ftwb05 - 8:41 pm on Oct 6, 2007 (gmt 0)

For the majority of my websites (consumer electronics)this is a quiet time of year - visitors drop off, revenue goes down, and it can be too easy to think it's something to do with penalties, algo changes or other things out of my direct control.

So what I do is punch in my most historically important key-words and phrases to Google trends and look at what has been happening over the last few years.

I find it a good morale booster, you can see the traffic spikes that will be coming, and it spurs me on to update relevant pages and add new content to catch those all important new, related keywords.

I know from my Google analytics data and Google trends that for one of my most important key-phrases, "widget thingamy" there is always a lull in the Spring, a spike in the Summer, another lull in the Autumn, and then a huge spike towards Christmas, so I make sure that particular site is more than ready to catch all those fresh visitors, with the new related widgets and thingamy's. I double check browser compatibility, broken links, and fine tune any ad layout and positioning experiments.

Aspirational goods that I may have trouble getting individual pages ranked for (too much heavy competition) get links on the pages I know I will do well on - and people always click across.

Christmas is coming - are you ready?