If your site offers some sort of holiday product (Halloween costumes, gifts ideal for Christmas, Valentine's stuff) or if you just want to write holiday-related content, it's pretty important to have your site visible in the SERPs for those search queries so you'll get optimum traffic for those terms. And, as we all know, it can take a little bit of time to get high rankings. How do you know when to start SEOing for that holiday rush of search queries? Well, a little research never hurt anyone.
Here's Google Trends data from the past twelve months for the search term "halloween costume ideas."
As you can see, searches start gaining traction towards the end of August and into the fall; thus, 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 goes for Christmas-related searches. Here I looked at "christmas gift ideas":
Searches start consistently increasing towards the end of September.
With Valentine's Day, the searches start in mid-December:
In each case, searches started about 2-3 months before the holiday, so it's important to acknowledge that and start crafting your content and targeting those keywords with ample time before the searches start gaining traction.
KeywordDiscovery, by the way, also graphs search trends, so if you have a membership I highly recommend analyzing their graphs if you're looking to craft a holiday campaign:
If you mouse over each bar, you'll see KWD's search count for the provided term during that time period (for example, the first September count shows 426 searches, then 741, then 917, then 2,085 as the month progresses). The chart can also be sorted by historical data (how many searches in the past year), monthly data (number of searches broken down into each month), trend (a graph of the search trends over the past year), combination (a graph of global vs. premium search data), and market share (a breakdown of which search engines were used to search for the query).
KeywordDiscovery's monthly data chart:
By market share:
Don't take your cue from when the drugstore starts selling bags of Halloween candy--do some research and find out what last year's trends were so you're prepared this year. If you start early enough, you'll be basking in glorious search traffic while your competitors are scrambling with last minute link building campaigns three weeks before the holiday.
Rebecca,
great points and way to put Trends and KD to use in a different way. They should of course be taken with a grain of salt for anything that seems illogical, but this is a smart approach. These are often used for the "right now" and what to optimize for, but this is more of a "I know what I want to optimize for.... now I just need to plan for when."
Of course many retailers have now entered into code freeze, or will be, right about......... what for it......... now!
As you've pointed out, it's important that people realize that SEO is primarily a longer-term, plan for it approach rather than a right now, over-night approach. But that doesn't mean that you need to throw in the towel if you haven't planned for it or you are now under a code freeze.
Social media, YouTube, blogs, press releases and good old fashioned word of mouth advertising provide a lot of opportunities to continue to take an active role even if you can't touch the code or underlying optimization elements of a site.
Stephan touched on some of these and other ideas in his Last minute holiday tips for retailers post on c|net.
Hope the mozzers all have a Happy Halloween! And stay away from the paid-link monsters, or Googlebot might turn you into a newt!!
Great post!!!
Though I have to say that if you have not already begun ramping up for the holiday buying season, its a little late.
The thing that I find difficult is when you have a client who has multiple holiday products and campaigns. Finding the right mix, and when to turn off Thanksgiving and turn on Christmas is key. Not just speaking of PPC, I try my hardest to not get involved with that tooooo much! Clients get pissy when dealing with add $ lol
Just the overall shift in content, home page specials, etc.
I also want to begin running analytics to see what impact that this annual switch of authority might have in the clients overall rankings and PR. They are in fact changing gears multiple times in a short period. Does their increase in sales strictly come from an overall increase in traffic when in fact their ranking and PR drops?
Arrrrgggg! You have sent my brain into overload, and I must go get a latte!!!
hi - 'ramping up' is a pretty broad term which gives you a lot of latitude so maybe I agree, maybe I disagree. I think generally you're correct and for small sites with slow indexing, certainly. But if your site has some indexing power both in speed and depth, I think there's 2 weeks left just being on the safe side. I'm talking PR 6 sites which get updated every other day. Unless we're talking major product blasting.
I like to cut it close because I have all these bad habits and hunches picked up from my own observations after being pointed out to me by others. One of them is the notion that newly introduced content enjoys some kind of 'newnest benefit' which shows by ranking slightly higher at first then settling in a bit lower. Just how high and for how long - it's not a rule, but I see a lot of 1 to 4 and 3 to 8 kind of things. Sometimes it debuts at one and stays there. But taking my faith to the extremely opposite position, I would not want to get ready and indexed for my Christmas content in February and really not even in September. If you're trying to hit the money products that slight shift can be a big benefit. I would say for me this newest benefit lasts 1 to 2 weeks or so. But for all I know this is yet another example of how bad practices and rumors get started.
I'm just saying, and perhaps with great speculation, that timing is a big, big factor in the holiday season and I have fun acting out my own stupid hunches because it makes the game much more fun. BTW.. i would never do this for client. No indexing and there'll be hell to pay.
Hey Rebecca,
I liked the post , I have used google trends before , but have been slacking lately
This is a great way to get me back into the grind!
Does anyone know how long the Free Trial lasts on Keyword Discovery?
Rebecca? Anyone?
Thanks appreciate the help...
I'm thinking, and I definitely might be wrong because I'm a paid member now, that it last indefinitely but you have very, very limited results and functionality.
Nice post. When's Festivus?
Festivus for the restivus! Time for the airing of grievances.
Funny you should reply to that Rebecca. I was thinking about your earlier blog post today. Remeber how George's father starts it off:
"I got problems with you people!!!" :)
Have a good evening!
Hahaha, and it's not over until you beat me at the Feats of Strength!
I'm getting my aluminum pole out of storage this morning.
Oh that is classic. Maybe one of my favorite episodes.
"Kruger! My son says your company sucks!!"
"...it's not over until you beat me at feats of strength".
Hmm, a scrappy Asian Warrior Princess not too far out of college versus a forty something guy with a receding hairline. Suddenly, I'm feeling very...very...Castanza. I think I'll pass on that one - you win. It's over. :)
Thanks for the post. I was interesting to see that people starts searching for Valentine gifts before Christmas season is over.
I'm surprised the chart for V-Day isn't flat at zero all the way until about Feb. 13, when it skyrockets to the top and then falls flat again. Guess that is just me.
Awesome post Rebecca! It's nice to see some of that premium goodness in action. It's clear that there's good stuff there, beyond Rand telling us that it exists and is great. It makes me want to convert...
Rebecca,
Great article,most of the clients I deal with are B2B (48 out of 53), have you seen anything in the way of trends in the B2B space? I have my metrics for my clients, but I'm trying to see if there is any data I can correlate with the data I have to show when the b2b hotsots are?
=)
What sort of B2B trends do you mean, paisley?
Do you mean B2B keywords?
The incredibly challenging point with B2B is that it is soooooooo different from B2C...........................
except when it's not.
The "problem"-- if it is one-- is that as soon as you say B2B, it's very easy to fall into this perception of a purchaser looking to buy some million dollar widget... but that isn't always the case. If you are selling SEO services, more than likely, you're selling B2B...... oh, and if you're selling SEO services for a million......... let's talk ;)
That said, B2B is often different than B2C. So the first challenge is determining how differently. So it comes back to demographics.... what's the lead time on for the product/service? Are detailed of a searcher will the typical purchaser be.... very broad and general or very narrow and specific? Is the solution explained in layman terms or highly technical?
For those that deal in a highly technical, long-lead situation, it obviously becomes much more complicated. Realistically, Google Trends may not cut it. And KD may be lacking in that department as well. This just comes down to a matter of numbers and that there are probably far less people looking for a "cummins 2000 kW Generator uninterruptible power supply" than the typical UPS. But the advantage is, hopefully, you or your client should have a much better impression on the typical persona you are targeting. You know or have an idea on what the peak seasons are, what the lead times are, who the typical players are (i.e., purchasing, marketing, engineers, multiple players, etc.).
But the same ideas apply... reviewing traffic logs or analytics to see when relevant searches and traffic spike. Again though, you have to plan out for this. If searches peak in November, then you need to start putting together and launching targeted content for these searches at least a month to three months out... again, it all depends on the industry and the authority of the web presence in question.
Thank you! So interesting... Question. is it possible to inherit part of the SEO work done in the previous year, if you keep the URL the same? Some holiday content might seem silly outside it's data range but it is very hard to loose relevancy... Or are all slates clean every new holiday?
I don't think slates are necessarily clean every holiday. I think it really depends on your product or what you're pushing that particular season.
Wow... I just got the answer I was looking for while reading Jane's post
Actually Spethen Spenser's presentation (slide 6) had the answer, but I would not have found it without you guys :-)
Once again, Thank you
This is great post I like the way that you have layered your arguments or statements with the Google Trends.
It really stipulates the importance on planning early to ensure that you are not dissapointed by price rises that come with holiday periods and special event periods.
The same approach should defeinatley be taken when it comes to booking holidays and travel planning over the high need periods that concide with special events. I have actually started to kick of this argument over on my holiday and travel blog.
Well done a very insightfull read.
man...the graph for "Lebowski Fest" isn't nearly as big as I would have imagined..."Ron Popeil" even beats it. So sad :(
Awesome! Another Mozzer from the Ville, or a Lebowski fan?
Just a Lebowski fan - I really need to make it out to one of those festivals though.
Interesting topic. I'm curious, do you see issues where people put out seasonal content but then it gets stuck and looks silly later, sort of like the billboards on the highway for movies that came out 2 years ago?
Or, a relevant case in point, Google "SES Chicago" and the 2006 site outranks the 2007 site (previously, I think the 2004 site was on top). Of course, that should be pretty easy to remedy, but it's clear that temporal targeting can be a little tricky.
Yeah, I've definitely noticed that with conference sites. It shouldn't be as big a deal with pages that aren't dated (you know, cuz the calendar shifts year to year, so the SES results can be confusing if you don't notice the date right away and are looking for what days the conference falls on) if you're promoting the same seasonal gifts. If not, you can probably redirect those old pages to the new page or to that category on your site.
Eventually, you could kill off the old ones, but it's got to be tricky when you want to keep last year's content up for reference but get the SERPs to prefer this year's content in rankings. You're right, though; in the product realm, it's not as big of a deal.
My former company used to have conference/tradeshow clients who actually wanted to change their domain names every year: "myshow2006.com", "myshow2007.com", etc. You wouldn't believe what an uphill battle that was with more than one company.
Ugh, I don't envy how that conversation must have gone.
Dr. Pete, good observation. Yes that's one of those... um, show stoppers, though it shouldn't be.
Those are prime examples why you want to avoid even the:
myshow.com/conference2006.htm, myshow.com/conference2007.htm
Instead.... myshow.com/conference.htm... and just maintain the same URLs, which will continue to build up links and authority over time. Most people will really want to be linking to the current event anyway, and you can always provide links to an archive if you feel it is necessary for anyone who may wish to access the old conference information.
After all, it isn't really the "conference" that is changing, just the "content."
Good one.
It would be interesting if there were more reliable content expiration on the search engines, like what's allowed in RSS feeds or even Google Base.
Yea, I think that is a bit of the idea with the meta "unavailable_after" tag, but of course it may be questionable as too how well that is received across all engines.
Honestly, I think reverse-archiving is far more desirable though in this case... it's less about "this is no longer available" and more about "new and improved."
It's kind of like a PR/link popularity bank account... old money out and new money in, but the net effect is to keep it all in one place and maintain and build equity.
I was getting my halloween candy a few days ago and they were playing christmas music. It got me thinking of how to help my small business clients have a better holiday season. I think your ideas of building holiday themed content is great.
I also think that based on shoppers increased interest in shopping during the holidays, it's also a great time to consider a sponsored search program for the holidays. I explain this in more detail in my post at https://bigblackpencil.com/blog/ In the meantime, I'm getting ready for New Years Eve!
Happy New Year!
Sweet graphs Rebecca!
Hey, I was in Seattle this Monday attending the Google Adwords Seminar in Sea-Tac and really wanted to stop by and say hi but thought, "They're just going to be like, 'Who's this guy and what does he want?'", so I didn't. But I really wanted to meet you guys.
Hehe, maybe next time.
Aw, you should have let us know! We always welcome guests into our Mozplex.
And if you are extra nice they will let you out too.
I think the big guys get this. I remember seeing a Disney Top Holiday Gift Guide come out about a month ago.
By the way - post with graphs are very cool.
I know! The graphs make up for my laziness and overall lack of text.
"Work smarter, not harder." - Scrooge McDuck
Duck Tales, woo ooh!
That's really interesting stuff! What surprised me was how early people start searching for Christmas gift ideas. September?! I mean, it's one thing getting in there early... :-)
I guess time to do a Christmas virol linkbait and video...
How about Christmas trees are banned in China..)