Seasonal SEO can prove to be beneficial for businesses.

Timing

Since organic search engine rankings cannot usually be achieved overnight; you need to be aware that the efforts you put into the site today might not return favorable results for weeks, or even months. You should usually give at least 2-4 months (that's ideal) starter time for any seasonal SEO project, to achieve higher rankings for seasonal keywords.

Keywords Research

This is a tricky one, especially if the season/event you are optimizing the site for is a few months out. The web's keyword research tools will give you the data for the "past month" which definitely doesn't apply to what you are trying to do here. I wonder how many people search for "Christmas gifts" in July/August? So if all the research tools are not going to be helpful, what are your options? Here they are:

• The most important keywords are obvious. How would you search for the kind of products you are selling? This may give you some answers. If not, ask your customers!
• Contact us about running a Google adwords campaign or even getting traffic/budget estimates from Google adwords can be very helpful. If you don't have one, this is the time to get it.

Optinisation

Optimizing your site for seasonal keywords is not any different from the regular SEO campaign. You just have to make sure that your home page, category and product pages provide good information in a keyword conscious way. The pages or sections (Christmas gifts section, Valentine’s day gift section etc) you have on your site should stay live throughout the year, so they can achieve better natural rankings. Including the year information in the text can be helpful too. For instance some people may search for Christmas tree stockiest 2011, that's where your time stamping can come handy.

Remember that successful organic SEO requires continuous monitoring and can needs a lot of tweaking for stable results as search engines are constantly updating their algorithms to make their results more targeted and it's our job to stay up to date with all the details to ensure your website achieves its optimal performance in our campaign.

Understanding the Search Results

While Google updates their various SERPS (search results pages) regularly, having a handle on the different SERP inventory available for your target keyword is a good idea. If Google is showing a lot of images, then you know you need to work on image optimization. If there are Shopping results, you know you need to get your inventory in Google Products. For event-based keywords like “Christmas Shopping”, Google often shows relevant News links above the organic results around the time of the event. For the News results, consider writing an article on “Christmas Gift Shopping”.

Often times, SERPs with News results also show blog results, so this would be an indication that you might want to add some content about the event to your blog. If it’s a hot term, update your blog regularly throughout the day, as Google will often update these links with the latest content. Seasonal SEO is trickier than regular SEO but can give fantastic ROI if planned and executed properly. Some other techniques to the holidays could include a seasonal paid search or email marketing campaign.

Chances are, your average SEO company is not offering you this service; instead they are just giving you the bare bones keyword research. The truth is this requires extra work and many just do not have the bandwidth to accommodate this type of work. Optymise will gladly perform seasonal SEO for any optimization client that would benefit from it.