Seasonal changes or real-world events
When the May 2022 core update happened, many site owners looked at their Google Analytics traffic and incorrectly thought they had been impacted by the update when in reality, the changes seen were due to temporary changes in searcher behaviour. The May core update happened at the same time as a holiday weekend in the United States. For many sites, traffic patterns will be different during a holiday as people’s search habits often change.
Also, in some situations, the SERPS may change to reflect different changing user search intent due to seasonality. For example, many SERPS can change to contain more eCommerce pages in the weeks leading up to Christmas. If you run an informational site you might notice a loss in rankings and traffic because of this.
When we assess traffic drops we will often compare year-over-year traffic patterns to help determine whether seasonality is in play. Here is a client of ours that appears to have a loss in traffic.
However, when we look at YOY traffic we can see that this is normal for them because they have a seasonal business that tends to be in demand less in the summer.
YOY traffic comparisons can be tricky to interpret these days given the world shake-ups that have happened in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic. Many sites we monitor saw huge drops in traffic in March of 2020 related to the official pandemic announcement and widespread lockdowns.
Here is one:
While this drop looks similar to an algorithm update hit, a lot of things changed in the world following March 11, 2020. This was the **** on which the pandemic became a reality to most — the NBA shut down due to Covid fears and the US stopped allowing incoming air traffic. In essence, it created a real domino effect.
If your site has been operational for several years, you may find you need to compare this year’s traffic to pre-pandemic years to determine whether the changes you are seeing are simply normal seasonal fluctuations.
If business (i.e. sales, traffic, etc) has changed dramatically because of the effects of the pandemic, it may not be possible to thoroughly analyze the effect of the changes in user behaviour unless you are intimately familiar with which aspects of the business have been affected.
Jason Dodge had a good question when it comes to this topic:
How do you take into account outside environmental and economic factors that can impact your website traffic?
— Jason Dodge (@dodgejd) July 7, 2022
Sometimes it can be hard to know whether a world event or seasonal change has affected a site’s traffic. It obviously helps to know the industry that the site covers. A sports site is going to see fluctuations depending on what season each sport is in.
A tip for analyzing YOY traffic in GSC:
GSC’s interface makes comparing specific **** periods difficult in some cases. We have found the Easy Custom Comparison Chrome extension very helpful here.
Analyzing trends:
Another helpful tip is to use Google Trends to see whether there has been a spike or decline in interest in the topics of the pages that are seeing traffic drops. Here is a client that came to us convinced they were affected by a Google update. We were able to discern in our traffic drop assessment that the specific decline they saw was likely explained by less interest in their topics.
Here is another situation for a client that sees seasonal fluctuations. Their main product is in demand more often in the summer months. Traffic mirrored the Google Trends data.
Wherever possible we add significant world events or dates to our list of known and suspected algorithm updates.
It’s sometimes helpful to search for “top news stories from [****]” or “what happened in on [****]” to see if something dramatic happened in the world or locally at the time of your traffic drop as well.
In cases where world events have affected traffic, you should notice that traffic is down across all search engines and not just Google. With that said, however, in Google’s guide to how they fight disinformation they tell us that in “times of crisis” they may adjust their algorithms to prefer authoritativeness and trustworthiness. We believe this could contribute to traffic drops for many of the sites that saw changes in March of 2020 (early in the Coronavirus pandemic) and February 24, 2022 (Russia invaded Ukraine).
One final thing to consider when it comes to world events affecting site traffic is that much of the world is suffering from financial struggles right now. It may be that there is less demand for your products or services because we are in an unprecedented time of financial struggle.
Ah that’s something i will add as well…I think some traffic drops could be due to the impact of the looming (or perhaps already here) recession😥
— Dr. Marie Haynes🐧 (@Marie_Haynes) July 8, 2022
