School’s Out For Summer! SEO for Summer Months

School’s Out For Summer! SEO for Summer Months

Seasonal Search Trends – How To Approach Summer SEO

Easter has come and gone, meaning the summer months are just around the corner. As the weather changes, we need to make sure we’re changing the way we produce content on the web.

For many businesses, summer can be a difficult time of year when it comes to sales. Our experience and research has shown this to be true in terms of seasonal search trends. As people change their schedules to head off on vacation, spend time with their children, and take time to disconnect from technology, digital marketing can be especially tough. But have no fear! Tailored SEO campaigns can be a great way to help your business survive the summer months.

“For businesses that tend to see slower traffic and business during the summer, SEO helps to bolster or offset that and help businesses gain more traction in what would be a slower time period,” said Rebecca Fairbanks, our Director of Marketing. “In addition, working on SEO during slower months is a great way to ensure stronger success during busier time periods.”

If you want to customize your SEO for summer and outperform your competition, here are some summer marketing campaign ideas to get the most out of the months ahead.

Plan Far in Advance

It happens like clockwork every year: even before Thanksgiving wraps up, Christmas-themed ad campaigns overwhelm us. Digital marketers don’t get their December plans together once they finish their turkey, though. Live campaigns for the holiday season are crafted well in advance.

The same approach should be taken regardless of what the calendar or forecast says. Give yourself time to work out all the kinks and build a strong campaign.

How Seasons Affect Demand For Products & Services

Your blueprint for the summer months should be largely shaped by your products and services, and how seasonal search trends affect their popularity.

If you sell swimwear, for example, summer is the most important time of the year. However, anyone offering ice hockey lessons can anticipate a dip in traffic. Those who expect lower traffic from May through September shouldn’t pack it in, though. Instead, it’s a time to get creative and test out unconventional ideas.

Consider What People are Asking and Care About

The keywords and questions people type into Google change depending on the time of year. Naturally, heat-based inquiries are more frequently typed during summer than they are during the colder months. How to cool off, how to stay cool, how to protect from sun, and outdoor activities are just a few common examples. If you feel you can naturally incorporate these phrases into your SEO, you should.

To gain a solid understanding of seasonal search trends and demand at a given time, you can use keyword research databases. SERPs’ database, which can be tested through a free trial not only provides information about keywords you enter; it also provides you insights on similar search phrases to help you pick the best wording possible.

Use Holidays and Big Events to Your Advantage

Holidays can be a stressful time for digital marketers. Though the summer season doesn’t have as many big sales or promotions holidays as fall and winter, it still includes some important dates that should be leveraged. Using these holidays and other big events to your advantage can pay major dividends.

Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and Labor Day should have their own campaigns. You can create a single landing page for holidays and regularly change the URL, keywords, images, metadata, and copy. Like we discussed earlier this month, using one page for every holiday can improve your page authority, as the longer a page is active, the more authority it garners from search engines.

Other targeted summer marketing ideas involve creating unique landing pages for each holiday. Doing so eliminates the risk of duplicate content and makes sense for companies that see big changes in traffic during certain times of the year. These landing pages, which should be full of holiday-themed keywords, can be updated and reused annually.

Beyond holidays, the last and first days of school present opportunities for sales and other deals. Back to school marketing is found across a wide range of industries based on seasonal search trends that indicate upticks in demand starting in August. If your products are intended to be used by students or educators in the classroom, you should have a robust promotional campaign ready to launch by the middle of summer.

There are also chances to take advantage of some memorable pop culture moments. One tried and true way to accomplish this is to embrace Shark Week. Every summer, you can bet on millions of Americans getting excited about Discovery Channel’s marathon of shark-related programming. Companies from Hot Pockets to Priceline, Gillette, and even certain automakers have historically jumped on this with different creative ideas to buoy interest.

Volkswagen exemplifies one car company that has done an effective job with its Shark Week marketing. Last year, the German automaker created a “Land of Sharks” campaign, which, with the help of Google Maps, resulted in a website that allowed visitors to type in an address and see places they know filled with water and ancient sharks swimming around. The site was fun to use and extremely informative.

Creative summer marketing ideas like this that can set you apart. If your team is in the early stages of developing a highly imaginative campaign, it’s worth asking if that concept can mesh with popular seasonal search engine trends that gauge demand within your target audience.

Understand the Way Online Habits Change

With so many people away from their homes and offices during the summer months, they’re not going to use their computers as much as the rest of the year. This should be taken into consideration when building out your digital marketing strategy.

Moreover, a Facebook survey showed that sharing on social media rises by 26 percent during the summer, and video content sharing rises by 43 percent. Without a doubt, this is one of the best times of year to boost your presence on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and other platforms that are favored by your target audience.

And, of course, seasonal search trends indicates that certain topics that are more commonly discussed online during summer. Research shows loved ones, recreational activities, health and beauty, and travel are among the topics that gain more traction on social media this time of year.

Plan for the Summer with Coalition

If you want to get more eyeballs on your products, Coalition Technologies has the resources to help. As the top-ranked SEO company in Los Angeles with a 99 percent client satisfaction rate, we have the industry-leading expertise in lead generation, eCommerce and local SEO to drive traffic to your website and increase sales.

If you have questions or need a quote, call us today at (310) 736-2327.

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