Yesterday I was out shopping and every store I passed was decked-out with Christmas decorations and promoting sales for the quickly approaching festive season… and you should be doing the same for your website!
Let’s use the most recent holiday – Halloween as an example.
Janet Meiners from Marketing Pilgrim explains how Halloween is big business with $5-7 billion in total spending in the US with the average adult coughing-up $65 on the holiday. If you check the Google Trends to see how the holiday ranks for traffic, you’ll notice that it starts to gain popularity around September and skyrockets at the end of October (funnily enough right when Halloween happens):
So as you can see, people start searching for ideas a month or so before the actual event. Rebecca from SEOmoz sums it up best in her post Plan for the Holidays Nice and Early By Analyzing Search Trends when she says:
if you’re doing SEO for Halloween-related terms, you would want to start building content and links towards the end of the summer so you’re more visible to searchers when they think to start doing research
The same applies to Christmas search traffic!
A lot of places have begun targeting Christmas related terms already and people have started searching for gift ideas – so if you want to take your share of some of this seasonal search traffic now is the time to do so. Here’s what Google shows for Christmas related search patterns:
What if I don’t have an online store that sells conventional Christmas gifts?
A lot of people who read this probably won’t have nice e-commerce stores selling things people would want to give as Christmas gifts. I sell SEO services and I can assure you that my family member’s eyes wouldn’t light-up if they received one of my articles on ‘how to perform effective keyword research’ or ‘a guide to social media’.
But just because no one would buy your services as a gift doesn’t mean that all hope is lost. There are countless ways you can create great baited articles based around the festive season. Examples could include – making a list of the naughty and nice blogs in your industry; a list of online tools, widgets or plugins that would help Santa organise his elves more efficiently; SEO Mistletoe – which SEO guys and gals would you like to see smack lips… etc. etc.
Each season offers a world of possibilities to further promote your business and connect with your clients in new and interesting ways. So what are you waiting for?… Christmas?
This is excellent advice. Not only should you start targeting the Christmas terms now you should also spend time developing content based on Christmas much earlier. Too many sites make the mistake of waiting until the last minute and miss out on a lot of potential sales.