I’m sure there are days throughout the year when the interest in your products or services is higher than usual.
These could be special occasions like Valentine’s Day for instance, or once-off events like conferences or shows happening in your city.
Some of these events have a high commercial value. Others offer an opportunity to build brand awareness.
But how do you ensure that people searching for information related to them will actually land on your site?
Here is a simple, 5 steps schedule to follow.
Stage 1: About a year before the event
It sounds crazy, doesn’t it?
To start the work a full year before the event…
But if you how much work you have to do before launching the campaign, it becomes clear that you need to begin as early as possible.
So, about a year before the event set some time aside to decide:
- What goals you want to achieve with the campaign,
- What sort of a budget you could dedicate to it and,
- Draw initial plan of action.
Goals
There’s no point in launching any campaign unless you clearly define what goals you want it to achieve.
Depending on your product or service, these could be achieving a specific amount of sales, generating leads or promoting the brand.
Whatever you choose, you should clearly define what outcome you want to achieve. Doing so will help you keep the strategy on track and monitor its progress.
Budget
Even though SEO traffic is free, attracting it will cost you money. You should therefore specify what budget you could devote to various aspects of the campaign: content production, link building, promotion and other activities.
Strategy
Lastly, decide in general what techniques you’re going to use to attract traffic and reach your goal.
For instance, are you going to rely solely on blog posts and landing pages to attract traffic or will engage in guest posting strategy to target even wider audience?
You don’t need to come up with a full strategy yet. But draft a rough idea defining how you’re going to be attracting traffic around the event.
Stage 2: Around 6 months before the event
A half a year before the event is the best time to start fine-tuning your strategy.
Start by conducting a thorough keyword research to find what phrases your target audience’s going to use to find information about the event.
The important thing to remember is to look not only for keywords relating to what you offer, (i.e. “valentine’s day restaurant”) but also generic information relating to the event itself.
Even though those keywords have a lower commercial value, they offer an opportunity to attract audience with blog posts and other content types.
When researching keywords, make sure you also check their trends. Google Keyword Planner makes it easy to establish when the interest in a particular topic begins and thus, when to schedule the campaign to launch.
Stage 3: Around 4 months before the event
With a list of keywords at hand, and only 4 months to go it’s time to start creating landing pages and other content for the campaign.
But why start so early?
For one, you need to ensure enough time for your content to mature and achieve some rankings.
But you should also leave enough time to allow you make any changes and revisions before the campaign goes live.
In a situation where your strategy involves publishing time-sensitive content (i.e. promotions or deals) that you wouldn’t like anyone to see before the event, consider using a different copy for now and update it with the right content at the time of the event.
Stage 4: Around 2 months before the event
That’s the best time to start promoting your content.
Here are some ways you could consider:
Email.
Email is a great channel to build excitement about whatever you have planned for the event. Start hinting about it in every email you send. Don’t reveal too much, just let your subscribers know that you’re going to make a big announcement soon.
And then, publish a newsletter dedicated solely to the event and whatever you have planned for it on the day of the launch.
Social media.
Twitter or Facebook are another great channels to build up excitement about your campaign. Moreover, they could help you drive traffic and social mentions to it when it launches.
Posting on Authority Sites.
Next, consider publishing articles relating to the event on your industry’s authority sites.
Reach out to bloggers and influencers asking them if you could participate with your content on their sites. Then write posts on a subject related to the event and include a link to your event-specific content in author bio.
Stage 5: Post Launch
This is often the most overlooked aspect of any seasonal SEO strategy.
You should however have a plan of what you’re going to do with the content once the event is over.
Face it:
Most of your content will become irrelevant after the event. What’s more, it will no longer attract traffic, at least not until the next event.
But one thing you shouldn’t do is taking it content down.
This is especially true for landing pages. If needs be, remove their content or replace it with some generic information about the event but keep them live.
This way you’ll let them mature and gain authority before the event happens again.
Creative commons image: Joe Lanman / Flickr
Last updated by at June 18, 2015.