When evaluating your business’s yearly gains, make sure that you’re comparing online traffic secured in year over year time frames. For example, compare May 2013’s growth to May 2012’s and not February 2012’s. A big part of SEO is understanding how and why people come to your website, and when they do so most often.

Users are attracted to your website based on the product that you provide. Most manufactured products are somewhat seasonal, so traffic will obviously be higher during peak user times. Seeing traffic go up over time is good, but businesses generally have some kind of seasonality. It’s important to think about the seasonality and your product, and gauge growth via that.

Here are three things to consider in order to accurately measuring online growth:

1. Use Google Analytics:
   Google Analytics is a great tool for searching traffic in time frames. When performing a search, you have the ability to determine just a few select months and you are able to click through and look at natural search results and traffic.
   
   You can select a specific time frame, and there is an option to compare two different time periods. This will give you a complete comparison between two different time segments. This is a very helpful tool for examining seasonality.
   
2. Determine your Business Type:
   You’ll also need to determine how seasonality is important in different businesses. GoEpps works with a lot of residential service companies, and a lot of these offer seasonal services.
   
   For example, one of our landscaping clients receives a lot of traffic during the spring for emergency tree services. Using year over year data, we can optimize their content toward this. We are able to get more traffic during the storm season; therefore, getting them more business.
   
3. Consider Seasonality:
   Think about your business and your seasonality. When do things slow down and pick up? Does work pick up for you at certain times of the year?
   
   View these patterns across multiple years; this data will help you assess how your business is affected by seasonality. These patterns will help you understand, from another source of data, how your business is affected by seasonality, and enable you to prepare a response plan.
   

We help businesses grow in spite of seasonality. Considering the seasonality of your business will help you to understand the patterns that drive revenue dollars. Understanding seasonality will allow your team to create goods and services that market toward off-season times.