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Doing SEO for the Holidays - Everything you need to know



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Doing SEO for the Holidays - Everything you need to know

Seasonal SEO has been around ever since SEO became a thing. It focuses on long-term optimizations for short period profits, but those brief periods can mean A LOT of profit when the holiday season is over. Don't be afraid of seasonal SEO, at the core of it, SEO is a long-term strategy, waiting for results is part of the job.

So, why is seasonal SEO different?

Because in most countries the holiday season comes once a year. And that's usually all about celebrating Chrismas and other winter-based holidays; it also involves the new year as well as other festivals.
With the traditional SEO, you are continually improving your content and pages in the home you will continuously get better ranks and more organic traffic.
With Seasonal SEO you will work ahead of time, often blindly with that hope that your positions and overall organic traffic will be good enough for about two months of the year as long as the holidays shopping spree lasts.

Why should you waste time with seasonal SEO?

Because everyone else does the same! Most brands out there are slowly preparing for Chrismas every year, and most of them are deadly serious about it, they plan to make a profit in the holiday season, if you have competitors in your niche that are doing this, you need to get in on the action!

And it isn't all about SEO; your general marketing should shit direction and adopt a holiday spirit if you want to sell anything. Holiday banners, holiday offers, special sales, special landing pages, holiday newsletters and everything in between should be implemented. Chrismas is the biggest buying period of the year.

So what does Seasonal SEO consists off?

Well, this is pretty simple. Seasonal SEO consists of aligning your content to fit a list of seasonal keywords and phrases that are only searched by users during the holiday period.
These keywords will only be relevant and bring you decent traffic during the holiday you are targeting, keep in mind once this period is over your optimisation will be worthless until next year.
So have a plan on how you are going to serve this type of content. Think really carefully about what you are going to edit, create and delete concerning content.

The main drawback of Seasonal SEO

You need to start early. If you are reading this article now and you think it is time to prepare your SEO for Chrismas, you may already be too late in the game to make a difference. It will take time to put everything in effect and for Google to notice the changes before you know it Christmas will be here.

It all needs to start at least three months in advance. Research, content building, on-page optimization and link building.
Keep in mind Seasonal SEO is a secondary tactic; it should be an additional SEO strategy, not your main one! Throughout the year your main focus should be normal SEO, this is just a plus.

Is Seasonal SEO worth it?

Yes. As I said, if your competitors are doing it, you should do it too. And if your competitors are dumb enough not to do it, you should find a way to do it!
Ask yourself:
- how important is for your business to sell for very specific periods of the year?
- what are your competitors doing and how strong are they?
- can you really turn a profit around?

Other types of Seasons to focus on

Of course, when referring to the holiday season, most of us think of Chrismas. But there are plenty other holidays you can implement seasonal SEO on:

- Other Holidays. Halloween, Labor Day, Valentine's Day, etc.
- Actual Season. Spring, summer, Autumn, Winter. All of them may have a different type of keyword research.
- Don't miss other trends, fads and specific patterns you may discover.

Comments

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potentialwriter
Doing SEO for your online brand is all you need to succeed with your online business carrier. This is what many website owners have ignored and are only chasing shadows around the internet. SEO starts with building a WordPress website and can be achieved within 24 hours. WordPress has the best SEO technology in the world and can help you start performing all necessary SEO tasks in just one click.



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vinaya
Even though the seasons, festivals and holidays are seasonal topics, we can make these topics every green. Christmas comes every year. New Year Comes every year, Halloween, Spring, Fall, Winter comes every year. If you published a content about Spring this year, your content can be relevant for the next year as well, all you have to do is update your content. Your advertisers are already promoting through seasonal ads, and now it is your time to have those ads on your pages and match your content to those seasonal ads.



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Corzhens
I don’t think it is a type of recycling but you can still do SEO for the holidays differently from what you did the previous years. Take for instance the contents. If you had written about Christmas tree last year and you want to write about it again for this year then just do it as long as your new article is not a copycat of the previous year’s article. There should be new information to share and not just a rehash of the past.



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overcast
I think the point about working 4 months in advanced for any season is the right approach. You can see that part definitely helps with the link building. And also the amount of money required for the holidays sales and the promotion can be doubled. So it takes time for those things though. But it's definitely doable if done correctly. I personally think that doing SEO takes time. So one should be regularly posting on this.



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augusta
This was a cool tutorial, certainly, most sites can do better with seasonal SEO as you rightly stated because your partners or counterpart in the same niche would or is doing it, then one shouldn't relent in doing same.create your topics to align with the holiday period and optimised it to rank higher in the search engine.Search for those keywords that align with the topics for any season and make do with them.Doing this will definitely bring more traffic and money.



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jaymish2
Great Information. I agree that the Christmas holidays and season as a whole is a cash cow. This is an opportunity to cash in on people's willingness to empty their pockets. I agree that planning for this season should start early. I would have my SEO tailored content ready way before Black Friday, as this is when the official shopping season starts. It would be foolish not to cash in during this period. I don't consider any other holidays in the running. People hardly shop for other holidays like Easter.



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Tronia
A great article that is right on time since the Christmas is coming fast and approaching. I think that the winter holidays that consist of Christmas and then the New Year's are the most important ones out of them all. Why? Because if you are in any sort of business that involves selling things this is the perfect time.

People are willing to spend more than usual and that is why the seasonal SEO is definitely worth doing, at least in my opinion.



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anwebservices
Seasonal SEO and (before) holiday marketing should be taken very seriously because it is very profitable way of doing business and online sales too. perhaps we just had black friday few days ago and just imagine how much money was spent on various discounts world-wide. So everyone who taken care about of it as seller, probably made more profits then usual.



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kgord
This is a very interesting and timely post. I wouldn't have even thought about doing SEO for the holidays and how it could be different from regular SEO. I find this to be very interesting and thoughtful. Thank you for the post..food for thought for sure.



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Baburra
I agree it really should be done way in advance. It's the same way with even offline store practices as many of them start making plans many months before the actual holidays are near. I think for some types of businesses it might be okay not to take advantage of the holidays and just allow the business to function as it would any other month, but for many it really would be a shame to let it pass.



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potentialwriter
SEO is the major online activity expected of every online entrepreneur that wishes to have financial breakthroughs running a blog or website. You might want to find out what SEO is all about. Doing searches and reading pages like this can give you a lot of exposure about it and you will be able to walk through it to success.

In the course of doing SEO activities on your blog, you need to understand that content is the king and there's no shortcut to getting massive traffic to your blog except by building it with quality contents.



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rhombus
It is imperative that any SEO expert become accustomed to their customer seasonal periods. Failure to do so could be disastrous, for your client and ultimately yourself. Not all businesses experience busy periods at the same time. Know your client, so some research - after all, they are relying on your expertise to guide them. Should your clients all experience their "season" at that same time ie: Christmas, avoid taking leave at this time. Even with the most careful of planning, things could change in an instant, when your services may become critical to their success (who ultimately pays your salary).



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Judas2018
I think the best thing for any brand or company to do around the holidays is sell Christmas themed merch. Shirts, hoodies, t-shirts or hats that represent your company and its niche or theme. But also show some holiday spirit. This is mostly important for Christmas time. As I think Thanksgiving and New Years while they're celebrated - don't really call for much merch beyond food and champagne.



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Corzhens
Gee, this looks like one of the hardest marketing tasks that I have seen. Calling people takes a lot of guts and patience because that is the work of call center agents. Some of them tell me that they couldn’t last for a year in that job because of the stress. So why do that cold calling only to receive a rejection or worse, a reprimand. If you haven’t experienced a phone banging, then do that cold calling and before you can make your 5th call, you will hear a bang on the other end of the line.



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