Danielle Haley, Co-Director at FSE Online Ltd
Seasonal SEO is a simple yet extraordinarily effective way to bring in traffic, customers and sales, says Danielle Haley, Co-director at FSE Online Ltd. Here are three simple steps to get you started
There are several times of the year when certain products and services are more popular than usual. Whether it’s Christmas, a bank holiday, Easter, Black Friday or Valentine’s Day, you can use these occasions to increase traffic to your website and bring in more sales.
What is seasonal SEO?
The most popular keywords in January are not the same keywords that are most popular in November. The most commonly searched keywords around Valentine’s Day are different to the most commonly searched keywords around Black Friday. This is the essence of seasonal SEO; people search in different ways at different times of the year.
Seasonal SEO refers to the trends that take place throughout the year with how users utilise search engines. When you use seasonal SEO, you are optimising your website for keywords that will rank highly in search engines for a specific period of time.
For example, around Christmas, people will start searching for terms like ‘best Christmas presents for boys’, ‘black dresses for Christmas parties’ or ‘how to decorate a Christmas tree’. If you sell any of these items, you can optimise your website so that these users will find your website and your products.
Instead of optimising for ‘black dresses for parties’, for a short while, you would optimise for the seasonal keyword ‘black dresses for Christmas parties’.
If you are a plumber, you could optimise for the winter and run your seasonal SEO campaign during September and November. If you are a private tutor, you could run a seasonal SEO campaign in the months before exams. Seasonal SEO is not limited to holidays.
How to create a seasonal SEO campaign
Here are three steps to creating an effective seasonal SEO campaign
1. Look at the data of the last year
The first thing you need to discover is when your traffic spikes. You can do this using Google Analytics using the ‘year-over-year’ stats. Don’t skip this step as the data often gives surprising answers.
2. Do keyword research
When you do your keyword research, be on the lookout for keywords that could benefit from a seasonal lift, as well as which keywords are working well that you will want to double down on and dominate the rankings with.
To complete your keyword research, Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner are two fantastic tools which are both free.
Compile a list of keywords based on your products and services. Try and find long-tail keywords also by using the formula “Seasonal word + Product/Service + City/Country”
3. Plan your content
Now that we have our keywords, we can start planning our content.
One idea is to create specific pages that you can optimise your titles, descriptions, headlines and URLs completely for the season or holiday you are targeting. The increased specificity will improve search traffic and conversions and the page can be re-used every year.
Plan on publishing these pages a few months in advance so they have time to be indexed.
What should you do with your pages when the season is over?
There is no need to delete any of your seasonal pages when the season is over. This will save you time next year and allow you to build more authority with Google over the year.
No matter what business you are in, seasonal SEO is something you can use to your advantage. It’s a great way to find people who wouldn’t normally find your website and to bring in increased sales around a holiday.