bored marketers

Interest in a product or subject changes over time and whether you’re trying to increase the number of people who arrive at your website ( preferably people who have searched with a commercial intention ) or fill a physical business with paying customers, trends in interest are something to remain aware of.

If traffic to your website comes from search results ( both paid Ads and the Organic ) and you watch the statistics with Google Analytics or a similar app, you can see the number of clicks to your website for search-phrases fluctuate over time. Sometimes the traffic volume decreases each weekend and rises up over the working-week and there are some terms that have a seasonal variation of interest.

Maintaining traffic to a website involves appearing in the search results for enough diverse terms so that when interest decreases for some, the traffic volume is maintained by others.

Today we have supercomputers that provide access to incredible amounts of data and it’s doable for anyone to locate the cause for decreasing traffic to a site and interest in a service. Here’s an example of a recent evaluation I did for a client : there was a downtrend in quote requests …

graph showing trend

Taking the phrases the website was appearing on page one of Google for, I compared the pattern of the quote request graph with the graphs of relevant phrases in Google trends. I was looking for was a pattern of change that matched the quote-requests pattern, which may have been a cause. The Google trend for roof repair was a close match …

google trends for roof repair

Then looking at the volume of Organic search traffic to the website overall and for the single search phrase you can see the resulting decrease for that phrase ( even though the client was still mid-page one of the search results for roof repair ).

total search volume

roof repair search volume

Which searches lead to a sale ?

Some search phrases can bring in the same number of contacts as other phrases, but result in more sales than the others.

The volume of calls and contacts while a measure of inflow, don’t by themselves tell you if they lead to a job. Total search volume and what the search-phrases were that got the click don’t say enough either. The data that’s needed, is from the customers who paid – “what was the search phrase you typed to find us”. These phrases are often called “paycheque keywords”.

Interest in search phrases or products changes over time, so if interest is decreasing for a previously good keyword phrase he solution is to –

  • locate other paycheque keywords that currently have high interest,
  • make up for the decreased interest in roof repair by continuing to increase the presence of the website in search results for the original term.