Catching Seasonal Trends to Stay Ahead

Regular monitoring of your traffic share across your competitors, as well as the broader industry, is crucial for your business. Understanding not only where users go, but how they engage with these sites, is a part of market strategy and analysis.

Many industries experience seasonal spikes in traffic, whether it be around the holidays, the summertime, or something more specific like Halloween. Search data is a key way to spot the trending ways in which users search for products, brands, or even topics, and with Similarweb’s Search Intelligence, there are a suite of tools that can guide you to finding what keywords to target, when they trend, and who is already winning on those terms.

Let’s pretend we’re Zara, looking at top competitors such as Uniqlo and Forever 21. Does our traffic align with theirs? Are they seeing any spikes that we’re missing out on? Is there a clothing trend during the summer months that we’re missing out on? Let’s find out.

 

Targeting the Traffic

Let’s start by running a traffic and engagement report. This is often a good place to start, since we can gauge the overall performance of your site compared to the top competitors. 

Start by going to the Web Intelligence platform. Then from there…

1. Under the Website Research module, click on Website Analysis.
2. Type in your site (we’re using Zara for the example), and select it from the menu.
3. Up top, click on the blue Compare button to add up to four additional sites to compare to.
4. Click on Traffic and Engagement to the left.
5. Adjust the time frame to the last 25 months for an over-two year trend.

 

What we can immediately see is the obvious: November ‘23 and ‘24 sees a spike in traffic across all sites. However, what else is going on? 

• Urban Outfitters sees a spike, at least 11%, in July both years.
• March is another month that generally sees a spike in traffic, although it was much greater in ‘23 than in ‘24.
• Uniqlo saw a rise in traffic in September, both years. 
• Overall, web traffic has gone down across the competitive set. (Note: change the date frame to the last 12 months and select the YOY toggle).

These are all interesting points to carry with us as we dive into the search reporting. Feel free to explore more actions and insights around Traffic and Engagement.

Now, let’s move onto Search Intelligence!

 

Finding the Crucial Keywords

A large part of the research necessary to discover trends and seasonality is search data. Similarweb has a whole suite of tools within our Search Intelligence module of reports to ascertain what’s going on. 

To begin, let’s go right to Keywords, which is found under the Website Explorer within the aforementioned module. However, since we’re already in Website Analysis, we can easily jump there without having to lose the websites we’re analyzing.

1. While in Website Analysis, click on Organic Overview under the Search section.
2. In the date range picker, change the time frame to the last 12 months (if it wasn’t already). 
3. Scroll down the page, and on the bottom right corner of the Search Traffic and Engagement trend report, click on the button that says Explore search keywords.
4. Before diving into the data, click on the Branded/Non-Branded filter and select Non-Branded.
5. Now we see the top keywords that have driven traffic to this competitive set over the last 12 months, excluding branded terms. If you scroll through, you’ll see keywords that have recently spiked under the change column. This gives us an idea of what’s currently trending, and they are a great place to start if you want to be more specific in your analysis. However, since we’re looking at a whole year, let’s wrangle the top terms we see and put them into a Keyword List.

Check out all that you can do with the Keywords report.

 

Creating a Keyword List

You can create a Keyword List directly from the Keywords report. Select any or all the terms, and create a new list from there. You can also add to a pre-existing list. This is a crucial step to this use case, because once this list is created, we can go forward with digging into seasonality spikes for certain products or brands. Find out about how to create Keyword Lists.

 

Demand Analysis

With the proper list created, let’s really start to learn what these trends are, and when they happen. Demand Analysis is a great tool to understand the search trends for a whole group of keywords, as well as picking out which individual keywords are trending and when.

1. Under Market Research, select Demand Analysis.
2. Find your newly made Keyword List and select it. 
3. In the upper right corner of the report, select the last 12 months, then toggle the YoY filter to see a year-over-year breakout.

 

In the above example, we see that overall the YoY trend is growing for these keywords, but be sure to take note of both charts. While the bar chart to the left looks promising, the line chart shows that demand was actually higher in the previous year for the latter months of the year other than December. This indicates that, while it was much higher earlier in the year, there’s been a shift and now demand is lower. Use these charts to gauge the overall demand for a product, brand, or in this case, to monitor if you’re keeping up with what’s popular overall. 

Scroll down a little more to see the top keywords and their trends. Not only will this call out specific seasonality spikes, but we’ll see if the demand has risen or fallen for each of these keywords both month-over-month and year-over-year. This is especially useful to determine the demand trend of specific brands, like New Balance in this example, or particular products such as loafers.

 

 

Lastly, the Keyword Trend Summary (Monthly Averages) report below will provide you a list of all the keywords and the Volume of searches they received for both time periods, as well as the PoP Change. Its the ultimate indicator of the brands or product you’d want to focus on. 

In this example (and the screenshot below) we see ’new balance’ as the most searched for keyword. While that’s a brand that Asos sells at their site, it’s still helpful for Zara to understand that that style of shoe is hot right now. When bringing this research to their product teams, this could be taken into consideration that for at least two years, ‘new balance’ has been the most searched for keyword out of the top keywords driving traffic to the competitive set. 

Dive in Demand Analysis to uncover more of its value.

 

When and Where do these Keywords Impact?

Now that we’ve found the keywords with the highest search volume, let’s discover WHEN our competitors are receiving traffic for these terms. Not only will it indicate the time frames we (as Zara) need to be aware of, but it will show us which products are trending, when, and to which sites specifically.

1. Under Search Intelligence > Keyword Explorer > SERP Players, type in and select the Keyword List.
2. Under the Total Clicks Over Time trend chart, select the Custom Industry* of your competitive set and then select 13M (for 13 months). (*To analyze only the competitive set in this report, you will want to create a Custom Industry of those websites.)

Find the peaks and valleys of the search traffic to these websites. De-select other sites to analyze one at a time, providing a concise understanding of the impact these keywords have on a specific competitor.

 

 

In the above example, we see that Urban Outfitters saw a big spike in May. Why? What happened then? Filter the report for May 2024, and scroll down to the Total Traffic Breakdown to see the Keywords driving traffic to them (and the competitors) specifically for that month. Look at one of the top terms, ‘white mini dress.’ Does that spike any other time, or specifically, in May ‘23? Go back to the Demand Analysis to ascertain if that’s a product you’re adequately focusing on, and do more keyword research if you already are to make sure you’re winning traffic.  

 

 

Discover all the value SERP Players provides.

 

Top Product (and Landing) Pages

As a final report for this use case, there’s the Landing Pages report. This takes you to the ultimate page-by-page analysis. You’ll find this report under Search Intelligence > Website Explorer.

Sticking with the Zara example, filter by month and by site to see the top trending products for the competitors. Use the keyword filter to input terms such as “white mini dress,” or be more broad and just input “dress” to see which product or landing pages are getting traffic for the terms of interest.

 

 

Do a deeper dive into Landing Pages.