Four Seasons

Most businesses are subject to seasonality on one level or another. Some companies sell products that align with seasons such as pool supplies or ski gear. Others may have a costume or party favor business that operates year round but offers different products based on the season. It is important to market to the target audience that will likely be making their purchases during the season. The point of SEO best practices is to get a site in the highest possible position in SERPs. When seasonal SEO is effective, it will put the website at the right place in the right time in order to take advantage of the traffic. Companies can learn to use seasonality to their advantage and help make the peak times for their business even better.

Plan Ahead

In order to rank for seasonal keywords like Christmas, back to school or Halloween costumes you will want to do some serious planning way in advance. It is a good idea to be ranking in search results before the season actually arrives. It is possible to put some fresh, great content and get a few links during the season, but people are more likely to link up with something that is more current. Seasonal SEO starts with getting the content for your site linked and indexed ahead of time. There is no guarantee that when you put up your content that the search engine will index it right away or that it will instantly be at the top in SERPs. Start before the season has begun to get the most advantage out of the campaign.

If you waited until the last minute, all hope is not totally lost though. It is possible to do some guest blogging, write fresh content for the site and obtain some links from blogs. You may run a special offer and let your blogger friends know about it.

SERPs and Keywords

The major search engines like Google and Bing update SERP displays on a regular basis it is a good idea to do a SERP inventory on your target keyword. If Google displays a lot of images, work on optimizing images. If there are several Shopping results for a keyword then get your inventory listed in Google Shopping.

Write appropriate content for the targeted keywords. For instance, if there are keywords that are event based such as “black Friday shopping” or “women’s Halloween costumes” write a fresh article about the event, targeting the specific keywords and put it on your site. Sometimes the SERPs will show blog results, in these cases, it is a good idea to put fresh content pertaining to the event on your blog.

What to do with Optimized Pages

A seasonal business may only sell items around a particular season, which means that the pages and content may not get too much attention for a large amount of the year. But this does not mean that sites or pages should be removed. The search engines do not rank whole websites, but single pages. Longevity is a factor that a search engine uses to determine a site’s level of trust or its reputation. By leaving an optimized, but seasonal page up even though there may not be a lot of traffic during the off season gives it time to build generic links. Seasonal NJ SEO can build on itself over a period of time, so go ahead and save the optimized page for next year. A couple of months before the season is in full swing, you will want to put up some fresh relevant content and start over with seasonal SEO strategies. In this way, you will be protecting the progress you make from one season to the next.