You want steady traffic at your blog, of course, but it’s also good to catch the seasonal waves as they come. Bringing new people to your blog with seasonal search queries can help introduce your blog to new readers, and seasonal long tale search terms can have less competition than your regular keywords.
An example from our lab site
The trick is catching the wave. With our lab site, we expected to be able to get some seasonal traffic with “Halloween lesson plans.” We posted a post with that title on September 30th and didn’t Tweet it or otherwise mention it, but you can see that we had a few visits, perhaps from subscribers.
In October, the traffic began to climb. This shows us that this is a good topic for us, so we started doing related posts: vampire lesson plans, ghost story lesson plans, pumpkin lesson plans… We added links to all of these on the original post, so that our visitors might be encouraged to hang around for a while at our site.
Taking action
We also had a look at the keywords people used to find us (search was the #1 source of traffic). We saw the expected “Halloween lesson plans,” but also the surprising “Shake dem Halloween Bones lesson plans.” This is a book we mentioned — and we’re going to do a post with lesson plans for that book right away, you can be sure.
We’re on page 2 at Google for “Halloween lesson plans” and page 1 for “Shake dem Halloween Bones lesson plans.”We’re also beginning to see sales of Halloween items at our affiliate account this week, so we know that it’s time to start working on linkbuilding for these seasonal posts.
We can also see that we should start getting our Thanksgiving and Christmas topics up to give them time to be indexed and recognized by the search engines, since Halloween traffic began its climb early in the month. We have some other holiday posts hidden away at the website, but aren’t yet seeing requests or traffic for “winter holidays.” We’re watching. We’ll put the dates those searches began to work for us on our calendar for next year, too.
Your website
You might need to think twice to see seasonal connections at your website, but we bet they’re there. If you have goods and services that are more popular in Q4, this is the time to promote them. Maybe there are connections with weird niche holidays, if not with major national ones. It’s National Comic Book Day today, and Saturday will be Ask a Stupid Question Day.
Special observances like Hispanic Heritage Month don’t require a special connection with your business — anyone can honor our nation’s Hispanic Heritage.
Once you identify a calendar connection, use your analytics to identify the searches that are coming to your website seasonally, as we did in the example above, and take advantage. If you see no rise in searches at your website, use Google Trends to catch the seasonal wave.
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