Every business has its peak seasons, periods of time when its products and services are more popular like given months or holiday times – it’s the so called business seasonality.
Decrease in sales during low season is a reality for many businesses. Let’s take as an example Christmas decorations, skiing equipment, school books or swimming suits. Some business to keep afloat offer also other products and services that are on demand all year round. In this case, seasonality of some products doesn’t impact profits. Yet, what of companies selling only seasonal products? What can they do? How they can plan effective SEO bearing in mind seasonality?
Managing and promoting strictly seasonal businesses has quite a few difficulties. On the one hand, it’s counter effective to promote seasonal business all year round, but then on the other hand if marketing actions are forgotten it may be difficult to successfully promote on time.
The usual SEO actions don’t have to be running all the time, but they need to be resumed during peak seasons. What’s important, optimisation of relevant keyword phrases can take up to few months to implement and take effect. Hence, planning ahead is a key.
Business seasonality? Comparative analysis of year over year data
Website search engine optimisation (not only seasonal businesses) should be always proceeded by detailed analysis. Research can help SEO specialists to know which keyword phrases are the most relevant for a given website and when you should start optimizing for seasonal keywords. Website traffic analysis is a starting point – the best solution is to analyze it a few years back. Charts can show you spikes of traffic but also moments with lower or no traffic at all. It’s important to notice patterns repeated throughout the years. If we know periods of time when certain products generate more interests we know when to start promotional activities and create optimisation strategies around them. This should be done in advance.
Seasonality in SEO – common solutions
The most reasonable solution is a constant optimisation with more focused actions during the peak season. On the hand, regular SEO actions make the website rank high throughout the year, on the other product page is promoted just before the peak. SEO specialist should keep an eye on competitors’ actions and promotions and know when users start to seek specific seasonal products. They key indicators of intensified interest are users queries and organic search.
Without proper research ahead of time there won’t be any effective results. Aggressive actions can bring results but are risky and can be penalized by Google.
