Seasonal SEO takes all the basic concepts of a comprehensive SEO strategy but uses the basis of a theme and a definite timeframe to focus these efforts. Whatever seasonal SEO focus you have in mind, I’m here to show you that it can work.

What is seasonality and why you should care

Seasonality can mean different things to different industries, businesses and consumers. When we think of seasonality in marketing we make think of:

Seasonal holidays like Christmas or Halloween.
General seasons like Summer or Winter.
Specific one-day events like Valentine’s Day or Black Friday.

Whatever the season, SEO can help you corner and capitalise on certain market segments. Most SEO campaigns focus on your business’ general SEO goals. If you shift your focus, occasionally you can get ahead of the competition by creating seasonal SEO campaigns that your competitors haven’t thought of. It’s also a great tool when it comes to understanding your own business seasonality. Think of when your overall sales are up or down during the year or when particular products sell better. By identifying industry seasonality and seasonal trends in your audience you can create a targeted SEO campaign.

How to Create a Seasonal SEO Campaign

Here are some tips and tricks when creating a seasonal SEO campaign.

Choose Your Season

As discussed above, you need to identify a season to focus on. If you’ve never done any seasonal SEO before, you should start with one target season. You need to choose a business-related season as well as a seasonal trend.

For a business season, decide on whether you want to capitalise on good months or try to improve your lower sales periods. From there you can choose a seasonal trend to go with that time period. This should be something that;

Has a high volume of searches in the targeted time period. You can use Google Trends to help decide on this.
Is appropriate for your products and services.
You can provide a strong message on.

Start Early

The best rule for seasonal SEO is to start early. You can use Google Trends to help you decide when to start. For example, look at this chart for the term ‘Christmas Gifts’. It’s pretty low for the majority of the year until around the end of August and then it slowly climbs, and then very rapidly climbs from the end of October onwards.

If you were looking to target the Christmas period and gain customers looking for gifts, then your best bet would be to start around September time. This will give you the time needed to build a content and social strategy before the end of October. By that point, you should have gained some traction that you can continue throughout November and December.

It’s not just about the trends though, there is a practical element to when you should start a seasonal SEO strategy. It takes time for search engines to crawl, index and rank your website. It doesn’t happen immediately so I would advise starting your campaign no later than 90 days before your peak period.

Plan it out

Just like any good SEO strategy, you need to plan out your seasonal SEO process. Not all plans will look the same but they should include:

Keyword and trend research
A list of additional web pages you’ll need
A plan for any changes to existing copy
Content marketing calendar for creating posts related to your trend and niche
A social media plan to improve brand recognition, gain awareness for your seasonal campaign and increase website traffic.
An email marketing plan (if applicable) to share your content and encourage repeat business.

Once you have your plan in place it’s time to start work on it. Keep your plan in mind at all times. Write down deadlines for each task. Web page creation, copy tweaks and content creation should be an early priority. While social media, emails and even paid adverts can be developed as you gain your content. Once your season is here, ensure you are proactive about adding additional content where needed. This could be for FAQs, new product guides or changes to your offering.

What to do with seasonal content afterwards?

Hopefully, your hard work will pay off and your seasonal SEO campaign has made the difference you hoped for. But what to do with seasonal content afterwards? Just because a season is over doesn’t mean that content is not useful any more.

For content such as blogs, news and whitepapers, these can be used time and time again. Their value won’t diminish after the season is over, and they may increase in value the next time the season comes around.
Web copy you may have changed, you might want to revert to the older copy or take this opportunity to rewrite your copy with fresh eyes.
Additional web pages can be kept for next year, or updated to reflect new information. For example, if you had a Christmas delivery page, you can simply update to say. “ Christmas delivery dates will be updated next December” and remove it from the main navigation. Just ensure if you do delete a web page, you set up a redirect so it doesn’t cause a 404 error.

I Need a Seasonal SEO Campaign

Have you got a seasonal SEO campaign in mind but not sure where to start? I can help. I create overall SEO strategies as well as seasonal SEO campaigns. Get in touch with me today and let’s see how we can grow your business together.