As customers today expect to find more discounts and deals during the holiday season, it’s imperative that you develop and implement a long standing strategy to stay relevant. Seasonal marketing involves incorporating climate trends into your strategy in order to drive more sales or traffic to your website at specific times of the year. As the holiday season approaches, is your brand thinking about how season-specific SEO efforts can work into your marketing strategy?
Timing is of the essence
Each holiday or event brings with it a load of opportunities for marketers to promote different types of products and content. Being prepared with timely campaigns targeting specific customers at various stages of the buying cycle will ensure that you get the maximum return on investment.
Promoting your upcoming offers prior to the holiday can be a great way to gain brand exposure and be on people’s mind when the time comes to buy. For example, if you are going to feature Christmas sales on your website, why not write a great piece of content on what customers can expect and promote it before the sale launch? Or you could design a social media campaign with a countdown and special offers for the first customers to make a purchase.
Make sure that you start your efforts early enough to achieve your goals in the appropriate timeframe but also that your efforts do not falter before the end of the season. With the recent Google Hummingbird update and the growing focus on fresh content, being active and promoting your content and products throughout the season/event is essential if you do not want to see your site pushed aside in favor of newer more relevant content.
Create season-based product pages that you can recycle
Most of the time, businesses offering holiday-based deals will feature them only on the home page with a link to the existing product page. Consider creating specific pages that you can optimize with content targeted to that specific event.
If it’s a recurring event, you will be able to recycle these pages next time it comes around, using the authority that you have already built for them and knowing that they are already indexed by search engines.
You can also create a URL dedicated to this specific event, for example “www.example.com/christmas-deals”. However, make sure that you do not use a date or year marker if you intend to re-use the page for a future campaign.
Gain brand exposure and authority
The holiday season is a time when people are looking for specific types of content. Make sure you know what people are talking about within your industry and capitalize on these temporary trends to establish your brand as an authority on the subject. Are you selling retail clothing? Write a guide about this year’s fashion trends for New Year’s dresses or a list of top 10 worst and best outfits to wear at your in-laws for Christmas.
Expand your reach beyond only promoting the most aggressive discounts and get a competitive edge by showing that you are ready to engage with your customers and provide them with great content that they will want to use and share with their friends and family.
Although it’s a little late to start thinking about Christmas and New Year’s if you haven’t already, don’t worry; there is a multitude of events and holidays throughout the year that you can consider integrating into your SEO calendar. Valentine’s Day, March Madness, Women’s Day, Easter, summer holidays, Day of the Earth, there is literally a day and event for everything. And if you are creative, you could also find unexpected niches and create your own seasonal trends.
