Seasonality impacts most industries, but by communicating the right message at the right time and adapting to the seasons you can generate traffic and sales.
Discover the keys to optimizing your natural SEO and getting the best positions out of season.
Opt for seasonal SEO!
– What is it?
Seasonal SEO refers to SEO strategy and techniques that take advantage of strong periods of activity in a specific sector. This can correspond to a season, several weeks, several days or even a single day (Christmas, New Year, Black Friday, Halloween, Mother’s Day…).
-Why is it important for your website?
Many companies rely on key periods of the year to generate traffic.
When search volumes are high on the web, seasonal SEO allows you to maximize traffic to your site but also to increase your conversions.
To do this, we suggest that you identify the most interesting search queries for your business and publish content that matches these searches. In addition, the long tail (set of keywords with low search volumes that are likely to be less competitive on search engines. These keywords once cumulated can represent a significant portion of a site’s overall traffic) would allow you to position yourself more easily and on highly qualified queries. This technique helps to know the seasonal changes and the most strategic periods on which to position yourself.
If we take the example of Coronavirus, we have noticed that certain sectors such as online sales or delivery sites have experienced high traffic as consumers have had to change their habits. And, other sectors such as tourism, events or luxury goods have been strongly impacted by this crisis and have not been able to adapt to this context.
Search engine queries are an important indicator of consumer intention and behaviour. The COVID-19 crisis has had a considerable impact on search choices, consumer mobility, consumption habits and budgets. It is therefore fundamental to analyze this unprecedented period to recognize these changes in expectations in order to improve your SEO in other periods.
To identify these queries, equip yourself with traffic analysis tools in order to identify the volume of search that is most interesting for you and thus refine the results. They allow you to deduce search trends and use the most relevant keywords in your editorial content in order to differentiate yourself from your competitors and attract the maximum number of customers likely to buy or use your service.
We recommend these three tools:
– Google Trends: a search trend analysis tool. Google provides a score according to “the evolution of search interest”. A score of 100 corresponds to the highest keyword usage rate.
– Google Keyword Planner: which allows web marketers to identify the most relevant keywords for a campaign to optimize the targeting and performance of their ads.
– Google Search Console: allows you to measure the performance and search traffic of your site, solve problems and optimize its ranking in search results.
Plan your SEM campaigns in advance:
Seasonality is one of the fundamental elements in e-commerce. If you want to generate high traffic on your site throughout the year, you need to optimize your e-shop according to user preferences regarding products and seasonality.
Use your expertise and allow your customers to order their products a few months in advance, for example. Make intelligent use of the long tail principle to bring your prospects and customers to a dedicated landing page during their early searches, allowing them to benefit from early order planning.
One of the first steps in optimizing your e-commerce store is to find out which products sell the most and when. Use your Google Analytics data to prepare your online store several months in advance for special events such as Black Friday, Mother’s Day, Christmas, etc.
Before launching a product on your site, you can create a teasing with your visitors by putting the upcoming products in a specific category such as “Coming soon”. Remember to include pre-order information. Draw attention to products that you think will be popular by displaying notifications on your home page. This is one of the best ways to increase awareness of your products before they are offered for sale on your e-shop.
As with each of your product sheets, remember to create content that is optimized and adapted for low periods to ensure maximum traffic.
Leverage mobile applications:
Nowadays, SEO for mobile applications is the solution to adapt to the changing behaviour of consumers using a mobile device. Fortunately, there are several ways to do so. First of all, the mobile version of a site is essential. It is possible to develop a responsive website with content that adapts to all screen sizes.
Tools such as Snapchat or Instagram can be real vectors of virality, especially if you are on the move.
Indeed, if applications are more and more present, it is thanks to Google which is able to index Apps. We’re not just talking about URLs and titles, but the content of the pages within your applications. Google’s Mobile API allows developers to send information directly, and thus associate each page inside your application with the URL of your website, which represents it by inserting Deep Links.
This way, communicate to your community the next places and dates of your presence with a picture of the place in question via Instagram. And if you feel like it, create a dedicated application for your brand, featuring exclusive content for people who download it. Generally, mobile applications of any kind are particularly well suited to low periods.
Social networks: your allies in increasing traffic
It is already important to ensure that your SEM campaigns are properly linked to your social networks. You must have good quality content to publish on social media. Social networks will also increase the number of links that point to the website. And the more your links are shared, the more clicks they will generate. You have to consider that millions of people spend a lot of time on social networks.
We can also talk about BuzzSumo, a tool that allows you to get relevant information about the most popular contents within a niche, about the people relaying these contents and about the influencers of a particular domain.
In other words, it is an indispensable tool for anyone who wants to get into web marketing, and content marketing in particular.
So make sure you stay active on all the platforms your company is present on and consider the importance of signing up on new networks to further expand your community.
Adopt e-mailing to build customer loyalty:
E-mailing and newsletters are far from being outdated! They are a great way to convert leads by sending a personalised message to your target audience.
Indeed, e-mail marketing allows you to create adapted content in all seasons without having to change all the information on your website. It’s the opportunity to send your promotions to all the people registered in your database with an irresistible offer, such as a special Black Friday or Valentine’s Day offer to build customer loyalty…
And don’t forget! When you launch an operation such as e-mailing campaigns, it is in your best interest to measure and analyse the opening and click rates. These figures are indicative of the level of engagement of your audience. Thanks to this monitoring, you know what works and what doesn’t, and so you can offer more and more targeted and effective content.
What to remember?
Seasonality is an essential criterion to be considered to follow changes and fluctuations in search volumes during the year. Such a strategy will increase traffic and optimize conversion through the right content at the right time and to the right people.
It is essential to optimize or decrease your marketing budgets when your business is going through a low period. You need to intelligently analyze your traffic to avoid unnecessary expenses.
Share your seasonal SEO needs with our experts at Eminence and contact us to optimize your web strategy!