How weather affects your SEO strategy

Many people don’t think about this,  but all seasons are not the same.   Historically over the past 20 years,  overall internet traffic tends to dip during the warm summer months,  and then tends to increase over the colder months.  Though this trend has seen a decrease over the past few years (blame your kids Xbox and Youtube Videos)  the fact is that this still happens today.

Though we are at the very tail end of the summer,  much of this still applies for the next month or two.

Some industries see an increase during the summer,  such as landscaping firms,  firms that sell pool equipment and firms that sell sporting equipment.

The physical reason is simple,  people still tend to go outside (your kids Xbox and youtube videos aside) during the summer.   This typically means slightly more mobile traffic ,  less desktop traffic,  and overall more sporadic peaks and lows for internet  traffic.    Then the dreaded vacation where decision makers are relaxing on the beach and not searching for the products you sell.

Winter tends to be more structured,  kids are in school meaning that they are not online during the middle of the school day (for the most part).   Vacations are taken with far less frequency and individuals are again searching for the products you offer.

This makes it awkward for searching traffic, planning and overall business decisions during the summer.

What many experienced SEO’s do during the summer is spend more time doing things that they typically would not do during the peak season.    Such as moving sections of a website, requiring a 301 redirect,  items like that tend to force the website to take a hit for short period of time.     One would never attempt this during peak season, but on a slower time it makes sense.

The overall SEO strategy that many adopt during this time (Late September) is to finalize any summer modifications that they were working on and go live with them.  This allows for enough time to get everything working and ranking before the peak holiday season.

When Winter sets in,  one typically spends more time monitoring and tweeking rather than making large changes to an existing website.

Interesting times.