A couple of years ago we highlighted the extraordinary case of Woodlands Junior School, the best optimised school website in the UK. It appears high up on the Google SERP for popular seasonal terms such as ‘mothers day’, ‘pancake day’, ‘easter’ and ‘lent’. Back in 2008 Woodlands Junior School was the biggest recipient of traffic from the search term ‘mothers day’, and this year it’s done it again. As the chart below illustrates, for the 12 weeks ending 13/03/10 the site picked up over a third of all clicks on the term – more than three times as much as Wikipedia, and much more than any commercial sites (many of which, unlike Woodlands, paid for much of their traffic).

Over the same 12 week period, the Woodlands Junior School site picked up traffic from over 42,000 different search terms, 349 of which were Mothering Sunday related. The site’s success means that it currently ranks second in our Education – Institutions category, behind the Open University but ahead of all the other University websites in the UK! And this isn’t a freak month: the site has ranked in second position since September last year, and has been in the top 5 for most of the last three years.
Back to Mother’s Day, and it’s interesting to see from the chart below that, although searches for the basic term ‘mothers day’ peaked on the week ending 06/03/10 and declined slightly last week (first chart), taking all the variations into account searches continued to increase significantly last week (second chart).


Clearly what happened was that people searched for information and the data first, before refining their searches closer to the date as they sought presents. The table below lists the top variations on the term ‘mothers day’ last week, with the more transactional terms unsurprisingly attracting higher paid rates.

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