When developing out your SEO and PPC campaigns, it’s important to keep seasons in mind. Every business has their peak times when consumers are in need of a specific product or service, more than usual, which is considered seasonal traffic. During these peak times it’s important to keep your search campaigns in mind because you will want to capture as much of that audience as possible.
As a business owner, you should know when your peak times are during the year. Make sure to share this information with your search marketing team because your budget may need to be adjusted during certain months to capture a larger amount of consumers searching for your product or service. Same goes for holidays, if your product or service relates directly to consumers on certain days of the year. Strategies need to be put in place.
Understanding the Seasonal Shifts of Search Traffic to Increase Conversions
By looking at the year over year search traffic in your Google Analytics, you’ll be able to tell what months are driving the highest amount of search traffic and conversions. With this data, you’ll be able to accurately predict about how many users should be hitting your site and set goals for your campaigns.
Now that you have an understanding of what sort of traffic to expect for the upcoming peak months, you will need to justify a strong increase for these campaigns. To do that, you will need to look at the year over year increase percentage. Each year, you may want to see a percentage increase in conversions, this number will allow you to see those increases. By looking at the organic search increase percentage, you’ll be able to easily see if your SEO campaign is being effective each year. If it is growing each year during your peak times, you know you’re investing your money into the right target keywords. If there isn’t much growth, your SEO strategy may need to be re-defined.
For PPC, it can be a little different because each year cost per clicks are going to change and budgets may change. To tell if your search campaigns are effective here, you still want to look at the conversion percentage increase year over year. Compare that data with the total cost each month. If you’re spending the same amount of money, and your conversions are steadily inclining, this is a good sign that the keywords you’re bidding on are driving sales for your business. If you’re spending more money and seeing less conversions, your keyword list may need to be re-defined with a new strategy.
Another way to look at seasonal shifts for search campaigns is by looking at the search trends for your target keywords. This will clearly spell out what you can expect in certain months based off of the average search volume increases and decreases for your keywords.
Why You Should Invest More Into Your Campaigns During Peak Seasons
Your Competitors Are Doing It, So You Should Too
The truth is, if your competitors are showing up for more of your target keywords in the search results, they’ve already started a push to drive seasonal traffic to their site. That means you need to get started too. After all, seasonal SEO is all about timing. If you don’t start at the right time, you may be too late to see any sort of return on investment since it takes search engines some time to index any of your content you’re promoting. That being said, it is best to begin promoting at least 3 months in advance for seasonal traffic to get the buzz going organically.
With PPC, give it 30 days to get the ads visible to where they will be driving converted clicks. Many may think that all you need to do is turn your ad on and it automatically appears in the top 3 of the search results. That can’t be any further from the truth. Even with these campaigns, you need to analyze the keywords that are driving conversions and narrow down the keyword list. That way, your budget is being mostly spent on keywords that are going to turn into qualified leads instead of wasted costs.
Higher Cost Per Clicks During Peak Times
This directly relates to your competition as well. If it is peak season for your business, it is the same for them. Which means they’re going to be aggressively bidding on keywords in their PPC campaigns to make sure their ads show in the top 3 search results over yours. A larger budget is necessary for your pay per click because of the competitive increased cost per clicks.
More Visibility on the Web
If your strategies are prepared with the right timing, budget, and approach; your business will have more visibility during seasonal shifts. Investing in more content on your website creates more indexing of your website in the search engines. Which means Google is coming back to your site a lot more because you’re giving the crawlers something new consistently. This helps build organic traffic and rankings which means a lot more visibility.
For PPC, with an increased budget, your ads will appear in the top 3 search results for your target keywords. This is where you want your ads to appear since that is where consumers are going to click first resulting in more qualified traffic to your site.
Closing Thoughts
Be prepared for seasonal shifts if you have a business in an industry that has peak highs and lows. If you are seeing a decrease in traffic month over month, don’t automatically assume your SEO and PPC campaigns aren’t being effective. Take the timing into consideration and do the research. If this is a trend that occurs each year, then you know that may be the time when your business starts to hit the low point. Consider reducing your PPC budgets during these low times and re-analyze your SEO strategy so that is prepared for the peak times.
