Looking to elevate your SEO marketing strategy? Optimize your website for seasonal events using season SEO and get the most of organic traffic and conversion to your business.

With the Christmas season approaching, it’s about time your business takes into account the seasonal trends to take full advantage of the holidays. Knowing the popular trends during the last holiday can improve your SEO traffic in the next one. Google Trends reported that consumers search Valentine gift ideas as early as January. Take this as an opportunity to start optimizing your website in advance.

Often, when we think about the holidays, we vision last-minute shopping, gift cards, and sales. This shows how the holiday season is an important time for marketers. It’s the perfect time to attract new customers and maximize your sales. It's also the time where your traffic, conversion rates, and other metrics shift. However, getting festive shoppers to find your site and buy your goods and/or service means you have to be on top of your competition. 

It’s also much more challenging in the current market. The COVID-19 pandemic has stifled sales of various industries across the globe. Fortunately, businesses can recover by stirring their marketing efforts online. Online traffic on retail sites has risen at a whopping 125%. 

More and more people are shopping online. Make sure you optimize your website’s SEO to take advantage of this new trend the next holiday season.

Understanding Seasonal SEO

Every business has its peak season at some time of the year. A time where the company experiences a spike in sales due to a higher volume of customers.

It’s ideal to adjust your SEO strategy to drive more traffic to your website during this holiday season. Adapt specific changes like restructuring your website layout. Make necessary changes that focus on drawing customers and improving sales. Know what’s your brand’s peak season and what your target audience is searching for. Then you can employ seasonal SEO strategies.

There are two types of seasonal SEO: 

• Time-based: Summer, winter, fall, annually, or monthly
• Event-based: Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Father’s Day, etc.

Consider utilizing these two types of seasonal SEO strategies to get ahead of your competition. Try to make sure that your content is relevant and aligns with your target market needs at any time of the year. 

Seasonal SEO also provides many benefits for your business:

• It meets your customers’ specific wants and needs.
• It helps increase your conversion rates since user intent are specific and immediate
• You can use the strategy every year, offering data to drive upselling and cross-selling.

Credits: Negative Space

How to Boost Your Seasonal Traffic

A blend of holiday-themed blog posts, good timing, great data, and the right keywords can lead your business to success. Learning a few tweaks about seasonal marketing can drive customers straight to your business. All you need to do is optimize your SEO for the holiday season.

• Review your past year’s data 

First, you have to find opportunities for your seasonal SEO traffic. Look at your data for the previous years from Google Analytics or other data sources. The information will show what period your traffic shifted in the market.

Last year’s data also serves as a starting point to improve your campaign performance. It will tell you what time of the year you experienced an increase in website traffic. It also indicates what keywords consumers search to reach your website. Use your existing performance as a baseline to improve your last year’s campaign. In this way, you can see a step-by-step improvement for a set of time frame each year. You can also tell which products and/or services to promote.

• Do a seasonal keyword research

For the holidays, incorporate seasonal keywords based on holiday-specific search terms. Try using long-tail keywords for seasonal SEO since they are more contextually relevant to the demands of your customers. Also, use Google Trends to determine what key phrases consumers search during the holidays. When shoppers start searching for “Christmas deals”, you can be found ahead of your competition. Another trick is to add a year to your keywords. This attracts shoppers looking for up-to-date sales.

If you’re looking for a more specific seasonal approach and within your budget, focus on your local or regional customers. A Whitby SEO professional, like Local SEO Search, works best for local SEO. They have the right knowledge for local businesses and they cost less than $10,000. Focusing on your local or regional strategies, you will see great results at a more affordable price.

Credits: 200 Degrees

• Create holiday-themed content

Now that you've learned which keywords drive traffic during the holidays, start planning your website’s content. People search for holiday ideas and advice. If you want to appear in the top search results, start creating holiday-themed blog posts. Choose topics relevant to your business and solve problems for your customers.

Aside from blog posts, create specific pages optimized with seasonal keywords and content. Publish the pages beforehand so they can start ranking on SERPs.

Optimizing these pages for annual events saves you time since you can reuse them for next year. They will perform because they will already get indexed on Google. Be sure to add the relevant title, description, headline tags, and content to these pages. Attract shoppers to your website by offering a clear and powerful call-to-action promotion.

• Promote your content

To succeed in your seasonal SEO campaign, you need to promote it. Advertise your campaign on social media platforms like Facebook. You can also use email marketing and pay-per-click advertising. Consider adding informative content that contains tips and advice about the approaching holiday. 

Adding a content calendar also helps you manage every content on your website and blog post. In this way, you can achieve your goals without missing anything. There's a chance your competitors will also be using the same method; be sure to tweak your strategies.

Start by including your website URL in your emails and social media posts. Reaching bloggers that suits your target market is an effective way to advertise your content. Natural links coming from them can drive traffic back to your pages. This also builds your off-page authority.

• Optimize your landing pages

Another way to attract seasonal traffic is by revamping your existing landing pages for the holidays. Incorporate your seasonal keywords into your landing pages. Include at least 3-4 internal links to your holiday-themed blog posts and product or service pages. In addition, change your page title and meta descriptions relevant to the holiday. Remember to upload images and videos for the season as well.

Another critical component for your seasonal SEO approach is using rich snippets. These are the results that appear with a blue title link and a short description when you search on Google. They sometimes include images, ratings, and pricing details. Using Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper, update your website with schema markup to get the best results from rich snippets.

Remember that search engines have the time to follow links and find your holiday landing pages. For this reason, make sure to change your landing pages to seasonal at least 30 days before the holiday.

Credits: janjf93

Preparing For Your Seasonal SEO Campaign

Carrying out content takes time, regardless of your industry. Discussing your marketing plans for the upcoming quarter is crucial. Various factors depend on the time of year. Prepare at least three to four months ahead to gather resources and establish SEO strategies. Try to optimize your keywords beforehand, and create supporting content and landing pages.

Applying the correct seasonal SEO strategy can go along way in boosting your sales. Most companies overlook their online marketing campaigns, resulting in a decrease in sales. To safeguard your efforts, invest in hiring a team of digital marketing professionals. They will track the progress of your campaign and create content that’s base on your market demand. They will help you improve your search traffic and position your strategy where you can maximize your return on investment.

Alternatively, you can turn to top digital marketing and SEO providers for home services, specifically those offering SEO for Hamilton or Whitby businesses. This way, they are familiar with the needs of the local community and can better target your market.