How much does the weather affect search engine traffic?

So... yet another summer is over. The question everyone seems to be asking is 'where did it go?' It seems that yet again, a summer which promised so much from the weather forecasters back in Spring turned out to be mainly wet and generally quite miserable, save for a few glorious days.

While the sun was shining/rain was coming down, we were hard at work on several search engine optimisation campaigns. When planning an SEO project, it is imperative to know which phrases to target based on common sense, key phrase research, competitor analysis and various other techniques. Quite often we can predict how easy/hard it will be to get a client website ranked on the target phrases for their website. And now that we have more information at our disposal about which phrases generated the most traffic, and more importantly, how much, our selection process is becoming easier.

However, the figures we work on are predictions, based mainly on previous behaviour with search engines (although sometimes Googles figures are not that great when compared to reality...). But what effects search engine usage? There are a number of factors ranging from user age or experience, through to time of year or even the weather...

Having worked on some campaigns for clients in the last few months, we've seen that traffic has gone down in the last few months. Ok, the summer holidays have been and gone which means that most of the (small) business world stops for several weeks. But surely Google/search engine searches never stop. Or do they? There are dozens of industries which rely on the weather to make their businesses work, but it's interesting to see what affect this has on search engine traffic and searches.

Some industries which I can think of which rely on the British Summer are shown below using Google Trends to show traffic over the last few years.



The aim of this graph is to show where searchers in the UK look for their holidays; either camping in the UK or trips to the sun in Spain. As you can see there are various peaks and troughs which we can assume are down to the weather for those years (see the BBC news article showing sunshine and rainfall recorded in the UK).

Comparing two great British summer pastimes Cluedo and Conquet (ok, well not 'great', but still relatively popular to make it onto a Google Trend graph) you can again see that the Summer of 2006 bought people out in the dozens to play croquet rather stay indoors playing board games. In 2007, it was a different matter with Cluedo nearly catching up with the famous lawn sport. I guess everyone wanted to know if Mr Plum did do it or not.



These are just two examples of where we can see external factors having an affect on search engine traffic and user behaviour.

The weather isn't something that you can control yet (although I'm sure Google are working on that) but it may need to be considered for your business website. When planning a search engine campaign, it is important to try and take into account every possible factor you can to ensure that you get the best results from your marketing spend.