October 2023 trends
I wrote a blog earlier on in the year when I noticed some significant changes in traffic and engagement in January/February.
And it’s happened again!
At White Knight, we prepare a lot of SEO ranking reports for clients every month. We do these at the same time every month, so we have a 30-day comparison.
Currently, we send out around 25 each month regularly and audit around 10 others monthly, as and when necessary. This gives up a great insight into the state of the market in general because we have clients across all sectors, so we get a good overview of trends.
For those of you who have had a quiet October, less sales, less enquiries, I can categorically say that this is because traffic dropped across all websites and searches last month. Only one client bucked the trend, and they were new and building visitors.
Traffic was not only down to websites, but it was also down in search generally; less people were making fewer searches, therefore, less traffic as borne out by Google My Business results. These echoed the activity shown on websites and highlighted a reduction in direct search, calls, and directions via this platform.
On Monday, BBC Radio 4 carried an article about how retail enquiries/sales were down in October for a significant number of businesses. We are here to tell you that it was not just retailers, so if you’re amongst the many that had reduced sales/enquiries during this period, you were not alone.
As the hit (circa 20% down in most cases), was such an anomaly for October, we do not predict this continuing, but we will be watching this space very carefully and if this continues, we will report again next month with some suggestions to improve this situation.
