SEOnotes

Factoring Seasonality in Search: What is the best approach?

Seasonality will almost always has something to do with the traffic a website receives from the search engines, regardless if your business will or will not click online. Search behavior varies in certain seasons, in certain industries. When talking of seasonality of search, 3 things come into consideration:

1. Industry/Product/Service

2. Period or season

3. Online Marketing Tactic

Nature of Industry

There are certain goods and services that follow their respective industry’s seasonal trends. Online selling Christmas-themed gifts will garner the peak of its traffic during the holiday season. As well as hotels and vacation properties, there will be off-peak and peak seasons of search in accordance to their busy and non-busy business months.

The Period or Season

Just like any business online or offline, to research on the peak seasons and those months where you have less sales must be identified in strategizing your traffic initiative on specific seasons.

Online Marketing Tactic

The top metric to consider when strategizing seasonal market initiatives online would be traffic. Knowing the nature of your product or service, and the industry it is under provides insights regarding the level of demand for your product or service, and the competition it faces. Considering the historical traffic data per season helps you decide as to when you will allocate your best resources: time and effort. You plan the specific initiatives that will work best per season.

For example, in handling hotel websites, it is best to pump up your marketing initiatives during the hotel’s peak season, so as to maximize ROI (return on investment). During off season, it is advisable to coordinate with the client about doing more offline activities, creating more affordable service packages, and have these communicated online, to boost interest and therefore, improve searchability of the hotel in the Internet. Campaigns about upcoming events and hotel amenities are also great to capitalize on during low travel season so as to prepare the potential guests in booking in that hotel.

In summary, you can categorize traffic initiatives with seasonality in consideration into two:

1. Off-peak/low season - Create campaigns/initiatives that will boost interest and search about your product/service. This will also make your website ready for the coming of the peak season

2. Peak season - Be more active in doing updates, building networks online, featuring the best assets of your product or service.

Seasonality in search is a good indicator in terms of allocating resources for both offline and online initiatives for a business. Getting the right information, particularly historical data on search behavior, and traffic are definitely useful in any search engine optimization campaign.