My sales just hit new records for one of my businesses and I noticed a surge in traffic starting about two weeks ago that has sustained itself since. It's good traffic too as my conversion is 4.15% which it what i often is but with the increased traffic I'm getting more sales. Any idea why this traffic surge happened about two weeks ago? Did Google change anything? Thanks
This surge happened on your website? If you use google webmasters / analytics you can check why this happened.
I searched for Google updates and saw Penguin 3.0 was released on October 17 which is the exact date my traffic surged. Does this mean my traffic will remain at this higher level from now on? Could another Google update cause it to fall back down? Thanks
Of course. It can fall back down just because too. Supposedly, if you keep a site free of spam / duplicate content / long tail keywords and overall play by the rules, Google may promote that site in its SERP. Just enjoy what you've got. Nobody can guarantee whether it will last or not. I truly hope it will last for you.
It only means that Google likes what you're doing for now So enjoy while it lasts! I think it'll be good to check your analytics to ensure that it is really because of the update.
Also you need to check properly if the surge is from Google organic results or just some new bots / robots crawling your site. It happened to us earlier that a bot named semalt inflated our hits a lot and we were mistakenly thinking it to be normal organic boost
Many of our and our customer websites saw the same thing a few weeks ago, we also suspect it was highly penguin 3.0 related giving the time of the increase versus when it was said to be released. As others have said, check WMT and Analytics to see where the traffic is coming from. If your sales also grew, I'd be putting money on it had something to do with organic search / penguin if you didn't invest in any extra advertising during that time.
You might be having a Google Analytics and Google Webmasters account which provides all the relevant information related to your incoming traffic, so you can check why there was a surge in your traffic.