Why You Must Account For Seasonality In SEO & SEM Projections
Digital marketers must often make projectionswhen creating strategies for search engine optimization, PPC, social media and even conversion rate optimization. This usually happens when a client or prospect asks forsome idea of what can be achieved when signing up for the service. Or for an in-house SEO or SEM, it would occur at the beginning of a new project or campaign.
After years of doing online marketing for many large and sophisticated projects, we have developed a pretty good system for putting together client projections. While I will not reveal our model in detail today, I will provide the basics and discuss why skipping seasonality implications can become a major issue.
Lets start bytalking briefly about online traffic and seasonality. In certain industries, the traffic plummets some months and surges in others. Consider an eCard company or online floral retailer. What do you think their traffic looks like in the weekleading up toValentines Day, compared to the week after? Ill give you a hint: It is wayhigher.
Due to thisfact of operating a seasonal online business, marketing professionals have to account for the historical business numbers. The agency or in-house marketer cant take credit for a surge in traffic when it is clearly seasonal, and they shouldnt be looked down upon for a seasonal drop.
Lets now cover some background on reporting and SEO projections. Then we can get into seasonality.
It is nice to have baseline traffic numbers that you can reference any time. This is more of just an FYI number so that you know the mean of traffic. To get the mean, take your total annual traffic and divide it by 12. You now know your average traffic number each month.
Once you have this information, you can be aware of where your client is in comparison to this number in any given month. Its a good number to have in your head for your own personal knowledge and the clients.
Of course, one of the most important things you need to consider is the percentage increase year-over-year. If your client is experiencing a 10% year-over-year traffic increase in month 1and month 2, that means your traffic growth is flat. If you are at 12% year-over-year in month 3, you have grown 2% since the year started. Its all about understanding these margins and if there is margin growth based on your baseline of growth that already exists.
Of course, you need to be careful how much weight you give to increases and decreases. SEO can be fickle, as we all know. Some months are up and others can be down the main goal should be to see a clear upward trendover the course of the contract, with positive year-over-year numbers.
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Why You Must Account For Seasonality In SEO & SEM Projections