There’s been a lot of chatter in Webmaster forums that Google must have unleashed a new search algorithm update in the first half of January. But as many of us know, the first quarter of the year is seasonally a strong quarter as new year’s resolutions are made and people are reinvigorated with hope until reality sinks in that the first three months of the year is really to pay taxes before you start earning any money for yourself.
In the first half of 2013, traffic on Financial Samurai surged by 50%-100% a day before slowing down by 25-30% during the summer and then flatlining in the second half of 2013. There was a slight 15% pickup in December as people prepared for the new year.
Now Financial Samurai traffic is up by 50%-100% again in January from December. If it wasn’t for the surge in January last year, I would be pretty ecstatic that something good had more permanently changed for the better ie a search algorithm update where Financial Samurai now ranks higher for whatever keyword(s). But the conservative old fart that I am, I’m just attributing everything to seasonality.
WHAT TRAFFIC CHANGES HAVE YOU EXPERIENCED?
It’s always hard to figure out what specific factor is the main reason for any traffic change, especially if you are in the high growth phase of your blog, which FS is no longer in. But I’d like to get an idea from all of you what you’ve been seeing in terms of organic search traffic and whether you’ve seen any unusual traffic changes (25%+) in January up or down. What about in the first half of 2013?
The only thing I’ve done recently is write an article on Forbes on retirement, a staff post on creating your investment edge on GRS, and do a ad spot for a client on Sirius satellite radio which is supposedly airing now. None of these extra activities have brought any significant amount of traffic (<5% of total). My posting schedule is also the same at 3-4X a week.
LIFESTYLE STRATEGY AS A BLOGGER
One of the main reasons why I want to study traffic seasonality is because I want to maximize my time throughout the year. Even though its hard to positively affect search engine algorithm changes, you certainly can do things to try to improve compared to seasonal traffic trends.
If it is certain that once you reach a “steady state” in terms of traffic that Summer and Fall are generally much slower than Spring and Winter, then my plan is to really kick back or plan those epic 1-2 month long trips from June – November every year.
It’s always good to “make hay while the sun is shining,” so if we can optimize our time throughout the year by working our hardest only during the seasonally highest traffic months, we’ll lower the chance of burnout and really increase our return on effort.
After all, one of the best things about running a site is that no matter where we are or what we do, we’ll still be able to receive traffic and earn income!
STARTING A MONEY MAKING BLOG
It’s been over seven years since I started Financial Samurai and I’m actually earning a good passive and active income stream online now. My online presence has allowed me to pursue other things, such as consulting for various financial tech startups as well.
I never thought I’d be able to quit my job in 2012 just three years after starting Financial Samurai. But by starting one financial crisis day in 2009, Financial Samurai actually makes more than my entire passive income total that took 15 years to build. If you enjoy writing, creating, connecting with people online, and enjoying more freedom, learn how you can set up a WordPress blog in 15 minutes like this one.
Leverage the 3+ billion internet users and build your brand online. There are professional bloggers now who make way more than bankers, doctors, lawyers, and entrepreneurs while having much more fun, much more freedom, and doing less work. Get started. You never know where the journey will take you!
Updated for 2017 and beyond.
Ugh. That’s a downer. I actually thought I was doing something good. :o/ Although I suspect it’s the New Year’s resolution-ers upping their finance game… for a month or two, now that you write that.
The only change I made was to join the Yakezie Challenge – which I can’t imagine would’ve doubled my traffic on it’s own (not that it was that high to begin with, but…).
So I guess now is the time to really find some topics I love writing about and try to hook some new readers for good.
It shouldn’t really be a downer to see traffic go up. Just take it as understanding seasonality and efforts and knowing everything matters. Just staying consistent is more than half the battle.
Interesting. After moving the podcast from one to three days a week I found myself in the weeds the last quarter and found the time by slowing down my blog posting. Now that I’ve been able to organize that better, my traffic’s up….but that’s just because I’m actively focusing on it again.
Hope it improves! You have an excellent podcast and a good radio voice.
I just checked my traffic over the same period last year, and it’s hard to tell. Traffic from Google is up 22% versus this time last year, which is nice. However, overall traffic to my site over the same period is up 100%, mostly due to social media and some referral traffic.
Compared to last year, I am down. Last period (month) I am about the same. Not exactly good news!
Hmmm, sorry to here. You’ve been very consistent with your content. Perhaps a round of guest posting in the works even if Matt Cutts says it’s dead?
Well, I am up big time compared to last January, but December was a extremely strong traffic month for me. I will wait it out.
Google simply obliterated my traffic last year. Steady month-over-month decline for the first half of the year. A rally in the summer, but then a 25% drop in September and then it more or less leveled off and another 25% drop in December. And as far as seasonality goes, nothing remotely aligns with the previous year!
So weird. Any idea why?
I’ve been trying to figure that out for a year. It started shortly after a Panda update, but my traffic hasn’t acted like how others have reported. Skipping in rankings compared to others have been suggested, but, while I’ve never actively tracked that, I still seem to rank strongly for the keywords that brought in the most traffic a year ago.
The only thing left that I can figure is my page loading times, which have gotten atrocious. I’m saving up for a redesign by Andrea this spring.
*edit: should have logged out. I haven’t moved much for one keyword, but others I’ve moved by entire pages, not individual rankings.
I don’t like looking at my analytics because it tends to get me down. I checked a few weeks ago for the first time in maybe 6-8 months or so and actually got rather depressed about it. But I’ve decided it’s not worth it to let it get to me and I’ve stopped checking. Maybe that’s foolish to ignore analytics though. I dunno.
Right now I blog because I enjoy writing and being involved with the Yakezie community, and hopefully I will build more traffic over time and someday give it a go full time. I don’t blogging for me to turn into constant statistics and comparing.
I’m pretty sure if I started posting more frequently without sacrificing quality my traffic would go up, but I can’t realistically do that right now. Sure I could sacrifice sleep and such, but I don’t want to burn out. And I’m trying hard to maintain my work life balance. Things just got bad for me when I was working too many hours last year and felt stressed out all the time.
Don’t be down Sydney! Let me do more to try to help in 2014! You’ve done a good job being consistent at least 2X a week all year.
Thanks Sam! I’ve tried really hard to keep up with posting twice a week. I feel so guilty if I were to only post once. Which isn’t the end of the world or anything, but I think it’s because in my heart I wish I could pump out three posts a week.
I have seen some comeback in my traffic in the last few weeks after deciding to check my analytics again, so that was an upside surprise!
January is always my best month of traffic. There is definitely a seasonality in traffic. This is also the reason I usually slow down in December as most people go on Holidays and don’t read my blog for the last 2 weeks. Then, people make resolution and start looking into their finance.
It’s like gym inscription: people think about their weight in January, before summer and after summer (’cause most people gain weight during their vacation). It’s about the same for finance, once they get back from vacation, they are looking for ways to make more money and pay off their debts because they are broke ;-)
My traffic is certainly up; a lot. It is well over double what it was last January and has increased by about 50% on November (in December it went down a bit. Need to do month by month analysis. Also, the increase comes mostly from search. Could just recently getting PR4 have something to do with this?
I don’t think PR has anything to do with the search traffic. I’ve gone up and down with PR and traffic has gone its independent way.
Did anyone notice a note on their Google Webmaster tools “Search Queries” chart? There is a vertical line dated 12/31/13 that says UPDATE with a pop-up caption that says that Google made an improvement to their search queries data. So there were definitely some changes made.
Running 5 different sites, my traffic numbers are all over the place. One of them shot up to 4x the traffic while another one went completely dead. But since then most of them seem to be returning back to their normal steady-state.
Hmm, my reply never came through.
What Google did there was simply start to provide more of the data it was already collecting. Google considers data such as indexed links and search queries to be proprietary and only shares a sampling of that data instead of all of it. In early January, they decided to start sharing slightly more of the search queries data and to make that decision retroactive to the beginning of the year.
Its interesting the impact people have had on their sites, but it seems like the most likely cause is the seasonal trends.
January has been solid, in terms of traffic and revenue. I’m hoping it continues, but certainly not counting any chickens just yet..
Only this week did my traffic get back to where it was before the holidays began at the end of November. I can’t say that it’s soaring, just back to a steady level. The only difference I’ve noted is that my key words are still bringing in quite a bit of traffic considering I’ve dropped in placement for certain key words (went from number one or two for certain keywords to the last on the first page!)
FWIW, I’ve been flat since ~ March 2013 on Google Traffic. I’m getting a lot more traffic from Referrals and that new ‘Social’ tab in Analytics… which is probably a good things since I used to be 80%+ Search.
Anyone else reading this – when you give your results I’m curious… are you using Google Plus?
Haven’t noticed the Social tab. Will check it out.
Yes; and interestingly some of my posts on G+ are front page search. Weird! I also have been building my Author’s profile (updating the links to my writing).
G+ has been shown to help e.g. correlation with G+ and better search, but that is no surprise since Google owns G+.
One blog is up year over year but down relative to December, no big surprise because people are looking for holiday bargains. The other is flat-to-down – gotta work on that for February.
I have recently hit the books hard on SEO and plan to build 100,000 views a month to my site by the end of the year. =)