“Deck the halls with boughs of holly, tra-la-la-la-la.” Apart from being a well-known and well-loved Christmas song, it reminds us that the holidays are a time to change things up, redecorate, do things differently and make the most of the time of year to generate goodwill. And it’s not only the Christmas season that this applies to, either. Every business has a “season,” not just retail companies. The trick to making this work for you online lies in knowing what—and when—the season is for your type of work, and being able to leverage trends to make your business blogging and search engine marketing effective. 
Timing is Everything
What, where, how, why and when. The critical word—and one that’s often overlooked while we grapple with the others—is the “when.” Everything these days is go, go, go, and frequently we don’t stop to identify why RIGHT NOW might not actually be the best time to do our marketing. If you want your efforts to pay off, then timing is vital for the success of your marketing campaigns.
Think about it this way: in May, you’re preparing for summer and aren’t concerned about sending your kids back to school. But even before the leaves start to change, your mind moves ahead to fall, the new school term and the holidays. Stores know this well; Macy’s in New York has its Christmas décor out immediately after Halloween is over. In fact, they’re so quick off the mark one might even suspect Halloween is nothing but a nuisance and an interruption.
The majority of online businesses haven’t yet learned to emulate brick-and-mortar businesses and are way behind the retailers in implementing strategies that make the most of seasonal trends. And yet, just as your thoughts turn to the season ahead when you see stores start displaying their merchandise, so do online users think ahead. And if they don’t, by leading them in the right direction you can help to guide their thought processes (and their purchases) rather than waiting for them to come looking for you.
Following the Trends
To take advantage of seasonal trends in your content marketing, you need to know what those are for your business. To find out, take a look at what happens the next time you publish a blog post or article.
First, it takes a while for new content to get indexed in search, but while it’s fresh you get lots of impressions and it rises in rank. After a point, it goes downwards and eventually settles in a position where you can determine how well it’s going to perform. It’s at that point you start seeing traffic to the post, and if you’ve left that too late into the season, well—you’re going to lose out, aren’t you?
To follow trends effectively you need to be a little ahead of them, paradoxical though that sounds. By publishing 2 to 3 weeks before you actually want the posts to perform, you’ll begin to see the results when the season arrives.
Leveraging Seasonal SEO
The use of trends is a valuable tool for businesses, which explains why we’re starting to see products like Easter eggs and Christmas gifts in store earlier and earlier. By applying the same thinking to your website, you can use them in the online world as well. When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), it’s a fairly simple process to find the keyword trends that are ranking at any given time, just by using Google’s Trends tool.
For example, if you search Google Trends for the keyword phrase “gift ideas” obviously you’re going to get a bunch of stuff relating to Christmas time. While a preliminary view of the results shows a year-on-year trend for the holidays, there are other trends you can work with that seem steady over the years. You can drill down to see when the spikes happen and then use that data in planning your marketing strategy and your blog editorial calendar.
Even if you push your product line all year round, when you research trending time you can boost your content marketing with a well-timed pay-per-click or social media ad campaign. And staying responsive is the key to making seasonal SEO work for you, because trends change (which is why they are called trends) and the keywords that worked last year—or last season—might not work quite as well the next time around.
Examples
Some companies manage to do it better than others, and we’ve brought you a few examples to get your creative juices flowing.
1) Event Venues
Entertainment is a year-round industry, but some types of events have particular seasons. For example, a company offering a wedding venue conducted research on seasonal trends and discovered that there was a significant spike in traffic in January each year. They identified this as most likely relating to an increase in engagements during the Christmas and New Year holidays.
The spike was followed by a dip back down to regular search numbers in the following 4 months, and then a similar spike in the summer months. The company was able to use this data to budget for some additional ad spend just ahead of these spikes in traffic, which helped it to optimize the extra traffic and boost the ranking of its website.
2) Pest Control Services
Companies specializing in pest control services typically find that searches ramp up as the weather gets warmer. This matches the level of pest activity, which peaks in the months of June to August. To really benefit from seasonal SEO, service providers should increase their allocation to paid search ahead of June, so running a PPC campaign in April and May is a strategic move. Optimize further by using the downtime during colder weather to get your website ranking as high as possible ahead of your particular “season.”
3) Clothing Retailers
Trend research shows that the keyword searches on the phrase “buy shoes” hits top of the pops around August. That makes end June/early July a good time to post content using the keyword. That gives it time to get indexed and settle in time to serve as a base for an online campaign aimed at capturing the searchers.
The secret to taking advantage of seasonal trends is to emulate what the big companies are doing as far as possible. They’ve done a ton of expensive research, so you might as well make use of it too. Just be ready to roll with your campaigns the same day they do, because if you wait until a week before the season starts, companies who posted a month earlier are probably attracting the visitors (and business) you could have had.
4) Watch out for False Positives
As with everything, there’s a downside to basing your online marketing strategy on seasonal SEO. One rather amusing example is the eye and sunglass retailer who increased ad spending on the word “shades” based on research that showed it as being an extremely profitable keyword. It turned out that the book “50 Shades of Grey” has boosted searches on the term, making it more expensive and less effective than the retailer wanted.
