While most businesses have a reasonable understanding of how to implement SEO to help their web pages rank better in search results, the task becomes more difficult when websites need to accommodate seasonal trends. As consumers change their shopping habits as seasonal trends come and go, websites need to adapt their SEO strategies accordingly. In this post, we explain how you can navigate those seasonal trends.
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The importance of seasonal SEO
In any year, there are predictable events that will alter people’s shopping habits. Whether it’s Christmas, Halloween, Black Friday, the change of season or even major sporting events like the Olympics or the World Cup, these and various other events affect the type of products and services people search for online. Crucially for SEO, this also changes the search terms they use to find them.
By knowing when particular shopping seasons begin and end, what kinds of products and services people will be searching for and, of course, the search terms they will use, websites can improve their SEO and optimise their websites to drive more traffic and improve sales.
Though this may sound straightforward, it’s not as simple as it sounds. While people might start looking for summer holidays straight after Christmas and summer clothes in springtime, the search terms they use each year might change depending on shifting trends. Key search terms like ‘family holidays’ or ‘beach outfits’ might remain constant year to year, but where people want to travel to, and the fashionable clothes of the season are more prone to change. Website owners will therefore need to keep abreast not just of predictable seasonal events but of seasonal trends if they want to make the most gains.
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Planning a seasonal SEO strategy
The first step to navigating seasonal SEO is to plan a seasonal SEO strategy. To start this, you will first need to identify your key seasonal events and when they begin. For Christmas, for example, the start dates for gift shopping, booking venues and haircuts, buying party clothes, food and decorations will all begin at different times. Venues and hair salons can be booked up months in advance and some people start buying presents in September. To have your strategy ready in time, knowing the start date for your specific business is vital. Once you know this, then the timescales below can be a helpful guideline.
The preparation for your seasonal event should start five to six months in advance, with keyword research and topic planning. This will help you choose the right content topics for your website and use keywords that are likely to rank higher in search engine results. To do this, you can use free tools like Google Trends and Google Search Console to find out which keywords are most popular in your niche. Google Trends is particularly useful as it lets you track keyword popularity over time, so you can see the most active times for particular keywords and whether use has increased or declined in recent years.
When it comes to content creation, some of this should be in place three to four months in advance of the start of the season. While it’s a bit premature to put Christmas decorations on your homepage in September, you should start putting Christmas-themed landing pages and blog posts online at this time. Early publication ensures they will be indexed by search engines and gives them time to climb up the rankings in results. Additionally, you should use this time to update older seasonal content so that it remains relevant for this year’s events.
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Once you have your keywords and create your content, the next stage of your seasonal SEO strategy, done around one to two months in advance, is to promote your content across different channels. This will include sharing on social media platforms, email marketing and even PPC advertising. Together, these will increase the reach of your content.
While you should continue to promote your content throughout the season, it is important to monitor the content’s performance in terms of search engine ranking, click-throughs, user engagement and conversions. If something isn’t performing well, then take action early to help make improvements.
When the season ends, rather than deleting seasonal content, keep it live on your website. The URL may have gained traction on search engines which will help it to perform well when the event comes around the following year. You can always update the content later when you know what next year’s trends will be. However, to help it rank well in the long term, avoid using dates in the URL – yourwebsite.com/best-kids-presents might rank well every year, whereas yourwebsite.com/best-kids-presents-2024 might only have traction for search engines and users for a single year.
To help you plan a whole year of seasonal SEO trends, the best solution is to create a content calendar that maps out the key seasonal events of the year and the points at which you need to start planning. If you consider that the last three months of the year alone include Halloween, Black Friday, Christmas, the Boxing Day Sales, New Year and the start of the holiday buying season, having a content calendar can ensure you organise your time effectively and don’t lose track of your actions and goals.
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Useful tools for SEO
While we have already mentioned Google Trends and Google Search Console, another tool used by larger businesses is SEMrush, which besides SEO is also helpful for market research, advertising and content planning. While a powerful tool, it is a pricey option. More affordable and focused specifically on SEO, is marketgoo – an all-inclusive SEO solution that audits websites and provides personalised SEO recommendations for owners. Its suite of features helps you track competitors, optimise page titles, submit sites for search engine indexing, monitor keyword performance, improve technical optimisation and more.
Conclusion
To take advantage of seasonal shopping trends, it is vital to get your products and services noticed online during those seasons. Seasonal SEO strategies play a crucial role in this, ensuring you have the right keywords and content in place to rank well for the right search terms for the different events which occur during the year. Hopefully, from reading this article, you will have a clearer understanding of how to navigate seasonal trends for SEO.
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