In the world of SEO, we often talk about technical problem and how to fix them. We focus on content strategy, keyword research, backlinksand PR.
But one thing we haven’t talked about enough is seasonal SEO – specifically its impact and how you can use it to improve marketing performance.
A solid understanding of seasonal SEO is critical to developing a successful SEO strategy, gaining insights from your performance data, and providing accurate reports to your clients.
In this column, you’ll find actionable tips and real-world examples to help you understand seasonal trends and use them in your SEO strategy.
What is seasonal SEO and why is it important?
Seasonal SEO is how your website performance and business are externally and predictably affected annual event Such as ChristmasEaster, Summer, Winter, etc.
Understanding seasonal SEO is important because:
- Generally, we need use it for our business.
- it helps Plan and decide which SEO projects performed and when.
- it helps us Navigate marketing during the “off season.”
- it affects our datareporting, and how we make decisions that take into account the impact of seasonality on SEO metrics such as clicks, impressions, and rankings.
A more detailed and in-depth understanding of the impact of seasonality on SEO will help you make better business and marketing decisions.
If you are a B2B business, do you need to consider seasonality?
I can hear people saying, “My clientele is B2B, so events like Christmas, Halloween, etc. don’t affect us that much.”
This is mostly true.if you are a Financial industry SaaS clientyou may not have considered how seasonality affects your business.
But here’s an example where seasonality can interfere with your B2B data.
Your B2B client performs a site migration in November and follows all the SEO guidelines you’ve shared with them.
They’re still seeing their site slump in December.
Is this because of migration or seasonality?
The performance degradation can be a natural effect of the migration process, it just takes some time to recover.
However, when seasonality is added to the equation, we do know that this decline has been slightly magnified due to the “low season” that most B2B businesses experience in December.
Therefore, you may see a deeper drop than expected from the migration.
In this case, understanding and accounting for seasonality can help you communicate with your customers what to expect and evaluate the performance of the migration process in a balanced way without panicking.
How to Navigate Seasonality in SEO
1. Since yesterday
The best time to start researching the impact of seasonality on business performance is yesterday. And the second best time is now.
Asking about seasonality is one of my frequently asked client onboarding questions, no matter what type of business it is.
This may sound basic, but sometimes you get unexpected information.
if you are doing a Annual or six-month SEO plannow is an opportune time to research the upcoming seasons that you should integrate into your plans.
It usually takes three to six months to start seeing the impact of any SEO efforts.
So if you want to rank Black Friday or Back to School, plan four to six months in advance Give your content a chance to be indexedand settle in the SERP.
When the time comes, instead of working from scratch, you fine-tune and build upon existing assets.
2. Know your hills and valleys
Here are more places where you can start researching business seasonality:
- Google Search Console.
- Google Analytics.
- Google Trends.
- SEMrush and other third-party tools that allow you to compare your performance to your competitors.
- Online reports on industry trends.
GSC Tips
google search console An ideal place to live for any SEO expert, it’s the best place to start when analyzing seasonality.
Try to map the performance data for the past 12 months to the seasons. If you find unexplained troughs or peaks, match them to the current season (summer, weekends, messages from customers, etc.).
You may also want to look at the month-over-month change over the past 16 months to see the expected percentage change for each season.
When analyzing the seasonality of GSC performance data, you need to consider the following:
View data with and without branded search terms.
You can filter out branded search terms using custom regular expressions in the query filter. Simply list all the different variations of your business brand name, separating them with a vertical bar “|”.
See how other B2B or B2C (whichever is more relevant) clients performed over the same time period.
This is especially helpful if you work in an agency and have access to different properties.
See if they have anything in common. Personally, I see that most B2B clients are down in December.
Important: GSC will only show data for the past 16 months.
Always back up your data so you can save historical data for future reference.
Watch out for other marketing campaigns.
The increase and decrease in overall performance due to increased and decreased searches for your branded keywords may not be directly related to your SEO efforts, but to the impact of your marketing activities on other marketing channels such as Facebook or LinkedIn Ads.
Filtering them out can help you cut through the noise and get a clearer picture of seasonality and SEO.
Semrush Tips
samlash Offers a “Traffic Analysis” tool that allows you to compare your site’s performance with some competitors.
The following is a graph of the traffic analysis of zara.com and hm.com in the past six months:
Screenshot of Semrush, February 2022From the graph, you can extract any number of insights.
For example, you can see that both sites have a peak in November.
This is something you may want to consider when reporting. This increase in organic traffic, while a positive thing, will not continue at the same level next month. Keep this in mind when doing your November and December reports.
You may want to highlight this; otherwise, you’ll report temporary seasonal highs in November as an overall improvement in organic performance, and then in December, you’ll report what may be your average or even above-average performance each month decline.
Seasonal Wheel
Another chart that can help you understand how seasonality affects your business throughout the year is VennDigital.co.uk.
The graph gives you an idea of seasonal changes in four major industries: automotive, retail, travel, and finance.
Your business may fall into one of these categories, and by studying this chart, you can better understand seasonality and why your data is so.
Image via Venn Digital, February 20224. Talk to business stakeholders
When it comes to the impact of seasonality on your SEO plan, two things need to be done.
First, talk to your stakeholders.
Don’t wait until the off-season to discuss reports and why many of your metrics are down. Do this early.
This helps keep all parties on the same page and reduces reporting pressure when packet loss occurs.
If you know your B2B business may experience a low season in December, start the discussion in October or November.
Screenshot of Google Trends, February 2022You might want to:
- Prepare a simple deck outlining different seasonal trends and their effects About operating results. Adding supporting data from tools like Google Trends will definitely help. You can see below that even for technical terms like “PDF” there is still some seasonality over time.
- Provide an action plan if needed For each major trend that affects seasonality.
- Always leave footnotes for monthly reports When relevant and explain the results.
5. How
Now, let’s talk about the actual SEO work.
You’ve read all of this and now you’re asking yourself, what should I do?
Here are 10 seasonal SEO tips to add to your arsenal:
- from analyzing your current Content assets And see if any existing seasonal content needs to be refreshed.
- Make sure you have category pages relevant to your business for each season; for example, pages for Black Friday, Christmas, Back to School, etc.
- For each of these category pages, you can have as many subpages for long-tail search queries as you want. Your Christmas page may link to other pages for Christmas trees, Christmas gifts, etc.
- Ideally, the URL would be homepage.com/christmas/christmas-trees.
- use Bread crumbs Similar to Home > Christmas > Christmas Tree
- For seasonal pages, don’t use the date or year in the URL.
- Don’t use dates or years in headlines or H1s unless you plan to update them every year.
- Link to the season page from the header and footer, at least 30 days before the season.
- After the season, remove the link from the header and footer. Don’t delete the page, instead, you can update it, send your customers a relevant message, and provide links to other valuable pages on your site.
- Last but not least, plan ahead for your backlink acquisition too. Build backlinks ahead of time to give Google enough time to capture the value of your content.
Image via almosafer, February 2022A great example of how to adapt your website to seasonality is how some travel agencies update their footer links based on popular destinations for a particular season, as well as their consistent overall list of popular destinations.
A final note on the impact of seasonality on the SERPs
If not discussed by Tom Capper, at Distilled Who noticed “changes when SERPs become high volume”.
Tom tracks SERP behavior for keyword terms [mothers day flowers] Two weeks before Mother’s Day, and how that affects Google’s top search results.
From the graph below, we can see that as we approach day 0 (Mother’s Day), searches for “mother’s day flowers” are increasing and the rankings of many of the top results for that term have changed.
Screenshot of Distilled, February 2022This is one of the most powerful charts showing the effect of seasonality on website performance in the SERPs.
More resources:
Featured image: Yuganov Konstantin/Shutterstock
