if your conversions were a little low last Thursday, that’s because people were playing with Google Street View instead of searching the web.
So whether you depend on direct traffic, email marketing, SEO or PPC to bring you business, the traffic can be affected by a variety of factors. Remembering to overlay these factors onto your results could reduce your stress levels when looking at your website results.
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