Even though its only September, the holidays will be here before you know it. And while most SEO programs are exclusively focused on long-term gains, sometimes you need to optimize for short-term, temporary seasonal trends.
Many brands are doing this right now, gearing up for optimizing for Christmas and winter related keywords so they can reap about two months’ worth of benefits for the year. There are pros and cons to this approach, and you must ask yourself if this seasonal optimization is worth it for your business.
There are many types of seasons, but all of them present the same argument for seasonal SEO. No matter what type of business you have, there’s probably a degree of seasonality in your business; that might mean an uptick in sales around the holidays, or a sharp decline in a certain month due to your clientele. There may be an advantage in optimizing your site for any of these seasonal events:
Holidays. Christmas and Halloween are big ones, but you might also have Labor Day sales or other individual events.
Literal seasons. You could take advantage of things like “summer clothing” or ski clothes.
Sales patterns. Your business could see an increase in client or consumer activity during certain times of the year, such as the first quarter.
Trends and fads. You might also have products or services that may be temporary in nature, serving trends and fads.
There are certainly some advantages to targeting seasonal-specific keywords, such as holiday-related phrases or keywords relating to a specific trend. There are tradeoffs, however, and you need to know the positives and negatives before you commit.
Spending the effort on optimizing for seasonal keywords will cause you to lose long-term viability and overall potential traffic. If you’re focusing on seasonal keywords, you won’t be focusing on your stronger, long-term keywords, which will probably earn you more traffic over time, since they’re relevant year round
However, you will also gain short-term relevance and the benefit of lower competition for the seasonal optimization. While these keywords are only relevant for a short time, they are highly relevant during those weeks or months, which may make it worth it.
It’s important to start optimizing for these keywords several months before the holiday or season begins. If you want to target Christmas-related keywords, the shopping season will begin even two months ahead of time, and you need to be ready if you want to dominate the SERPs.
If you are thinking about using seasonal optimization, remember it isn’t for every business. Ask yourself these questions to see if it’s truly worth it for yours:
- How important is seasonal business? If you have high percentage of sales during this season, go for it.
- How much competition are you facing? If no one else is optimizing seasonally, give it a try.
- Can you reuse your assets? This is better for holiday-based optimization as opposed to fad-based optimization.
If you do choose to optimize for seasonal keywords, there are a few things you can do to help make it successful. Start early, and give yourself at least several weeks to ramp up your efforts. Remember to keep seasonal content secondary, and still give your main SEO strategy priority. Try your best to make your seasonal content evergreen, so you can reuse it in the future.
Seasonal optimization, especially for the holidays, can be hugely beneficial. If you want to try it for your business, contact Code204 for help.