Find Seasonal Keywords to Improve Your SEO Strategy

Quick: What time of the year is it?

Is the World Cup on? Is it Christmas? Is it summertime?

I’m asking because, depending on the time of year, you can beef up your marketing strategy using seasonal SEO. Some things are trendy year-round, while others change with the seasons. Think costumes close to Halloween or swimwear in the summer.

Seasonal keywords are an important part of any SEO strategy but are often overlooked.

It’s time to change that!

I’ll use some seasonal keyword and holiday SEO tips and tricks to ensure you’re reaching the people looking for your products or services throughout the year.

Key Takeaways

• Seasonal SEO refers to adapting your online marketing, specifically, search engine optimization, to match seasonal trends. Consumers’ search patterns vary throughout the year. Incorporating seasonal keywords into your SEO strategy can significantly boost visibility and traffic, especially during peak seasons like holidays. 
• Ensure you understand your audience’s customer journey and draw up customer maps, so you can identify their seasonal needs and effectively tailor your content and offers. 
• Refreshing existing content with new seasonal keywords can enhance relevance and searchability during key times. 
• Use past data from peak seasons and events from the past 12 months to inform potential future trending or seasonal keywords and holiday SEO. Specifically, look at search trends, traffic numbers, and conversions.
• Seasonal SEO benefits B2C and B2B businesses, especially those in sectors that experience fluctuations throughout the year, such as e-commerce and the agricultural sector.

Table of Contents

• Key Takeaways
• Seasonal SEO and Its Impact on Your Overall SEO Strategy
  • What Are Seasonal Keywords?
• How Seasonal SEO Can Benefit Both B2C and B2B
• 5 Steps to Planning Your Holiday SEO with Seasonal Keywords
  • 1. Know When to Start
  • 2. Use SEO Tools to Discover Seasonality
  • 3. Leverage Internal Data
  • 4. Consider Your Target Audience
  • 5. Create Unique Content for Each of Your Top-Performing Seasons
• Pro Tips to Get the Most Out of Your Seasonal SEO
• FAQs
• Conclusion

Seasonal SEO and Its Impact on Your Overall SEO Strategy

Seasonal SEO means optimizing content and keywords to take advantage of seasonal trends in search results.  By analyzing your previous data, you can maximize your ROI for the year’s busiest seasons. Then, you can start planning your marketing projects ahead of time.

As marketers, it’s up to us to understand who searches our target organic keywords and phrases—and when they might search them. Then, we’ll know which keywords to prioritize at different times of the year.

Using a seasonal SEO strategy means your business stays relevant, so people searching for terms related to your business’s season-specific content or products will find you first.

For example, let’s say you sell outdoor gear online. You could include short-tail keywords like ‘Hiking boots’ in your content. You could also use more specific long-tail keywords like ‘Vivobarefoot Hiking Boots for summer’ in a post about suitable hiking footwear in warmer weather.

What Are Seasonal Keywords?

Seasonal fluctuations are an inevitable part of your business. Using seasonal keywords is about identifying the seasonal popularity of products or services and adjusting the search terms you use online to drive sales during these peak times. For instance, you may start by adding specific holiday SEO keywords to attract buyers to a piece about the best holiday buys this year.

You’ll need to consider two types of seasonal keywords: those tied to specific holidays and those tied to seasonal events or linked to changing weather. For example, searches for jewelry often peak around Christmas, and shoppers start looking for Halloween costumes in September.

Another example is camping gear.

Sales for these products spike when the weather gets warmer. To take advantage of this, REI hosts its summer sale at the end of June in the run-up to Independence Day and offers its most significant discounts in May ahead of Memorial Day.

When should you start?

Fortunately, there’s no need for guesswork when it comes to high-demand seasons. You can use tools like Google Trends or Ubersuggest to find keywords for your content, and you can include the top seasonal terms in your PPC ads, too. 

How Seasonal SEO Can Benefit Both B2C and B2B

For businesses and marketers, ‘seasonal’ means maximizing the opportunity to capitalize on the changes in your target audience’s behavior throughout the year, and seasonal SEO can help both B2C and B2B businesses. 

For example, retail businesses often have increased demand during holidays or events like Valentine’s or Mother’s Day. Similarly, the travel sector peaks during summer and winter vacation seasons, and the agricultural sector’s seasonal crop cycles influence market availability.

B2B businesses like corporate gifts and promotional products companies could also take advantage of seasonal demands with different holiday campaigns, new fiscal year promotional items, or back-to-school products.

As a B2C or B2B company, seasonal SEO marketing is a gold mine because it helps your:

• Visibility: You can increase brand awareness and reach new customers who may not be aware of your company.
• Conversion rates: Realigning your SEO strategy with seasonal trends can improve leads and sales.
• ROI: By using seasonal SEO in your marketing, you can maximize your ROI during high-demand periods.
• B2B businesses can take advantage of business cycles when companies are more likely to buy. Some companies may be spending up unused budgets toward the end of the fiscal year, for example.
• B2B companies can also gain more leads by creating seasonal content that appeals to other businesses or contractors, such as ‘The best accounting tools for tax season.’

A further advantage is you can keep ahead of your competitors by outpacing other niche businesses that don’t consider seasonal trends.

5 Steps to Planning Your Holiday SEO with Seasonal Keywords

There’s never a bad time to start planning your seasonal keywords and holiday SEO, so make sure you get ahead of the game. Below, I talk you through five steps to get the most from this strategy.

1. Know When to Start

If you’ve read my blog often enough, you’ll know SEO doesn’t happen overnight. It can take months to see results, so you want to start planning and publishing your content well in advance of seasonal spikes.

Chances are, you’ve got a lot of data to trawl through, so starting to plan 4-6 months ahead of busy seasons makes sense when you’re working on holiday SEO. For instance, researching keywords and emerging trends and planning and publishing your holiday season content in late August.

2. Use SEO Tools to Discover Seasonality

You can easily find trending and seasonal keywords using SEO tools. This lets you make competitive comparisons, discover trending keywords, and better understand branded and unbranded search behavior. Here are three tools to get started with:

Google Trends

Use Google Trends to find emerging search terms and peaks and valleys. Get regional insights by using the ‘location’ option to filter results and see how seasonality varies geographically, too.

You can see there was a large increase in interest in November into December, which aligns with the holiday season, when more people were potentially looking for gifts. After the holiday season, the search interest declines, but then stays fairly consistent the remainder of the year.

Ubersuggest

My tool, Ubersuggest, gives you access to past data to see keyword performance and find trends and fluctuations in search volume. You can also use it for competitive analysis to see how others use seasonal SEO, and for content ideas based on seasonal trends.

Semrush

This popular tool has a traffic analytics feature to let you see web traffic journeys, uncover competitor traffic sources, engagement metrics, and spot trends. Another Semrush feature is the Keyword Magic tool, which helps find trending keywords, search intent, search volume, and keyword difficulty.

3. Leverage Internal Data

This is where your internal data comes in handy. Use Ubersuggest, Google Search Console, or your preferred tool to evaluate seasonal SEO. You’ll want to pay special attention to queries users are searching for, traffic, and conversions. 

Say it’s wintertime, and you know people will be traveling to destinations for winter activities like skiing.

A brand like Canada Goose can anticipate more sales at this time of year and dedicate a page to outerwear they recommend for travel.

Clearly, they’re doing a great job with their seasonal SEO strategy.

Now, they can go into a tool like Ubersuggest and type in their domain to see what pages bring in the most traffic.

As you can see, a lot of pages with ‘luxury performance outwear’ are performing well.

The brand can now match travel content for the winter season, and publish content around luxury performance outwear to show shoppers they don’t have to sacrifice style for warmth—even when they’re traveling.

To get some creative ideas flowing, test some of these features with your business and see what results you get.

4. Consider Your Target Audience

By creating a buyer persona, you can spot ideal customer characteristics, like demographics, psychographics, and behaviors. This data lets you focus your marketing strategies more precisely and uncover the seasonal keywords people might use.

Then there’s the buyer’s journey.

It covers three main stages: awareness, consideration, and buying. By understanding this part better, you can write more personalized content and post it on customers’ preferred platforms. You can also create more helpful content that supports the purchase journey because you’ll recognize the buyer’s specific needs. 

Also, consider search intent and why buyers seek specific information. For example, if they search for “buy summer dress,” their intent is transactional because they’re ready to buy. If they just want information, they may search under ‘summer travel tips’ or something similar. 

By understanding your ideal customer better, you can start marketing more effectively to them and develop helpful content to support the buyer until they’re ready to convert.

Here’s an excellent example from REI.

The REI article shows a strong comprehension of SEO strategies by aligning content with buyer personas and journeys. By understanding keyword intent and providing valuable, actionable content, REI successfully positions itself as an authoritative source, guiding customers through their purchasing journey while optimizing for search visibility.

5. Create Unique Content for Each of Your Top-Performing Seasons

When creating new content, ensure it’s relevant and engaging by using the right seasonal keywords and making it useful for customers looking for products related to that time.

You’ll want to create content specific to each season or holiday and maybe share or refresh older content that fits those themes.

So, how do you keep your content fresh and exciting (even when you’re dealing with the same topic season after season)? Well, you could mix it up a bit with shopping guides, reviews, blogs, videos, and season-specific category pages.

You could take some tips from Starbucks and launch/promote new products or services along with the changing seasons, and write content or develop new advertising campaigns around them, too.

Starbucks has unique offerings perfect for every phase of the year. In the fall, for instance, it has the Pumpkin Spice Latte and other variants.In the summer, there are different refreshments. These seasonal drinks create excitement due to the time limitations of the product, appealing to customers’ changing tastes.

Starbucks also has timely spring promotions. For example, the Iced Lavender Cream Oatmilk Matcha aims to ‘capture the uplifting energy of spring in a cup.’

As you’ll see from the above link, Starbucks creates engaging content to highlight the uniqueness of each new drink and uses visually appealing images to encourage sales.

Pro Tips to Get the Most Out of Your Seasonal SEO

Applying the above tips means you’ve come a long way toward optimizing your online marketing with seasonal keywords, but you can always do more. Here are some additional tips:

• Create urgency with your content: Send emails with limited-time offers during peak sales. For instance, a hotel could offer a ten percent discount on Valentine’s Day meals or romantic getaways.
• Develop a cohesive seasonal marketing plan: Coordinate blog content with email marketing, PPC ads, social media channels, etc.
• Use seasonal keywords throughout your content and marketing: Include them in your titles, meta descriptions, headings, URLs, and even image alt text. 
• Organize your content with category pages: For example, you may want to have categories for New Year’s Sales, Halloween, Valentine’s, etc. 
• Keep your content evergreen: Avoid using dates in headings and titles, such as ‘Best Christmas Gifts for  Men 2024.’ Instead, consider more evergreen phrases like ‘Best Christmas Gifts for Men’
• The same goes for dates in the URL. Keep them simple, like this: “https://www.website.com/summer-travel-tips.”
• Analyze and refresh your current: Refresh your content to address seasonal trends and add new information.
• Publish ahead of time: Allow content time to rank and ensure it meets Google’s helpful content and E-E-A-T guidelines.
• Add internal linking:  Use hyperlinks with keyword-rich anchor text in your main navigation or footer to increase visibility to your seasonal pages one to two months before the holiday. Internal linking can also create a more streamlined journey for the user to reach other relevant pages.

FAQs

What is seasonal SEO?

Seasonal SEO is optimizing content and keywords to align with seasonal trends and events.This strategy aims to enhance your visibility in search engine results during peak times when consumer interest is high. Utilizing seasonal SEO can help you make key marketing decisions and lead to more conversions.

What are seasonal keywords?

Seasonal keywords relate to seasonal searches. These keywords have a high search volume during specific times of the year. For example, consider the search term “summer clothes”: From late May to August, many individuals want to prepare their looks for vacation season. However, there is very little demand for summer clothing in the winter.

Where do I find seasonal keywords?

You can use tools like Google’s Keyword Planner and Ubersuggest. You can get an SEO page report to discover your competitors’ page rankings for popular seasonal keywords or generate keyword suggestions and content ideas. This is all you’ll need to develop a solid action plan for your seasonal SEO strategy.

How do I use seasonal keywords?

Update or publish content around seasonal themes. Remember, people often search months ahead, so don’t publish content at the last minute in the hope of gaining traction. 

Make seasonal content part of your content calendar, or have a separate calendar for seasonal content and keywords. 

Create actionable, helpful content around seasonal topics and weave keywords into your content, titles, meta descriptions,  headings, etc. Also consider using highly searched seasonal keywords in PPC ads too.

Conclusion

You can’t always anticipate changing search trends, but seasonal SEO and seasonal keywords are a pretty safe bet.

Using this strategy helps you meet your customers’ changing behaviors and search patterns, and can improve your visibility during some of the busiest times of the year.

The advantages of using seasonal SEO include increased conversions and a better ROI.

But don’t think it can wait. 

Like any good SEO strategy, you must give it time and ensure you’re ready well before the seasonal spikes. 

It’s easy to get started. Use tools like Ubersuggest to find keywords to build your content around and use your internal data to spot peak times.