While the wildfires continue to rage in Southern California, we at Pink Shark Marketing maintain hope for the safety of our neighbors and our colleagues in the Los Angeles SEO and social media industries.

The physical safety of local residents is of foremost importance, with property concerns close behind. But without co-opting the fires or diminishing their importance, we consider it worth highlighting how business processes and outcomes can also be impacted by local disasters or, in the case of a Los Angeles SEO company, by any highly significant local news story.

With smoke drifting into the city, now might not be the time when a large number of local-area site owners are concerning themselves with optimization. But life – and business – goes on, and there’s little doubt that some people will require the services of a Los Angeles SEO company against the backdrop of these conditions.

But the problem with this isn’t just the conditions themselves. If you require your Los Angeles SEO company to undertake short-term analysis of search metrics, the statistics are rather likely to be skewed by the widespread impact that an ongoing disaster has on the public.

Compare your own recent search history to a comparable period when there were no fires nor anything that was disrupting the lives of Angelinos and you’ll get a sense of how certain local search metrics may not reflect general behavior. This isn’t to say that a Los Angeles SEO company can’t be useful to you even in the midst of local upheaval. But when conditions are challenging, a long-term view of search analytics is probably a safer bet.