Chart the same weeks across three years, not against last month. A post-April decline is normal for compliance-weighted practices. What matters is the floor: if each year's off-season baseline sits lower than the last, that's erosion, not seasonality, and it usually means advisory content was never built.
The panic is annual and usually unnecessary
Every May, some accountant looks at their analytics, sees traffic down sixty per cent from March, and concludes something broke.
Nothing broke. People stopped searching for tax preparation because they stopped needing tax preparation. The chart is describing the calendar.
The useful question isn't whether traffic fell. It's whether this May is worse than last May.
The three-year floor test
Open Search Console → Performance. Set the date range to the last 16 months — the maximum the interface gives you — and note the shape.
Then compare like periods. Rather than March against May, compare this May against last May, and if you can get the data, the May before that. Search Console's 16-month window covers two points; for a third, use whatever you have in Analytics, or export each year as it passes so you have it next time. If nobody has been exporting, start now — it's the single highest-value habit for a seasonal business.
Read the floor, not the drop. The height of the peak varies with tax-season volume and doesn't tell you much. The floor — where traffic settles in the quiet months — is the number that reveals the trend.
Three outcomes:
Floor roughly flat year over year. Healthy seasonality. Your peak comes and goes and the underlying base is stable. Nothing to fix.
Floor rising. Something is working. Worth identifying what, so you do more of it.
Floor falling. This is the finding. Each year you return to a lower baseline, which means the practice is increasingly dependent on the seasonal spike and has less underneath it.
What a falling floor usually means
The compliance content ranks and does its job for three months. Nothing else on the site has anything to say for the other nine.
That's not laziness — it's what happens when a site is built around the service that generates the most search volume. The advisory pages that would carry the off-season either don't exist, or exist as a menu item nobody searches for.
The diagnostic overlap here is worth naming: a falling off-season floor and a query mix heavy on compliance are usually the same problem seen from two angles. If this post's test comes back negative, the query sort in how do I tell if I'm only visible for tax prep when I want advisory work will usually explain why.
The other thing to rule out first
Before concluding erosion, check whether the measurement changed.
A year-over-year comparison is only valid if you were counting the same way both years. Analytics reconfigurations, a switch in properties, bot-filtering changes, and consent-banner changes all produce apparent declines that are entirely artefacts of counting.
If your floor dropped sharply between two specific years rather than drifting down gradually, suspect the measurement before the market. Gradual drift is more likely to be real.
What you can and can't conclude
Directional — Whether your floor is falling. You can see it, and with three years of data it's reasonably solid.
Unconfirmed — Why. A falling baseline is consistent with thin advisory content, with competitors publishing more, with search-result displacement absorbing the informational queries you used to win, with a measurement change, or with some combination. Those look identical on this chart, and separating them requires page-level and query-level analysis over the same period — not just the traffic line.
Pending — What it's costing. Off-season search traffic and advisory revenue aren't linked tightly enough to convert one into the other without your own conversion data.
The habit worth starting
Export your Search Console performance data every quarter and keep it somewhere permanent. The interface only holds sixteen months, which means the three-year comparison this post asks for is impossible unless someone started saving it earlier.
Ten minutes a quarter now buys you a diagnosis you cannot otherwise make.
A falling seasonal floor is one of six symptoms in the full map at how do I tell if my website is losing me clients.
More on how we work with CPA and accounting firms.