Why seasonality matters in your search engine marketing
When you are utilising search engine marketing to promote your business, one of the key factors to consider is seasonality. We all know of particular businesses which enjoy a surge in sales or even suffer a drop in trading during specific times of the year. For example, a shop which sells school uniforms generally does moderate business for 9-10 months of the year before enjoying a huge rise in sales during the mid-to-late summer, peaking in almost chaotic fashion in the final days before the new school year begins in September.
When it comes to search engine marketing, seasonality is even more crucial. It’s one thing to have the mindset that some months will be better than others, but you have to put yourself in the shoes of the customer. Just like there are trends in sales, there are also trends in customer enquiries.
Let’s use the most notable season as an example: if your business distributes Christmas trees, even if you’re open all-year round, do you envision yourself receiving many speculative enquiries in, say, April or May? Probably not. So, what are the chances of someone Googling your business and/or Christmas trees and finding you, and getting in touch with you about this subject during the spring months? Again, it’s unlikely. Jump ahead to the autumn or to early December, however, and not only will your sales have a massive increase, but the number of people finding your business via a search engine will also multiply tenfold, if not more.
Therefore, seasonality is a major factor to consider within your Search Engine Optimisation SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) strategies. After all, if you can structure these strategies based on the likes of seasonality, ensuring that they operate at their highest level during the most lucrative points of the year, then the business will truly benefit.
One thing to consider is baseline traffic figures for certain months in the previous year or two, not only to help you identify your “peak points”, but to also find those months which may also bring about unexpected sales increases. Obtaining these figures and then comparing them with your average monthly search totals will help you to pinpoint when your business is most likely to receive an upsurge in searches and, potentially, enquiries.
You can also take your keyword metrics and ROI (Return On Investment) figures, and using a monthly calendar, you can determine what these totals will be at the low, medium and high end of the scale aside from analytics, and then determining what the totals will be when factoring in seasonality based on sales and search results. This will allow you to note how SEO, PPC and search engine marketing can increase or decrease based on seasonality, and therefore it can dictate how you manage these strategies going forward to ensure you experience higher sales figures during specific points of the year, which can only be of benefit to your business.
The other tool which can be of particular use is Google Trends. A recent initiative rolled out by Google – the world’s leading search engine website – this provides specific analytics of particular search terms relating directly to your business, in the form of tables and charts which can be sent directly to you. Of course, when you have the likes of line graphs in front of you showing peak points or even low points at particular months each year, it becomes much easier to understand when your business is booming, which makes the process of tailoring your SEO and PPC marketing strategies based on seasonality more logical and reliable.
Seasonality will always be a factor in business depending on your sector; no matter what you do, there will always be certain months each year when you enjoy a particularly high upswing in sales, and therefore it makes sense that the same knock-on effect will happen to online customer searches relating to your trade. Therefore, especially during a climate when the Internet is more prevalent than ever before, identifying seasonal trends is vital, because if you can adapt your SEO, PPC and general online marketing strategies around seasonality, whether that be emphasising strong months to try and enjoy record-level sales or to find methods of promoting your business more effectively during quieter months, then the time and effort spent on marketing your organisation will be much more worthwhile, and in the long run, your business should truly benefit and become more successful than ever before.