Seasonal SEO for local business: Leverage search demand for holidays and annual trends

Author: Tomás Nápoles

As a local business owner, you’re probably familiar with varying levels of customer demand throughout the year. In the same way your business experiences seasonal changes, your potential customers’ online search habits also shift. 

Understanding these seasonal search habits and using them to boost your business’s visibility is known as seasonal SEO, and it can make a significant difference in how your business cashes in on seasonal demand. 

In this guide, I’ll share my favorite methods for identifying seasonal trends and keywords for your local business, optimizing your website for seasonal SEO, and measuring the success of your efforts. 

Table of contents:

• What is seasonal SEO?

  • How seasonality should influence your SEO strategy

• 4 ways to identify seasonal keywords

  • Check Google Trends

  • Monitor weather predictions

  • Analyze seasonal search volume

  • Research season-specific keywords

• How to optimize for seasonal SEO: Best practices

  • Create a seasonal content calendar

  • Match your content to user search intent

  • Build seasonal landing pages

  • Optimize your seasonal content

  • Add seasonal visuals

  • Plan to publish in advance

  • Use evergreen URLs

  • Update old content

• Measure and analyze seasonal SEO campaigns for iterative gains year after year

  • Organic website traffic

  • Conversion rates

  • Year-over-year comparisons

  • Google Business Profile visibility

  • Business revenue

What is seasonal SEO?

Seasonal SEO is a strategic approach that focuses on adapting your online content and tactics to take advantage of changes in customer search behavior throughout the year. These changes often occur around holidays, events, changes in season, school schedules, or industry-specific cycles.

For local businesses, seasonal SEO allows you to align your digital marketing campaigns with the times when potential customers are most likely to search for your products or services—be it Black Friday, school graduation, Pride Month, or any other occasion. This leads to potentially greater visibility in search results, increased website traffic and, most importantly, more customers.

How seasonality should influence your SEO strategy

Seasonal SEO is about putting your budget where it’s most likely to have an impact. For local businesses (which typically have smaller digital marketing budgets), this can make a huge difference in their return on investment.

Imagine you run a pumpkin patch in Illinois. During fall, people in the area will start searching for things like [pumpkin picking near me] or [kids Halloween activities], and you want to make sure your business is front and center for these searches—how do you do that? Seasonal SEO.

Even if your business isn’t obviously seasonal, seasonal keyword trends can significantly improve your local SEO strategy. For example, a local bakery might notice a spike in searches for [pumpkin pie delivery] in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, highlighting an opportunity for a new seasonal offering they know is in demand.

4 ways to identify seasonal keywords

Sold on the idea of seasonal SEO and how it can help your local business? Here are my favorite methods (and tools) to find valuable seasonal keyword trends within your industry:

• Google Trends

• Weather forecasts

• Seasonal search volume analysis

• Season-specific keyword research

Check Google Trends

Google Trends is a free tool for identifying search trends based on how often a search term is entered on Google over a given period of time. This highlights the periods throughout the year when you should see a spike in searches for that topic, enabling you to plan your SEO strategy in advance and gauge customer demand during peak periods.

You can search by category to identify seasonal trends that influence your customers’ purchase decisions, or search for a broad keyword related to your industry and review related topics and queries to discover new terms.

Monitor weather predictions

Weather can significantly impact search trends as it often influences the products we want to buy and activities we’re looking to do. If you’re a local hardware store, this means you will likely find more demand for items like [gardening tools] in spring, [grills and outdoor furniture] in summer, [leaf blowers] in fall, and [snow shovels] in winter. 

With this approach, you should also consider unexpected weather changes. For example, a local HVAC company should expect to see increased searches for [AC repair] during a heatwave, and optimizing their urgent/emergency air conditioning repair landing pages in advance should bring in a lot of new leads until things cool down.

Analyze seasonal search volume

Keyword research tools provide a huge amount of insight into seasonal search volume for your target search terms. For example, if you search for [AC repair] in Wincher’s Keyword Explorer, you can see that every year the search volume starts to increase as we approach summer, with a peak in June. 

Wix website owners can even research keywords (including analyzing search volume, intent, keyword difficulty, and seasonal trends) from within their site dashboard by installing Wincher Keyword Research from the Wix AppMarket.

There’s no shortage of keyword research tools available, including Semrush and Ahrefs as well (although their data for seasonal search volume may not be as detailed). Use these tools to identify when searches start to increase and how long the increased interest lasts after the peak. This allows you to plan when you’re going to optimize your content and how long you can expect to see an increase in business from this effort. 

Research season-specific keywords

If you’re unsure about what seasonal keywords to target, this method might be the best to start with because you’re using your insider knowledge as the business owner, website manager, or as an SEO agency working closely with the client.

List all of the seasons, holidays, and events relevant to your business. The example below is for a local bakery.

Seasons	Holidays	Events
Spring Summer Fall Winter	Valentine’s Day Easter Thanksgiving	Wedding season Local festivals

Next, fire up your keyword research tool and search the terms you’ve listed (along with your location and/or your industry, as shown below).

In this example, searching for [Thanksgiving in Texas] revealed keywords like [Thanksgiving events in Texas],and [Thanksgiving turkey in Texas]. As you would expect, these terms increase in searches as Thanksgiving approaches, highlighting an opportunity for businesses with relevant offerings to optimize their landing pages and content to capture this interest.

This list also includes some searches specific to the city of Fredericksburg. Depending on the level of competition and the area your business covers, niching down your search terms for neighborhoods or towns allows you to target customers in a very specific area and reduces your competition.

How to optimize for seasonal SEO: Best practices

Now that you’ve identified your seasonal keywords, you can start planning to integrate them into your website to target these searches. You’ll need to:

• Create a seasonal content calendar

• Match your content to user search intent

• Build seasonal landing pages

• Add seasonal visuals

• Plan to publish in advance

• Use evergreen URLs

• Update old content

Create a seasonal content calendar

Rather than reacting to upcoming seasons, events, or industry-specific peaks and rushing to publish or optimize content to target them, create a seasonal content calendar. This works best when combined with your keyword research, so you’re identifying seasonal keywords and trends and then adding them to your content calendar straight away.

You can re-use this seasonal content calendar each year if you find the peaks in your business are cyclical, just make sure you take the time to review seasonal keywords each year to identify any emerging trends and adapt your strategy to suit.

Match your content to user search intent

Make sure your content matches what people are looking for when they use these search terms. This is known as matching the search intent behind the keywords, and if you don’t do so, the traffic you gain from seasonal keywords will go to waste (or you won’t even rank in search engines). 

For example, if you’re a local HVAC company and you want to attract people searching for [AC repair], optimizing your air conditioning installation page will not convert as many customers as having a dedicated air conditioning repair page. 

To properly match intent, you’ll need to conduct a search engine results page (SERP) analysis. In the search example below (for [furnace cleaning]), you can see that there are local service ads, sponsored listings, a Yelp page full of local businesses, informational content, and a local pack.

Crucially, what you do not see in this example is local furnace cleaning businesses ranking directly in the top results—the ones that do appear are paid ads. This means that a local furnace cleaning business might get more visibility by optimizing their Google Business Profile (GBP) and informational content than if they created a landing page for this service.

Build seasonal landing pages

Unless your business only operates during specific seasons (e.g., ski resorts, water parks, Spirit Halloween stores), you want to ride the waves of seasonal keywords while maintaining a strong presence year-round. One of the best ways to do this is to create landing pages to target seasonal keywords without impacting your year-round landing pages.

As an example, a local flower shop might create a [Mother’s Day Bouquets in (Your City)] landing page while maintaining a [Bouquets in (Your City)] landing page for year-round traffic.

Optimize your seasonal content

As with any SEO effort, you’ll need to optimize your on-page content to rank for the seasonal keywords you’ve chosen. This should be no problem for experienced digital marketers, but if you’re more of a novice or a business owner who isn’t a full-time marketer, you can leverage on-page optimization tools.

Wix website owners can enter their keyword into the Wix SEO Assistant for guidance on how to optimize their title tag, meta description, headings and, if required, structured data markup to target rich results.

Add seasonal visuals

Update your content or landing pages’ images and videos to reflect the current season. Ideally, this should happen across your main pages, like your homepage, and any seasonal landing pages you create.

Going back to the local hardware store example, changing the products featured on landing pages (so they’re seasonally relevant) not only helps boost the visibility of the page, but also helps increase conversions for in-demand products. 

Plan to publish in advance

Aim to publish your optimized content prior to the peak in interest for your seasonal target keywords. 

Search engines typically don’t pick up on your website changes immediately, so you need to allow them time to discover, crawl, and index new pages. This process can take several weeks or even longer, depending on how many pages you publish and how well your website currently ranks for related terms.

Use evergreen URLs

Even if your page content changes seasonally or annually, keep your URLs consistent. 

Use URLs like yourwebsite.com/holiday-specials instead of yourwebsite.com/holiday-specials-2024 to maintain the SEO value of that URL year after year, rather than losing all your hard work every time you replace it.

This is because your page is already in Google’s index and may have earned valuable backlinks over the years, which helps to improve rankings. If you need to change existing URLs to evergreen URLs, set up 301 redirects to pass on authority to your new URLs and retain any existing traffic they might receive. 

Update old content

Continuing with the logic of evergreen URLs, you should also avoid creating new landing pages each year. Instead, update old content to reflect your offerings for the current year or season. 

For example, if you have Black Friday promotions every year, create a Black Friday landing page and update it every year with your current offerings (rather than creating a new page from scratch each year).

This prevents search engines from incorrectly showing your landing pages from previous years, which will confuse your customers and likely result in lost sales opportunities. 

Measure and analyze seasonal SEO campaigns for iterative gains year after year

Measuring the success of your seasonal SEO campaigns is one of the most important steps in your strategy, allowing you to refine your approach each year so you’re maximizing its impact on your business. 

Depending on your website’s goals (i.e., sales, leads, traffic, etc.), these are the metrics you should review for your campaigns:

• Organic website traffic

• Conversion rates

• YoY comparisons

• GBP visibility

• Business revenue

Organic website traffic

Monitor the organic traffic figures for all your seasonal landing pages leading up to and during peak periods using tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console. If you researched the search volume of your seasonal keywords, you should notice your traffic figures increasing at the same rate the search volume increases during peak periods.

Conversion rates

Measure how many of your seasonal page visitors convert into sales or leads. After all, there’s no point in attracting traffic if it’s not the right kind of traffic (i.e., traffic that converts). Google Analytics is a reliable tool for this, providing you have set up tracking events from your website.

Year-over-year comparisons

Even if you haven’t implemented seasonal SEO in previous years, year-over-year comparisons allow you to review your website’s performance during seasonal peaks against the same period in previous years. 

This gives you a clear picture of your progress and qualifies whether your hard work optimizing for seasonal trends has paid off in increased traffic, conversions, revenue, etc.

Google Business Profile visibility

For local businesses, your GBP allows you to see how many times you’ve appeared in the local pack in search results (i.e., the map results) during different time periods.

Similar to organic website traffic, if you notice an increase in visibility and interactions during peak seasonal periods, this indicates that your SEO strategy is paying off.

Business revenue

Ultimately, the goal is to increase your bottom line. Regardless of all the other metrics above, the best way to track your seasonal SEO efforts is to correlate them with increases in revenue for seasonal offerings.

This metric can be crucial—especially if you don’t own the business you’re optimizing for. Showing revenue increases can justify greater investment in your SEO recommendations, which also means more opportunities and growth if you’re a career digital marketer.

There’s always next Black Friday, back-to-school, spring cleaning, etc.

As you compose and execute your seasonal strategy, keep in mind that SEO is an ongoing process and what works one year might need tweaking the next. 

Similarly, if you don’t notice the peaks in revenue you were expecting, this doesn’t mean you should ditch your seasonal SEO approach. Instead, use this as a baseline to improve the next time the season rolls around and don’t be afraid to experiment with new approaches.

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Tomás Nápoles - SaaS Growth and Digital Marketing Consultant

With over eight years of experience, Tomás Nápoles works with different brands to drive their growth by generating inbound leads via strategic content marketing and optimizing sales and partner processes to enhance engagement and revenue. Linkedin