With Thanksgiving behind us, we’re rushing headlong into the holiday season. Most retail chains don’t break even for the year until Black Friday. Cyber Monday set new records this year with 15% growth over last year’s sales.
People in the service industry may see these trends and think “So what? This doesn’t apply to us… Our business isn’t seasonal.” True, your sales may not increase dramatically during the holiday season (particularly for B2B companies), but that doesn’t mean there are no applicable seasonal trends. Public sentiments change during the holiday season. People start thinking in terms of the new year – it’s a fresh start! A clean slate. Time to make changes to make next year the best year yet!
This sentiment should be factored into your website’s web presence strategy. How might people search for your services differently around the holidays? Do your customers have any common New Years resolutions? Is there anything you can blog about that would be applicable (and commonly searched-for) around the holidays?
Try using Google Insights to find trends that pick up around this time every year. Here are a few examples of search terms that see minimal traffic throughout the year, and then spike in December:
Business New Years Resolutions
Weight Loss New Years Resolution
Giving to Charity
Thanks to recent Google updates, relevant posts you write about these topics THIS MONTH should outperform similar posts from previous years, simply because they are “fresher.” As an added bonus, these terms tend to be “long tail” terms – far less competitive terms that can bring in highly qualified traffic looking for exactly what you’re talking about.
This concept lends itself to some businesses more easily than others (weight loss and charitable giving are popular end-of-year topics), but if you get a little creative (and do a little research), there’s a seasonal topic nearly every business can tap into for increased traffic.