Capitalizing seasons has been a cornerstone of marketing for ages, and it’s easy to see why the practice has lasted so long. If you sell a seasonal product, you have exclusivity and urgency—two of the most powerful motivators in marketing—on your side. There are many seasonal trends for marketing and SEO, but none so important in the US as the Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping events leading up to Christmas. Seasonal SEO-driven content marketing can help you take advantage of these huge events no matter what kind of business you have.
What Is Seasonal Marketing?
So, what is seasonality in terms of marketing and SEO? When referring to a business seasonality simply refers to rotating inventory or service themes that revolve around the season, quarter, holidays, or other annual events. For eCommerce seasonality means rotating your featured products, and even your entire inventory, to align with your committed time marketing. It can be difficult to define seasonality for businesses that offer services rather than products, but it generally means a change in targeted marketing efforts to include seasonal or holiday themes.
Seasonal Businesses vs. Seasonal Marketing
Seasonal marketing generally refers to sales, promotional events, and products or services that tie into a temporal season or holiday. However, a seasonal item doesn’t have to be specifically related to the season itself. For instance, an effective winters SEO strategy for a retailer could be toy-specific without mentioning the major gift-giving holidays that take place during the season. When considering promotional events examples include back-to-school specials, early Black Friday discounts for members, and other opportunities to create urgency and exclusivity in your messaging. But seasonal marketing is very different from having a seasonal business.
So what is a seasonal business? Businesses that only sell seasonal products like Halloween decorations during the months leading up to the holiday are considered seasonal businesses. By definition seasonal businesses don’t do any other type of marketing besides seasonal promotions and seasonal ads; they’re not around long enough to warrant other types of lead generation.
Benefits of Seasonal SEO and Content Marketing
You should adopt seasonal mindset strategies for marketing if you rely on or benefit from seasonal sales in your business. Don’t make the mistake of thinking seasonal marketing only works for eCommerce and retail; service-based businesses thrive with these techniques too! Easter real estate marketing ideas, like an egg-hunt open house, not only attract new leads but they build community connections that are vital to service-based businesses. We recently wrote about how valuable Black Friday teaser emails and targeted marketing can be, even for service-based businesses.
When it comes to the best way to market seasonality examples depend heavily on the type of business you are looking at. Real estate and eCommerce are going to have very different approaches to seasonal advertising and seasonal keywords, and their approach is going to be even further from, say, an automotive detailing business or a SaaS provider. In our earlier seasonal discount example of the membership access to early Black Friday discounts, you can create chains to target both members and non-members with the same promotion. Members don’t want to miss out on deals that make their membership worth its price, and non-members don’t want to miss out on discounts they can’t get elsewhere. In both cases, exclusivity creates the desire and urgency drives the action.
Pro Tip:
Don’t forget to motivate your team during this stressful and hectic time. On the back end of your business, seasonal sales might result in rewards for employees. Sales initiatives examples could include gifts or bonuses for meeting sales goals individually or as a team.
How to Find Seasonal SEO Keywords
Use a keyword research tool like AHREFS to find high-volume, low-competition keywords to optimize your landing pages, blog, store, and social media content as well as to target your audience with ads that convert. Create a cyclical, seasonal marketing calendar that breaks down the overlapping seasonal stretches and maximizes the seasonal factor marketing thrives on.
Early season marketing efforts might include teaser emails or text campaigns, whereas paid ads will be more effective later in the season, while a new round of teasers starts for the next season. Other seasonal SEO tips and tricks include increasing your backlinks to seasonal landing pages, adding visual references to the season to your site for additional appeal, and easily refreshed seasonal content that you can build on every year.
Products vs. Services
Keyword bases for seasonal products examples include decorations, clothing, and holiday-adjacent items such as toys in the winter or candy in the fall or spring. These examples of seasonal products highlight opportunities for targeted seasonality marketing and will appear in a variety of targetable keyword strings like “Halloween candy near me” or “best Christmas toys for 8-year-old girls”. Other seasonal demand examples include informational searches for DIY projects (e.g. “DIY decorations” or “DIY gifts”) as well recipes, hours, charity donations, and events.
This also is where service-based businesses can edge into the market with discounted rates or gift certificates marketed as practical, thoughtful gifts for family or friends or by blending holiday aesthetics and phrasing into their existing marketing efforts to experiment with holiday and seasonal targeting. Easter marketing ideas for real estate could be ideal because they meld with the existing curb appeal marketing that real estate agents would use year-round, much like Christmas selling ideas would include lights for the same reason. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel every few months; you can blend holiday phrases for marketing with your existing SEO strategy to take advantage of seasonality trends without any additional stress.
Final Thoughts on Seasonal SEO
Building an effective seasonal SEO strategy is less complicated than you may think, but it never hurts to have experts like the Adrian Agency team help you through the process. Not sure if your content is up to par for head-to-head competition with the big corporations? To see how your site, store, or landing page is performing in terms of seasonal (and general) SEO, try our free SEO audit tool!