Seasonal keywords – how to rank them?
Whenever we talk about keywords it’s good to see if they are used by users seasonally. Seasonality of keywords is nothing but increased searches during a specific period of time. This can be very important when planning your SEO efforts – some phrases have variable competitive environments.
Types of keywords
Generics (generic phrases)
Usually 1-2 word phrases (depending on the industry).
Freshers
Short-living phrases that appear suddenly and disappear suddenly – usually associated with a momentary trend.
Long-lasting (evergreen)
Keywords that generate steady, uninterrupted organic traffic to your website.
With a characteristic of a product line.
Geolocated
Related to the location of the company.
User-defined
Those that are not in the Google Ads planner but come up from the need at the moment (e.g. how to repair the sink).
It’s always worth checking whether the keywords have a variable number of searches in time. In other words, so that we know what positioning strategy to choose and what to focus on when positioning in a given industry. Keywords have a correlation with your business reality.
Things you might check in terms of keyword seasonality
- Official and less official holidays.
- The length and period over which unofficial “long weekends” fall.
- Cultural events and happenings – when and where they take place.
- Sowing calendar (in the agricultural industry), grass pollen (pharmacies, doctors).
- Enrollment deadlines for schools, courses, student recruitment.
- As students head back to school – important for the real estate industry.
- And everything that makes a particular industry unique.
It is also worth asking the client for information. He is the one who has the best knowledge of when he exactly types in a sudden query. For example, language schools have 3 seasons: summer term, winter term, and summer holiday courses. In the agricultural industry, fertilizers are purchased during spring. In cosmetics, tanning oils are bought throughout the season (winter trips to warm countries also affect the season), while in spring and summer all kinds of tanning oils and creams are very often purchased.
For the Google Trends tool, it’s worth looking at keywords that are gaining popularity. You may find that business-wise they will be the perfect supplement to ones you’ve already picked up.
Tools for checking seasonality of keywords
There are several tools in which you can check whether your keywords are used seasonally:
Paid tools (Senuto and Semstorm) present the charts with data actually pulled from Google Planner. However, it is worth using paid solutions. They give you the opportunity to perform a comprehensive analysis of the keywords.
How to plan activities for seasonal SEO?
Understanding trends allows you to plan well. In order to improve the position of pages that are subject to seasonality, keywords should be grouped.
What you should do:
- determine when the season begins and ends;
- check the industry and analyze the market of competitors;
- check the competitiveness of phrases;
- determine the number of seasons (ups and downs, below-average sales) for each keyword – separately or group them.
The above division is only an example, but it allows you to estimate when to start positioning the particular keywords or grouped phrases.
For the phrases given as an example above (sunbathing products), SEO activities should start right after the season in order to be in time for the next season. The expected SEO activities to effectively rank for the next summer season would take about 6-8 months. For the agricultural industry, 4-6 months should be enough to be in the Top10.
The implementation of individual changes should be carefully planned and carried out during the off-season. This is difficult in the travel industry, but traffic is at its lowest in November and this is where you should plan any work.
How do you build content for seasonal trends?
First of all, you need to determine exactly what queries you are dealing with. Whether the keywords include holiday names, dates, time, specific names. While executing content marketing for such words, we need to consider the following things.
- The keywords with the date should occur in the TITLE, DESCRIPTION, and the H1 header.
- The content must be rich in seasonal keywords.
- The subtitle should also contain the seasonal keyword – it is good if the subtitle is a question.
- The article must be long and substantive (8-10K characters). Use valuable graphic materials/a video and lots of photos. This is especially important for building your rank in Google.
To sum up
In each industry, it is worth checking whether there is a seasonality in queries and how do users search for services or products. This allows you to plan your content marketing efforts in advance.
