Holiday / Seasonal SEO: Optimising Your Business’ Peak Season’s Keywords

Curious why your ice creamery doesn’t get the same business in the winter months as opposed to summer? Taking the blistering cold as the most obvious point of comparison, the dips and peaks in the demand in your business might work on similar reasons. The name for the phenomenon is seasonal SEO – and in today’s podcast, we’ll be going over the concepts and principles that make managing its effects a strength to take advantage of!

Defining Seasonal SEO

It doesn’t matter what type of business you own; your engagement and reach are going to vary at different times of the year. This is called ‘seasonality’, and it directly affects your sales and traffic. So, based on what products and services you offer, you can optimise your business’s keywords during high-interest or demand seasons.

Now, there are two types of seasonal SEO strategies. The first one is time-based, which focuses on larger seasons, such as summer or winter, or certain time periods, like a month. The other seasonal SEO strategy is event-based. So, these SEO centre around specific events, such as Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Halloween, or Easter.

But why does seasonal SEO matter? With every business out there vying for attention, you want your business to stand out. So, if you are marketing your products during a period when they would most likely be needed, it would increase your visibility to customers and capture more potential revenue. This is particularly important if your products are seasonal items, as you want your peak-time sales to balance out the sales from the low-demand months. What’s more, by investing in seasonal SEO, you can also potentially generate a higher ROI than with other marketing strategies. 

Understanding Your Own Seasonality

To start, the first thing you want to do is identify your peak-time SEO words. These should be any holiday or occasion-related terms that accompany a surge of sales or visits. If you’re not sure what they are, you can use different analytical tools, which are mostly free of cost.

For example, a keyword research tool can help you track the behavioural change of your product and pinpoint the best time to market it. There are other tools out there that can help you find relevant keywords along with a list of related keywords. Another helpful trick would be to find out the trends within your website, such as which sections are working and what pages your audiences are engaging with.

During our work with our client; Sydney Tall Ships, we noticed a huge spike in clicks on pages using keywords based around “vivid”, with one of our targeted keywords going from 0 to 33 clicks.  After looking into why this suddenly happened we found out that this spike occurred during the Sydney Vivid Festival. Meaning this popular light installation event was able to drive significant traffic to our client. This goes to show the value of researching event-specific keywords for your content.

Optimising For Your Seasonality

Now that you understand the importance of identifying event-specific keywords and have spent time finding your own, you can begin optimising your content. Remember, your content should focus on pushing and signifying the importance of your products for the current or upcoming season. If you offer different services, you can also work on those pages accordingly.

Like general SEO optimisation, seasonal SEO is also a continuous process. You can start during the ramp-up period, which is basically the months leading up to your peak time. You can push out content to increase your brand awareness so that you are customers are ready by the time the season arrives.

Engaging With Your Peak Seasonal SEO

Next step is the engaging period, that is, when the product is at the height of its time. Most people would be buying during this period, so you want them to take immediate action. Then comes the slow-down period when the season is over. You want to begin transitioning towards other products that your audience would most likely need. The slow-down period can be the ramp-up period of another item.

For Sydney Tall Ships, we noticed a significant increase in our quarterly review results during the warmer summer months. This makes sense as people are more likely to be looking from a scenic cruise during good weather. As we approached the winter months, as expected, we saw a huge drop in traffic. This only emphasises the importance of preparing content during the ramp-up period before the months of increased traffic will occur.

Key Takeaways

Now, don’t forget to update your content every year. You can always reuse your previous content but remember to add relevant information or redact anything unnecessary. By repurposing your content, you will stay on top of your seasonal SEO game and drive customers to check out your products and services.

If you want to level up even more, you can always add seasonal visuals. But remember to only use relevant graphics. We have another podcast planned for you where we’ll delve deeper into how to use visuals to boost your SEO rankings.

And there you have it! If you’re looking for an SEO expert, don’t forget to check out our website. You can also give us a call to get a quote. Thank you for listening, and we’ll see you in our next episode!