Seasonal keyword tracking locally?

[JanetJ]

I'm managing a project for a local fence contractor in Wisconsin. During Fall, his site was getting a fair amount of traffic. (We only track traffic from the State of Wisconsin and exclude office IPs.) For November, traffic tanked and keywords fell. Is there a way to check the search volume by month to see if the recent extreme cold and early snow are the culprit, (people not searching for fences), or should I be looking elsewhere for a problem?

I know I have to get more pages optimized for ideal keywords but time is extremely tight on this project. (But, that's another problem and story all of itself!)

Thanks!

[Linda-Vassily]

You can get monthly search volume through Google Adwords Keyword Planner, where you can filter by date range. You can even compare to the previous month or the same month last year. (You have to have an Adwords account, but it doesn't cost anything to get one if you don't already have it.)

[JanetJ]

Thanks Linda - I did try the Keyword Planner before I posted here but it only showed information through October. I'd like to see November. Do you have any idea how often Google updates that information?

[Linda-Vassily]

No, I do not know when they update, sorry. (But we are only a few days into December, so they might just not have their data for November compiled quite yet.)

You could try searching a past month where you know it went from being warm to cold and snowy and see what the traffic change looked like then, just to give you a general idea.

[Gyi]

One place to look is impression data from Google Webmaster Tools? Hopefully, if you've linked GWMT to Google Analytics, you might also be able to compare to previous year(s). Are you buying keywords on AdWords? You could look at impression data there too.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Janet,

Common sense would definitely suggest that less people are going to be looking for fence contractors in the winter in a snowy place like Wisconsin, and I would expect that the contractors are used to this seasonal flux. Your best bet here would be to look at previous years' analytics to confirm, if the website was hooked up to this in years past, but even without that data, I would bet dollars to doughnuts that this type of fluctuation is completely normal for this time of year in this industry and geography.

[JanetJ]

I agree with you 100%, Miriam, but the client is disagreeing with me. Ugh!!

[Linda-Vassily]

I do see the Adwords data for November is up now, so you can check your keywords.

[JanetJ]

Yup, Linda - I just checked it and as suspected, it is decreasing.

[KeriMorgret]

Another thought would be to look at Google Trends. I did a quick search for fence repair in the US http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=fence+repair&geo=US  and over the last several years, winter clearly has a dip in searches. Also interesting is that the southern states have more searches than the northern states in general.