For any business owner and even for any SEO specialist, it’s important that you consider search trends and seasons within your SEO campaign. Take, for example, a pest control company who treats for termites. In order for termites to swarm, the temperature has to be just right and in Florida, that happens around February through May. You can image that traffic and searches for termites will skyrocket during these particular months. Knowing seasonality trends can help you create and plan a better SEO marketing campaign.
Before you begin projects for any SEO or digital marketing campaign, it’s important to know the average baseline of traffic for the previous year. My favorite tool to use it Google Trends. Let’s take the example of the pest control company who treats for termites. Below is a screenshot that shows the search term interest for 2014.
One of the many reasons that we compare year-over-year trends in our monthly SEO report is so that we can compare a clear and delineated season to give our clients a true perspective on the progress that their website is making. Many business-minded folks like you are typically concerned with quarterly reviews, but beware! Quarterly reviews won’t always give you the best data for analysis. Take, for example, the trend for termites that we’ve show, above. The search term trends rise in Q1, Peak in Q2 and spiral downward in Q3; so if you do a Q2 v Q3 analysis, it won’t be true to how well the site performed during the peak termite season.
So now the question is, how to do you use this information to strategize the perfect SEO campaign? Estimate traffic by looking at search volume from previous years, and place them into low, medium, and high success metrics. For example: growing traffic year over year by 10% can yield X amount of visits to the website, 20% will yield Y amounts, etc. If you know your conversion rate on the current traffic, this will help you estimate conversions with a low, medium and high success metric as well.
Things to remember:
- Traffic won’t always increase year over year or for a specific time period.
- Make sure that all tracking data and goals are set up properly on the website so that you can provide an accurate projection.
- Anything you do on and off site can affect your SEO goals and campaigns so think strategically about how you will guide the TV ad to your website or which landing page your direct mail campaign will go to. This all has a great effect on the conversion rate and success of the website.
Thanks for reading. If you liked the blog, please share.
-Monique
