Residents around many parts of the country have woken up to a blanket of snow this morning.
For some, this means a struggle to get to work and m any will choose to stay at home. Thousands of students will also be at home today after high schools and universities close.
All of this plays a part on the country’s use of the web. This can result in a number of unusual results in our website statistics, particularly for a Monday when most people would be starting their working week.
This video shows some of the snow around Christchurch this morning and explains how people might be using the Internet differently today.
Video Transcript:
Hi, my name’s Mark from NZS.com. As you can see behind me there’s a lot of snow around today and a lot of people are going to be stuck at home.
You might be wondering why an Internet company has an interest in the weather. Really anyone who’s interested in their website statistics should definitely be looking at them today and comparing them with the past because the Internet traffic will change quite a bit with the weather, surprisingly enough.
A lot of people probably stuck at home today. The universities will be closed, a lot more students at home so perhaps search traffic will rise for terms related to students like student jobs, courses, all that kind of stuff.
Obviously the morning will start with heaps of people searching for snow reports, road closures, so that they can find out whether they can get to their place of work.
If they can’t, or even if they can, a lot of staff will be at home so today’s going to be a really good opportunity for business owners and business managers to spend some time online – on their own website, on their search engine presence to see how well they’re doing in search results.
It’s a good chance to look at that and to look at opportunities that might lie in social media to get a bit more presence out there. There’ll be a lot of things that they’ve been wanting to do to their website, to their blog, to their newsletter that they might have been putting off for a long time because there’s too much other stuff going on.
There could be a lot of searches for website design ideas and things like that perhaps. Plenty of that on NZS.com of course. nzs.com/website-resources – you can see that straight from the home page on the menu. Jump in there, have a good look around, there’s a lot of contributors from across New Zealand, all web professionals that have all been contributing some articles and guides on how to get the most out of the Internet and out of website design, search engine optimisation, etc.
Check out the blog, nzs.com/blog, have a crank through that. There’s some good tips in there so subscribe and we’ll see you more in the future with some more tips and ideas.
Cheers, stay warm!
If you are looking at your website statistics today in places like Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Central, take a look at our guide to understanding search queries for some key stats to look out for.
