Seasonal SEO Tips & Examples For Year-Round Search Improvements

In the world of SEO, we talk a lot about technical issues and how to solve them. We look at content strategy, keyword research, backlinks, and PR.

But one thing we don’t talk about enough is seasonal SEO – specifically its impact, and how to leverage it to improve marketing performance.

A solid understanding of seasonal SEO is essential to building a winning SEO strategy, getting insights from your own performance data, and providing accurate reporting to your clients.

In this column, you’ll find actionable tips and real-world examples to help you navigate seasonal trends and put them to work for your SEO strategy.

What is seasonal SEO and why is it important?

Seasonal SEO is the way your website and business performance is affected by predictable external annual events such as Christmas, Easter, summer, winter, etc.

Understanding seasonal SEO is important because:

• In general, we need Take advantage of it for the benefit of our business.
• helps in Planning and defining search engine optimization (SEO) projects to implement and when.
• help us Navigating “low season” marketing.
• It may affect our dataand reporting and how to make decisions that take into account the impact of seasonality on SEO metrics such as clicks, impressions, and rankings.

Getting a more detailed and in-depth understanding of the impact of seasonality on your SEO will help you make better business and marketing decisions.

Do you need to think about seasonality if you are a B2B company?

I can hear some people say, “My clients (customers) are B2B so events like Christmas, Halloween, etc. don’t affect us much”.

This is mostly true. If you’re a SaaS customer in the financial industry, you probably don’t think about how seasonality will affect your business.

But here’s an example of when seasonality can interfere with your B2B data.

Your B2B client migrates the website in November and follows all of the SEO guidelines you shared with them.

They still saw their website go down hard in December.

Is this due to migration or perhaps due to seasonality?

Decreased performance can be a normal effect of the migration process and it will just need some time to recover.

But when you add seasonality into the equation, we understand that drop is a bit amplified as a result of the “low season” most B2B companies experience in December.

So you may see a deeper decline than you would expect for migration.

In this case, understanding and taking into account seasonality can help you inform customers what to expect as well as assess migration performance in a balanced way without panicking.

How to navigate seasonality in SEO

1. Start yesterday

The best time to start looking at analyzing the effect of seasonality on business performance is yesterday. The second best time is now.

The question about seasonality is one of the customer onboarding questions I always get asked, no matter the type of business.

It may sound basic, but sometimes you get information you weren’t expecting.

If you’ve been working on an annual or six-month SEO plan, now is a good time to consider what upcoming seasons you should incorporate into your plan.

It usually takes three to six months to start seeing the impact of any SEO efforts.

So if you want to arrange for “Black Friday” or “Back to School” terms, plan this four to six months in advance to give your content a chance to get indexed, and settle into the SERPs.

When the time comes, you are not working from scratch but adjusting and building on existing assets.

2. Learn about hills and valleys

Here are some other places you can start looking for the seasonality of your business:

• Google Search Console.
• Google Analytics.
• Google trends.
• SEMrush and other third-party tools that allow you to compare your performance against competitors.
• Online reports on industry trends.

GSC tips

Google Search Console is where any SEO expert should ideally live, and when analyzing seasonality, it’s the best place to start.

Try to map your performance data for the last 12 months against seasons. If you find unexplained dips or peaks, look to match that with the current season (summer, weekend, info from your client, etc.).

You may also want to look at the change on a monthly basis for the past 16 months to understand what percentage change to expect for each season.

Here are some of the things you need to consider when analyzing GSC performance data for seasonality:

Look at data with and without brand search terms.

You can filter your trademark search terms using a custom regular expression in the query filter. Simply list all the variations of your business brand name separating them with a “|” pipe.

Look at how other B2B or B2C customers (whichever is more relevant) have performed in the same time period.

If you work for an agency and have access to different properties, this is especially helpful.

See if dips and peaks are common across it. Personally, I see a drop in performance for most of my B2B clients in December.

Important tip: GSC will only show data for the last 16 months.

Always back up your data so that you can save your historical data for future reference.

Be aware of other marketing activities.

The increase and decrease in overall performance due to an increase and decrease in search volume for brand keywords may not be directly related to your SEO efforts, but the impact of marketing campaigns of other marketing channels (such as Facebook or LinkedIn Ads).

Filtering it can help you remove noise and get a clearer picture of seasonality and SEO.

Semrush tips

smrash Offers a Traffic Analysis tool that allows you to compare the performance of your website against a few of your competitors over time.

Here is the traffic analysis graph showing the performance of zara.com vs. hm.com for the past six months:

From the graph, you can get any number of insights.

For example, you can see that for both locations, there is a peak in November.

This is something you may want to take into account while preparing reports. This increase in organic traffic, while positive, will not continue at the same level for the following month. Keep this in mind when preparing your November and December reports.

You may want to highlight this; Otherwise, you’ll report temporary seasonal highs as an overall organic performance improvement in November, and then in December, you’ll report what might be your average or even above-average performance as a monthly decline.

seasonal wheel

Another thing that can help you see how your business is affected by seasonality throughout the year is this chart VennDigital.co.uk.

The infographic gives you an idea of ​​what to expect in terms of seasonality for four major industries: automotive, retail, travel, and finance.

Your business probably falls into one of these categories, and by studying this graph you can get a better understanding of seasonality and why your data is the way it is.

4. Talk to business stakeholders

There are two things to do when it comes to the effect of seasonality on your SEO plan.

First things first, talk to your stakeholders.

Don’t wait until low season has arrived and then discuss the reports and why many of your gauges are down. Do it early.

This helps all parties stay on the same page and reduces the stress of reporting when downfalls occur.

If you know that your B2B business is most likely to experience low season in December, start this discussion in October or November.

You may want to:

• Create a simple display showing different seasonal trends and their impact on business performance. Adding supporting data from tools like Google Trends can definitely help. You can see below, that even for a technical term like “PDF” there is still some seasonality over time.
• Provide an action plan if necessary Each major trend affects seasonality.
• Always leave a margin for monthly reports Where appropriate and explain the results.

5. How

Now, let’s talk about the actual SEO work.

You have read all this and now you are asking yourself, What am I doing?

Here are 10 seasonal SEO tips to add to your arsenal:

• Start by analyzing your existing content assets and seeing if any existing seasonal content needs an update.
• Make sure you have a category page for each season that is relevant to your business; For example, pages on Black Friday, Christmas, Back to School, etc.
• For each of these category pages, you can have as many sub-pages as needed to target long search queries. Your Christmas page may link to other pages for Christmas trees, Christmas gifts, etc.
• Ideally, the URL could be homepage.com/christmas/christmas-trees.
• Use the bread crumbs similarly to Home > Christmas > Christmas Trees
• For seasonal pages, don’t use the date or year in the URL.
• Don’t use the date or year in the heading or H1, unless you plan to update them annually.
• Link to seasonal pages from the header and footer, at least 30 days in advance of the season.
• Once the season is over, remove the links from the header and footer. Don’t delete the page, but instead update it with a relevant message to your customers and provide links to other valuable pages on your website.
• Last but not least, plan your backlink acquisition early on as well. Create backlinks beforehand, to give Google enough time to pick up the value of your content.

A great example of how you can adapt your website to seasonality is how some travel agencies update their footer links according to popular destinations in a given season, in addition to their consistent list of top destinations overall.

A final note about the effect of seasonality on SERPs

We cannot discuss seasonality in SEO without discussing the amazing research that he has done Tom Capper, in Distilled who note that “SERPs change when they get high volume”.

Tom tracked the behavior of SERPs for the keyword term [mothers day flowers] During the two-week period leading up to Mother’s Day and how that affected your top results in Google.

From the graph below, we can tell that as we get closer to Day 0 (Mother’s Day) while search volume for “Mother’s Day flowers” increases, the rankings have changed for many of the top hits for that term.

This is one of the most powerful graphs showing how seasonality affects a website’s performance in SERPs.

More resources:

• How to take advantage of seasonal content for your SEO campaigns
• 5 Essential Content Considerations for Successful Holiday Shopping SEO
• SEO trends for 2022, according to 44 experts

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Featured image: Yuganov Konstantin/Shutterstock