The market is flooded with seasonal goods and offers, the demand for which jumps up and down depending on the seasons and various events. In this article, I want to understand what “traffic seasonality” is, determine its main types, main factors, and how to use traffic seasonality to your advantage.

Seasonality - recurring fluctuations in website traffic depending on various external factors. Identification of seasonal factors of business segments allows:

• reduce the level of error in the analysis of traffic dynamics;
• objectively assess the level of development of the site;
• predict the level of site traffic in the time range;
• plan advertising campaigns during high season periods.

Almost every business segment has a "high" and "low" season; The "high" season is characterized by the peak value of consumer demand and, accordingly, during the "low" season, consumer interest in the company's goods or services is reduced to a minimum.

Factors that affect traffic can be combined into several main groups, highlighting certain types of seasonality. As a rule, it is impossible to make an exact distinction between the influence of certain seasonality factors on site traffic, since they intersect and can have a simultaneous effect.

Types of traffic seasonality

Traffic fluctuations can be divided into two main types: cyclical, which repeat at regular intervals throughout the year (for example, holidays or temperature warming), and “event traffic”, which is formed under the influence of event events or unexpected news.

Let us consider in detail the factors of cyclic traffic fluctuations.

Seasonality of traffic depending on the season: this species seasonality due to climate change and consumer features. So, for example, the number of requests related to the purchase of air conditioners decreases during the cold season, and the peak of site traffic falls on a period of sharp warming:

At the same time, during the cold season, the frequency of requests related to the purchase of winter clothes increases and, accordingly, decreases in the summer months. As an example, the figure shows the traffic of an online winter clothing store:

The short-term rapid growth of traffic is formed under the influence of seasonal factors such as holidays and famous dates. So, for example, the query "carnival costumes" can bring the maximum traffic to the site in December before the New Year's holiday, and the minimum - in June.

As a rule, in the first half of January and May, there is a general decline in traffic as a result of long holidays, and the same short-term rapid growth after the end of the holidays, which is due to the accumulated needs for the purchase of goods or services. The figure shows an example of a construction site:

Summer - the time of holidays and rest - is characterized by a decline in the business activity of the market. Under the influence of this factor, one can observe a decrease in site traffic in the summer months (with the exception of seasonal summer goods and services, for example, boat trips).

Ways to determine the seasonality of traffic

To analyze the seasonality of a particular query, you can use the WordStat tool, which allows you to see the dynamics of the frequency of a query in the form of a graph and a table. To do this, we perform a number of simple steps:

• go to your Yandex account;
• follow the given link;
• in the search bar, we set a keyword or phrase, the dynamics of which we are interested in;
• under the search bar, check the box "Query History";
• select a region for statistics analysis (for example, Ukraine);
• press the "Select" button.

The figure shows an example of the history of requests for the phrase "walks along the Dnieper"; this request is characterized by a pronounced seasonality depending on the time of year, being popular from late spring to October:

Search history for the last twelve months can also be tracked using the Google Adwords Keyword Planner tool. To do this, go to the AdWords service. In the "Tools and Analysis" section, select the "Keyword Planner" item and in the "Find keyword and ad group options" block, specify the queries that interest us. In the "Keyword Options" tab, next to each keyword, the frequency is indicated, in exact match of the search, and a chart with the history of requests for the last calendar year. The figure shows an example of the history of requests for "carnival costumes", which is characterized by a pronounced event seasonality:

Service Google Trends allows you to track the dynamics of the popularity of requests for a selected period of time and a given region. In the service, you can easily compare the popularity of two or more queries, set the most requested keywords in a given month.

The “Related Queries” block allows you to view a list of queries that were popular along with the keyword specified for analysis (the “Top” section) and queries that were in the trend of the period, that is, gained popularity compared to the previous period (the “Trending” section). ).

It should be noted that the numbers given in the statistics of the service are relative and are not absolute indicators of the number of searches for a query.

Thus, seasonality analysis is necessary for planning the company's actions for the high season. It is also important to take into account seasonality factors when analyzing website traffic and the level of its development: perhaps you should adjust your offer taking into account the season, how will sales creep up? To analyze the dynamics of development, you can track the pages of entrances to the site and the groups of keywords that were clicked on. You can also compare the value of traffic for the selected period of time with the same period last year.

How do you analyze traffic seasonality?

Those who create a website or an online store for the first time often do not know many of the nuances of working with traffic, and the dependence of traffic on certain queries is just one of such moments. Moreover, both owners of online stores and owners of ordinary content projects can take advantage of the seasonality of certain key queries, for example, with the help of affiliate programs.

Seasonality is expressed in regular fluctuations in attendance, and, accordingly, sales volumes. Moreover, such fluctuations in demand are typical for a fairly wide range of goods and services, affecting in one way or another almost any type of business.

In order for a business to operate effectively, it is necessary to work on preparing for the next surge in traffic, for example, by starting work on promotion six months before the expected period. Attracting and monetizing such traffic can bring very good profits.

Checking the seasonality of demand is quite simple, just enter the required phrase in wordstat.yandex.ru, click the "Select" button and set the "Query History" switch:

Examples of seasonal requests include:

• air conditioners;
• landscape design;
• Cocktail Dress;
• rest in the Crimea, etc.

Thus, simple analytics allows you to predict a jump in seasonal traffic, and take this into account in your plans in advance. Special attention it is worth paying attention to holiday traffic, in particular this New Year, February 14, March 8, etc.

It is probably already clear that for stores with various gift items, this is just a gold mine.

How do you prepare for a burst of activity?

First of all, select those queries from your subject that you are going to promote, and evaluate the potential of traffic that you can get by displaying the pages of the online store in the Top 10. Most likely, the number of predicted transitions will be in the thousands, and possibly even tens of thousands of visitors in a day. Accordingly, it will be necessary to work on the technical component and, immediately before the onset of such a period, allocate appropriate hosting capacities for the site.

A good, powerful server and its maintenance will most likely cost some $150-200 per month, which is incommensurable with the losses that are possible due to the fact that your site will be unavailable to visitors at the very peak of possible sales. Moreover, it is worth taking care of it, taking into account recent changes in algorithms search engines, which take into account the page loading speed of the site when ranking.

You will not need to constantly use a powerful server, and it will be enough to pay for the necessary parameters for a period of several months.

The second important point is the creation and optimization of special pages for seasonal queries. For example, categories on the store's website, or writing a series of feature articles, with links to products, or simply for monetization by placing contextual ads (for content projects).

You need to create and optimize pages for the future in advance, 4-6 months before the expected event. Since you are not the only one working in this direction, it is necessary to prepare content not just for seasonal and holiday requests, but tied to a specific event, for example, instead of “where to relax in November”, we adapt the page to the request in this form - “where to relax in November 2013".

Immediately after they are done listed works, you should start working on promotion. Search engines do not immediately begin to fully take into account the weight of links, so it is clearly impossible to get the required positions in a month.

But, if we are talking about seasonal traffic, then you definitely need to prepare for the off-season decline. In this regard, it would be wise to focus on various kinds of service offers and discounts at such a time.

Also, as a fight against seasonality, one can also attribute the launch of new services or product offerings to the market, which would be used on the principle of substitution. During the off-season downturn, it will be useful to work on the infrastructure and improve business processes.

As they say, he who is warned is armed!

As practice shows, in every business area there are periods of high and low season. And in this case, we run into a problem.

How to explain the seasonal decrease in traffic to the client?

You can download reports from Yandex.Metrica and Google Analytics to compare attendance with the same period a year ago. You can use the query history in Yandex.Wordstat. But what if the client does not see in the reports what is visible to an ordinary SEO specialist?

No magic, 5 minutes in Excel - and we get something that will help the client see this elusive beast "SEASONALITY".

In the example, we will use a company that sells and delivers concrete in Smolensk. We take data for 12 months and enter them into an Excel spreadsheet.

We create in excel spreadsheet the following form:

We leave the first line for the analysis period (minimum 12 or 6 months).

In the second line, we will indicate visit data for the key phrase for the current year.

The third line contains seasonal data from Yandex.Wordstat based on the actual value of impressions for the past year.

In the fourth line - the position of the phrase in search engines (in our case, this is Yandex).

Based on line 3, we make a diagram of the following form:

According to the graph, we can see how seasonal traffic behaves: it increases by May, then sharply decreases by December, then gradually starts to increase again. Now it’s worth looking at how traffic will behave if we correlate seasonality and traffic from SERPs according to Yandex Metrics?

Based on the data of rows 2-3, we build following diagram:

We can see that the graphs of seasonality and search traffic are very similar, they almost reproduce each other's highs and lows. The main thing to remember is that the ideal similarity of data is a utopia that is almost impossible to obtain.

BUT we will not stop there. And let's add position data for the phrase "concrete smolensk" to our chart.

The peculiarity of the chart is that the axis parameters are set in the reverse order of values, so that you can see the growth and fall of positions for a specific keyword.

Positions in the search results for the query "concrete smolensk" are in the top 10 of Yandex during the year, which we can see from the diagram.

Eventually

We end up with a chart showing how much traffic has grown and fallen seasonally relative to the previous year. We back up the data with a graph for positions from search engines and see that the query did not fall out of the top 10 for the year.

That is, the loss of traffic is clearly related to seasonality. If the chart by position jumps from the top 10 to the top 30, then we have other problems, and this is no longer seasonal.

Now using this chart, Yandex.Metrika, Google Analytics and Yandex.Wordstat at the same time, it can be proved that the drop in traffic is due to the seasonality of demand.

Good afternoon, dear readers! Today we will consider another very important and serious topic of promoting websites and blogs in search engines. Let's talk about what is seasonality search queries how to identify seasonal phrases and how they are used in SEO promotion of web resources. This post will help you understand why search traffic on your sites sometimes jumps and what to do about it. You will also see a step-by-step scheme for using seasonal queries, get my recommendations and advice.

The fact that there are seasons, we are taught since kindergarten. We all understand, for example, why people need to dress differently depending on the months. An entire industry of industry that produces seasonal clothing depends on it. Of course, the seasonality of the year affects when we most often buy new coats, shoes and socks.

What is seasonal traffic and seasonal queries

AT search promotion also has its own "seasons" and they are expressed in the seasonality of search queries. It is the phrases from the search for Yandex and Google (as the main search sources of Runet) that determine the popularity of certain queries on different days.

If you look at the web analytics of a site that works with seasonal keywords, you can see their duration. Here is an example of such queries that are used in the seo-promotion of the culinary blog "Your Cook" (data taken by week):

The peaks of the graphs for each query show when these phrases are in demand. For example, the query "wine from grapes at home" became relevant only at the end of summer, and now in September it is gaining its peak. The phrase "champignons on the grill" is interesting mainly in the warm period (April-October), although these mushrooms can be bought at any time of the year. But cooking them on the grill in winter will not work (massively, at least).

Such requests generate search seasonal traffic, which is a component of the general one. At the peak of their seasonality, with proper SEO promotion, phrases that are inconsistent in time can bring a large number of transitions. And some topics on the site can become the most traffic on certain days.

Let's take a look and compare how seasonal traffic can differ from regular traffic. For example, let's evaluate the traffic of the three most popular traffic-generating pages of Your Cook for September 2015:

You can clearly see the difference in the number of clicks on a seasonal article and the usual two popular ones. food blog posts. Overall, the article about making wine received 4 times more traffic than the best content, which generates an even number of clicks throughout the year.

This is evidenced by the chart on the percentage of visits for September (a piece of it is visible in the figure on the right). The number 17.5% in the chart represents the share of this article's traffic in relation to the number of clicks on all other food blog posts. That is, if this article did not exist, then in September we would not have received about 90,000 visitors from the search (3,000 per day).

Of course, in a month, the traffic on this post about grape wine will subside, and over time, the number of visits will be reduced to a minimum. But now it brings huge traffic.

That's all the wisdom of working with seasonal traffic. Now you know how to find the maximum number of seasonal requests and how to use them to develop your resource.

If you have any questions for me, write in your comments to this article.

Sincerely, Your Maxim Dovzhenko