The Memorial Day Dip: How One Holiday Weekend Hit 17 Websites Across 13 Industries
By Cara Bunda • June 7, 2026 • Digital Marketing
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By Cara Bunda • June 7, 2026 • Digital Marketing
By Cara Bunda • June 7, 2026 • News, Digital Marketing
If you manage a website, you've probably noticed it: traffic gets quiet around a holiday. You check Search Console the Tuesday after a long weekend, see a dip, and wonder for a second whether something broke. Usually nothing did. People simply stepped away from their screens.
But "people step away on holidays" is the kind of thing everyone knows and almost no one actually measures. So this month we did. Memorial Day 2026 fell on Monday, May 25, capping a three-day weekend (Saturday May 23 through Monday May 25). We pulled day-by-day Google Search Console data for every site in our portfolio and isolated that exact window, then compared it against the surrounding two weeks of normal activity (May 16–22 and May 26–June 1).
The result is a clean natural experiment: the same holiday, the same calendar, hitting seventeen different websites across roughly a dozen industries — from a one-person leadership podcast to a statewide tourism platform doing half a million impressions a day. What we found is that the "holiday dip" is real, but it is wildly uneven. Some sites lost more than three-quarters of their clicks. One barely moved. And two actually grew over the weekend. The difference between them tells you almost everything about who their audience is and when those people are searching.
This is a companion to our May 2026 client benchmark report, where several clients' monthly numbers carried a Memorial Day footnote. Here we zoom all the way in on the weekend itself.
A quick word on method, because it matters for reading the numbers below. We measured the average clicks per day during the three-day holiday window against the average clicks per day across the fourteen surrounding non-holiday days. For larger sites, that percentage is highly reliable. For very small sites — ones earning only a handful of clicks a day — a swing of one or two clicks produces a huge-looking percentage off a tiny base, so we flag those as directional rather than precise. Two sites (The Diligent Leader and Toll Talk) run at volumes so low that a holiday is statistically indistinguishable from any other quiet day, so we've left them out of the math and discuss them qualitatively at the end.
Throughout, we list the actual clicks for each of the three holiday days — Saturday May 23 / Sunday May 24 / Memorial Day Monday May 25 — so you can see the shape of each dip, not just the summary number.
Here's what each site did.
Systcom — 0 / 1 / 2 clicks — down ~77%. The commercial technology integrator (AV, network cabling, data infrastructure) posted the sharpest collapse in the portfolio. Against a normal weekday rhythm of roughly four to five clicks a day, the three holiday days produced just three clicks combined — and Saturday May 23 recorded zero. Crucially, impressions held completely steady (around 1,100–1,400/day) and average position didn't budge from its usual ~19–20. Google kept serving Systcom's pages to the same audience; that audience — office managers and facilities buyers — simply wasn't working over the long weekend.
ITS (Interactive Touchscreen Solutions) — 6 / 1 / 10 clicks — down ~39%. The digital signage and wayfinding company told the identical story one notch softer. Sunday May 24's single click was the worst click-day in its entire three-month record, while impressions stayed flat at ~3,800 and position held near 20. Same signature: visibility unchanged, clicks evaporated, because the B2B research audience went dark. (Monday's bounce to 10 is the audience starting to trickle back.)
MOJO (our own site) — 5 / 8 / 4 clicks — down ~42%. We'll own the cobbler's-shoes reality, as always: mojo.biz behaved exactly like our B2B clients. Against a ~10/day weekday norm, the holiday produced 17 clicks across three days, with impressions rock-steady around 6,000–7,800/day. The people researching marketing and web-design services are a Monday-through-Friday crowd, and our own data proves it.
Beal Industrial Products — 1 / 2 / 1 clicks — down ~33%. The industrial-battery and energy-solutions company showed the B2B dip in a slightly different metric. Clicks were low (4 across the window) but already noisy day-to-day; the cleaner tell was impressions, which sagged on the weekend days (Saturday fell to 189 against a weekday norm in the 350–450 range), reflecting fewer searches happening at all from a B2B buyer base that goes quiet on holidays.
getpiping (plumbing/piping) — 4 / 9 / 16 clicks — down ~36%. Clicks fell from a mid-teens weekday average to under ten across the window, with Saturday bottoming out at four. Impressions held steady (~300/day) while average position drifted into the high teens and low twenties on the holiday days — a clicks-and-position dip rather than a visibility one. Note the climb across the three days (4 → 9 → 16): the audience was already returning by Monday.
Scardina Home Services (HVAC/plumbing) — 2 / 4 / 9 clicks — down ~23%, and unusually shaped. Scardina took its hit on Saturday (just two clicks, on the lowest impression count of late May) but then recovered through the holiday itself — Memorial Day Monday climbed to nine. That fits a home-services business with an emergency component: HVAC and plumbing problems don't observe holidays, and a warm late-May weekend can actively generate "AC not cooling" searches.
Maryland Curbscape (concrete/curbing) — 0 / 1 / 0 clicks — down ~67%. Blake's Asphalt (paving) — 1 / 0 / 0 clicks — down ~82%. Buxton Media (video production) — 0 / 1 / 1 clicks — down ~65%. These percentages are mathematically correct but come off baselines of just one to two clicks on a normal day, so the holiday weekend going quiet means the difference between two clicks and zero — directionally a real dip, consistent with the contractor pattern, but too small in absolute terms to read as precisely as the percentage implies. For Curbscape and Blake's, impressions held flat through the weekend while clicks and average position softened; for Buxton, the dip was mild and well within its normal day-to-day noise.
Mabrey Law — 16 / 7 / 11 clicks — down ~33%, but for an interesting reason. This is the one that looks backwards at first. Across the holiday weekend, Mabrey's impressions rose to among the month's highest (6,500–8,000/day) while clicks fell — Sunday's seven against a weekday norm near sixteen to twenty. Rankings stayed strong on page one the whole time. So this wasn't a visibility problem at all: Google showed the firm's pages to more people, but holiday searchers dealing with traffic and criminal-defense matters clicked through less. It's the zero-click-era pattern in miniature — more exposure, fewer clicks.
Fello (disability/self-directed services) — 128 / 103 / 144 clicks — down ~33%. Partners In Care (senior services) — 20 / 14 / 17 clicks — down ~32%. Fello Communities (affordable-housing development) — 11 / 4 / 5 clicks — down ~30%. All three human-services organizations softened by roughly a third. Fello's volume makes its dip the most statistically meaningful (a ~187/day weekday average falling to ~125/day across the holiday). The important nuance for all three: every one already shows a pronounced every-weekend lull, because their audiences engage with this content during the work week. So the Memorial Day dip is partly the normal Saturday-Sunday pattern, extended across a third day. The holiday-specific tells were subtle — slightly softer rankings, and for the two community-facing sites, impressions falling alongside clicks (meaning fewer searches were happening, not just fewer clicks).
Estate Specialist (estate cleanout services) — 8 / 6 / 5 clicks — up ~45%. Far from dipping, the estate-services site had one of its strongest stretches of the month over the holiday weekend, with Saturday May 23's eight clicks among its best days. The reason is human: estate and bereavement-driven services aren't tied to a workweek, and a long weekend is often exactly when families finally have time to deal with a property. (Note: this site's Search Console was only connected in early May, so we measured it within-month rather than against an April baseline.)
Sanford & Son Coins & Collectibles (local retail/antiques) — 8 / 10 / 7 clicks — down ~10%, essentially flat. The coin and antiques shop held right in its normal range across the weekend, then surged immediately after — May 29–30 produced 15 and 19 clicks, two of its best days in the entire dataset. High-intent local searches like "antique buyers near me" don't pause for a holiday; if anything, a long weekend is when people have time to deal with selling collectibles.
mdsheds / Pine Creek Structures (outdoor storage structures) — 14 / 12 / 14 clicks — flat, ~2%. The shed company didn't dip at all, holding 14, 12, and 14 across the three holiday days, dead in line with its weekday norm. This is the DIY logic at work: Memorial Day is prime backyard-project season, and the county-by-county shed-permit content that drove this site's breakout spring (covered in our May benchmark) captures exactly the homeowner who spends a day off measuring the yard and Googling permit rules.
Visit Maryland (statewide tourism) — 3,974 / 4,850 / 4,944 clicks — up ~4%, and it's the most reliable number we have. The largest site in the portfolio — roughly half a million impressions a day — actually grew over the holiday weekend. Sunday and Monday (4,850 and 4,944 clicks) ranked among the strongest days of the month, and it kept climbing into the following week (May 30 hit 6,210). For a tourism platform this is exactly right: a long weekend is peak travel-planning and day-trip time. The same Saturday-through-Monday that silenced the B2B sites is precisely when a destination-marketing audience shows up.
Lay the sites side by side and a clear logic emerges. The Memorial Day dip wasn't really about SEO at all — rankings and impressions mostly held steady across the board. It was about who each site's audience is and whether those people were working, resting, or planning over the long weekend.
B2B and professional services dipped the hardest. Systcom (3 clicks across the weekend), ITS (17), MOJO (17), and Beal (4) — the sites whose buyers are at a desk Monday through Friday — saw clicks fall between roughly 33% and 77% while their impressions barely moved. When your audience is the workforce, a holiday removes them almost entirely. This was the most consistent and clean-cut signal in the data.
The trades dipped moderately. Plumbing, HVAC, concrete, and paving contractors (getpiping, Scardina, Curbscape, Blake's) softened in the 20–40% range on a like-for-like basis, typically with impressions holding and clicks-plus-position easing. The exception was the emergency-services edge: Scardina actually recovered on the holiday itself, because broken air conditioning doesn't wait.
Human-services nonprofits dipped about a third — but it's partly their normal weekend. Fello, Fello Communities, and Partners In Care each came down roughly 30–33%, layered on top of an existing weekend lull that's structural to how their audiences engage.
Non-discretionary and consumer-driven services held steady or rose. Estate services and local antiques/coin retail didn't dip, because their demand is event-driven and time-rich on a holiday, not calendar-bound to a workweek.
Leisure, DIY, and travel rose. Outdoor structures and tourism treated Memorial Day as a tailwind. These are the categories people actively engage with because they have a day off.
The single most useful way to summarize it: the holiday didn't reduce demand, it relocated it. The exact same long weekend that emptied out a commercial-AV integrator's traffic filled up a tourism site's. Demand didn't disappear — it moved to the businesses whose audiences had time and reason to search.
Across the fifteen sites with enough volume to measure cleanly (excluding the two too-small-to-read podcast and coaching sites), here's the aggregate picture, calculated three ways because each answers a different question.
Equal-weighted across all measured sites: about −33%. If you treat every business the same regardless of size — giving the one-person contractor the same weight as the statewide platform — the average site saw its daily clicks fall by roughly a third over the Memorial Day weekend. This is the best answer to "what did a typical site in our portfolio experience."
Among the sites that actually dipped: about −43%. Fourteen of the seventeen sites declined. Averaged together, those dippers lost roughly 43% of their daily clicks across the holiday window — though that figure is pulled upward by the small-base contractor sites, where a one-click swing reads as a large percentage.
Volume-weighted across the whole portfolio: roughly flat, about +1.5%. And here's the most important caveat in the entire analysis: when you weight by actual click volume, the portfolio barely moved — because Visit Maryland alone produces more clicks in a single day (nearly 5,000) than every other site combined produces in a month, and Visit Maryland grew. Strip Visit Maryland out, and the volume-weighted total for everyone else lands at about −31%.
That spread — a typical site down a third, the trades and B2B down anywhere from a quarter to three-quarters, and the single biggest site actually up — is the real finding. There is no one "Memorial Day dip." There's a B2B dip of 40–77%, a trades dip of 20–40%, a nonprofit dip of ~30% that's half normal-weekend behavior, a flat-to-positive consumer and non-discretionary group, and a travel-and-leisure bump. The holiday is the same for everyone. The audience is not.
A few practical takeaways fall out of this for any business watching its own search traffic around holidays.
First, a holiday dip is almost never a problem to fix. In nearly every case here, impressions and rankings held steady straight through the weekend — the dip was entirely on the click side, and entirely about human behavior. If you see softer traffic the day after a long weekend, the data overwhelmingly says: wait two days. Every single dipping site in this analysis rebounded to normal or better within the week.
Second, know which kind of business you are, and plan content timing around it. If your audience is B2B, don't launch your most important content on the Friday of a holiday weekend — you'll spend your best material into an empty room. If you're in tourism, DIY, retail, or any leisure category, the holiday is exactly when to have your seasonal content ranking and ready, because that's when your audience shows up. Visit Maryland's Memorial Day guide and mdsheds' shed-permit cluster both earned their best numbers because they were positioned for the moment.
Third, the dip you should actually scrutinize is the one that doesn't recover, or the one that shows up in impressions and rankings rather than just clicks. A holiday clicks-dip on steady impressions is the calendar talking. A sustained slide in impressions or average position is the thing worth a real diagnosis — and telling those two apart is exactly what a careful look at the daily data lets you do.
That, in the end, is the whole point of measuring something everyone already assumes they understand. "Traffic dips on holidays" is true. But it's true in fifteen different ways at once, and knowing which way it's true for your business is what turns a worrying-looking chart into a decision you can actually act on.
Want this kind of analysis on your own site? Every MOJO client gets monthly reporting with this level of depth — and when a holiday weekend, an algorithm update, or a seasonal swing moves your numbers, we tell you exactly which kind of move it is and what (if anything) to do about it.
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In almost every case, no. Across the portfolio, impressions and average rankings held steady straight through the holiday weekend — the decline showed up almost entirely in clicks. That combination (steady visibility, fewer clicks) is the signature of an audience stepping away, not a technical or ranking problem. Every site that dipped rebounded to normal or better within the same week.
It comes down to who the audience is and whether they were working or resting over the long weekend. B2B and professional-services sites (like Systcom, down ~77%) lost the most, because their buyers are at a desk Monday through Friday. Tourism and DIY sites (like Visit Maryland and mdsheds) held steady or grew, because a long weekend is exactly when their audiences are planning trips and backyard projects. The holiday didn't reduce overall demand so much as relocate it.
Measured equal-weighted — treating every business the same regardless of size — the typical site was down about 33% in daily clicks over the three-day window. Among only the sites that actually declined, the average drop was steeper, around 43%. Weighted by raw click volume the portfolio looks nearly flat, but that's entirely because Visit Maryland is so large and happened to grow; excluding it, the volume-weighted total for everyone else was about −31%.
B2B and professional services dipped the most (roughly 33–77%), followed by the trades — plumbing, HVAC, concrete, paving — in the 20–40% range. Human-services nonprofits came down about a third, though part of that is their normal weekend pattern. Estate services, local retail, outdoor structures, and tourism held steady or rose.
Mabrey Law's pages were actually shown to more people over the holiday weekend (impressions hit some of the month's highest levels) while clicks fell and rankings stayed strong on page one. That means Google kept the firm visible, but holiday searchers dealing with legal matters clicked through less often. It's a clean example of the broader "more exposure, fewer clicks" dynamic that defines search in 2026.
It depends entirely on your audience. If you're B2B, don't launch your most important content on the Friday before a long weekend — you'll release it into an empty room. If you're in tourism, retail, DIY, or another leisure-driven category, the opposite is true: the holiday is precisely when you want your seasonal content already ranking and ready, because that's when your audience is searching.
The key is which metric moved. A clicks dip sitting on top of steady impressions and rankings is the calendar talking, and it self-corrects within days. A sustained decline in impressions or a real slide in average position is the kind of thing worth diagnosing. Looking at day-by-day data rather than monthly totals is what makes that distinction visible.
The Diligent Leader (leadership coaching) and Toll Talk (industry podcast) run at such low daily volumes — often just a handful of impressions a day — that a holiday weekend is statistically indistinguishable from any other quiet day. Including them would have distorted the averages, so we discuss them qualitatively rather than folding them into the percentages.
This is the depth of reporting every MOJO client receives monthly. When a holiday, an algorithm update, or a seasonal swing moves your numbers, we identify exactly which kind of move it is — behavioral, structural, or seasonal — and tell you what, if anything, to do about it. You can request a quote or call us at (410) 439-1994 to get started.
