Wondering about seasonal variations in Google traffic

[ichthyous]

Hi there, I have noticed a slow leak in traffic all throughout the month of May, and now traffic is down about 20% since the end of April. Normally when a Google update affects my site there is a sharp drop in traffic, but this time it's been a slow steady week over week decline. I have also noticed that the variation in traffic from day to day has gotten a lot more 'spikey'...i.e. it can range by a few hundred people on a weekday, whereas all Winter and through April it was a very close range. I am wondering if this may be the effect of universities and schools letting out for summer? I have always seen a large amount of traffic from educational institutions from K-12 to major unis around the world. A quick check of my SERPS for about 20 terms important to my business shows that my position has mostly increased since about two weeks ago and I am on page one for 19/20 terms. Thanks

[tedster]

Can you see if traffic is down across all your top ranking keywords, or only some are affected?

[mayest]

ichthyous, I run a site that is primarily used by university students (lots of .edu backlinks) taking courses in a particular subject area. I see exactly the pattern that you mentioned.

I've only been using GA for the last year, so I don't have a long time frame to compare. Still, looking at my traffic shows that it starts to pick up a lot in mid-August, stays high until mid-December, and picks up again in mid-January. In about mid-May traffic began slowing as you mentioned. This pretty clearly tracks typical semesters in US universities.

Demographics is destiny. Now, if I could just figure out how to better monetize these students.

[tedster]

Even beyond having fewer interested people at different seasons, keyword ranking and sitelinks can now be affected by seasonal changes - or even by the day of the week or time of day. Check out this April 2007 patent on Scoring based on Traffic Analysis [appft1.uspto.gov]

You also might find it interesting to check your important keywords on Google Trends [google.com] for spikes and dips.

[mayest]

tedster, thanks for suggesting Google Trends. That was enlightening. For my most important keywords, it seems that there is a spike in searches in the third quarter of every year over the past several years. There is a much smaller spike again in the first quarter. To my mind, that confirms my semester theory for my site's traffic.