Seasonality is a major driver in how people make their purchasing decision and can direct the buying journey for your audience. Since weather, holidays, and dates impact how and what people buy, you should be using seasonality in your SEO marketing strategy.
Does your SEO strategy account for seasonality? If not, then your business could be at a disadvantage. No matter your industry, seasonality impacts SEO projections and other business factors. Creating a solid seasonal SEO strategy is key to leveraging the peak buying period to its full potential.
What is seasonal SEO strategy and why does it matter?
Seasonality refers to regular and predictable trends recurring every calendar year. Different industries may be impacted by different seasonal trends but it is hard to find a business that would not be affected by the biggest holiday season out there, i.e. Christmas and New Year.
Seasonal SEO takes all the basic considerations of a traditional SEO strategy but then looks at ways to drive conversions based on themes and a finite time period. Factoring seasonal influence into your overarching SEO strategy can help your business align your content and distribution strategy to meet the needs of your customers. In turn, this helps drive more qualified leads and increases conversions.
Here are a few of the necessary steps for preparing for a seasonal SEO strategy:
- Think about the dates, events, etc. that you want to build your campaign around.
- What promotions will you offer?
- What message will you use for the offer and how does it relate to the season?
- Perform keyword research around the chosen promotions.
- Plan, create, optimize, and publish content for select marketing platforms and channels.
- Create supporting content like landing pages that are optimized for your seasonal keywords.
How to prepare your site for the high season
So now that we know when the big season is actually coming, how to get prepared? Well, there is a lot to be done here.
Bring your seasonal products and offers forward
You know your target audience and your best-selling products best: look into your previous years’ data and identify what you are going to use to lure consumers with.
[READ MORE: How to sell products that are low in demand or unpopular]
Here’s what you may want to feature on your site home page:
- Products that sell well during the season.
- Product bundles to help product discovery.
- Special offers that would be different for new and return customers.
Plan out your seasonal content strategy
Seasonal content is the most effective way to attract natural backlinks and organic social media shares (which both bring traffic and conversions instantly as well as higher authority in the long run).
Seasonal content also brings more sales, provided it meets the following criteria:
- It caters to the seasonal needs (e.g. gift ideas, holiday planning, festive dinner cooking, etc.) To identify those, you may want to look at your competitors, survey your customers and ask for ideas from your sales and customer support teams.
- It should complement the products you are selling. In other words, your content should bring up problems your product or service is solving. Again, both your customer support and sales teams are the best sources of ideas here. Creating customer-centric content is key to seasonal SEO and marketing.
- Ideally, it should rank. This is what brings real exposure and sales, year after year. This is where you resort to good old keyword research to identify ranking opportunities for a seasonal content piece.
Create your social media marketing strategy
“Bring and they will come” hardly ever works. Whenever you develop seasonal content, you need a strong social media campaign to bring it forward.
A solid seasonal social media strategy includes:
- Effective cross-team collaboration: Your social media team should work with sales and customer support teams, as well as with your content writers. This way, they will know what is being actively promoted, which questions customers ask, and which content assets are coming up for promotion.
- Keyword and hashtag research for those updates to be organically discoverable.
Make sure your site will perform consistently and reliably
It is also a smart idea to alert your reputation management team of the need to actively monitor your brand mentions and establish their efficient communication with the development team. If any customer is complaining of anything not working, your social media team should promptly address the issue and notify the development team.
Remember: An angry customer can become your brand advocate if your business representative quickly responds to the complaint.
Optimize on-page experience for conversions
Now that your business has a good idea about the timing, content, and keywords, you will need to optimize your website for conversions. You will want to create unique landing pages for each seasonal campaign that your business can reuse each year.
Navigation menu: Updating your main navigation menu to promote the key products and services your customers are looking for can improve UX and help drive your customers toward the solutions they’re looking for.
Landing pages: As you build out your content calendar for different channels, consider creating and optimizing specific landing pages for each offer. This will improve your conversion rate and keep your message together across your entire marketing strategy.
Customized call to actions: Avoid generic CTAs for special landing pages and other content for your seasonal SEO strategy. For example, Instead of a boring “Call Now” CTAs, our air conditioning repair business could use more creative CTAs like “Don’t Sweat It. Call Today!” or “Keep Your Family Comfortable Now!”
[READ ALSO: Here is what SMEs must understand about finance bill, others]
Final thoughts
Seasonal SEO may be tough and overwhelming but the good news is, it gets easier year after year. You will be able to re-use many of your seasonal offers and campaigns, update much of your content to bring it up back into the readers’ feeds, and make use of previous years’ sales patterns and experience.
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