Seasonal SEO – plan ahead

Certain businesses become much more high profile around certain times of the year. Card companies, for example, are more likely to advertise in the lead up to Valentine's Day or Christmas, while a chocolate manufacturer might step up its campaigns around Easter.

Of course these companies have not just decided to run billboards and TV adverts a couple of weeks before the seasonal event; they have spent months planning and designing an effective campaign. The same planning needs to be implemented ahead of search engine optimisation (SEO) campaigns if businesses and website owners want to make the most of the seasonal opportunities.

Take Christmas as an example: websites need to start planning any SEO campaigns now if they want to stand a chance of boosting traffic for competitive festive keywords. Kelvin Newman, director of strategy at digital marketing agency SiteVisibility told OnRec: “A successful natural search campaign can take a while to plan, some time to kick in, and then you’ve got to bear in-mind delivery cut off times. Therefore, with Christmas just six months away, seasonal SEO planning needs to start within the next month, no later.”

He added that most campaigns can be tied into a similar calendar of planning, which needs to start at least four months ahead of the actual date. The first thing to do is mark the peak date in your diary and brainstorm new ideas. Take this opportunity to review previous campaigns and look at what has worked for you in the past and what your customers are searching for around the date in question.

Then, around three months ahead of the festive season, you need to have a comprehensive plan in place. Mr Newman noted that project management is “one of the most under-appreciated aspects of natural search” and urged businesses to spend the necessary time and effort on careful planning.

Two and a half months in advance of the key date, is the time to get outreach and content production in “full swing”. It takes time to create good content and you need to give yourself enough time that it will be well-written and carefully constructed rather of rushed out at the last minute.

Six weeks ahead of the peak is “prime time” for acquiring links. This needs to be proactive and should be the time when you are publishing rather than making initial contact. The next milestone is the one month countdown, at which point you will need to consider a plan B if things haven't gone quite as planned. Press release syndication or a competition could offer a suitable boost to your campaign.

From the two week mark you really need to be following your analytics software closely and also looking at what keywords are popping up across the board. Carefully monitoring the situation should help you manipulate your SEO campaign to deliver the best results for your business and even if things haven't gone quite to plan, now is the time when you can spot your mistakes and prepare for next year.