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As an SEO agency the summer doesn’t always bring BBQs and long days on the beach as we already have one eye on cold nights, Christmas and what we can achieve for clients in New Year campaigns. Planning across any campaign timeframe is important but winter brings with it some particular quirks which can be identified in year on year data to allow for greater campaign targeting.
Search Volumes
Dependant on the industry worked in there will be natural changes in search volumes over the winter period, in particular in the run up to Christmas and following the start of the New Year.
Historically we see travel clients see a surge in search volumes following Christmas as users attempt to counteract the New Year blues, with ecommerce naturally peaking in November and December as Christmas shopping takes place.
Digging deeper into your data relative to your website will be able to identify:
- Products/services driving greater search volume
- Search volume leading to greater traffic numbers
- Traffic leading to sales
Not only does this give an immediate volume for search traffic, but it puts a revenue figure on subsets of products or services offered by a business.
Identifying the search volume for different terms at peak times of the year is essential to carrying out an SEO campaign that drives leads and sales at key points for a business.
Device Use
Over the course of the year it is important to identify how traffic sources change and device use – particularly for final conversion – differs.
For example, within travel SEO campaigns, we see changes in the way users act on site. Initial searches and queries are largely on mobile, with final transactions (particularly larger transactions) happening on desktop. Further in the process users are focused more on core areas of a website, with far less browsing taking place. Notably this comes with average 43% drop in bounce rate for first page ranking terms, and also sees direct traffic increase substantially as well.
Whereas ecommerce is seen to be up to 80% completely mobile and increasing in terms of device use.
Conversion Data
Finally, there is a need to understand conversion data at different points of the year. Like traffic, different users will adapt conversion trends across the winter.
Setting up goal funnels and different conversions based on the needs of the business allow for a better understanding of user behaviour.
Year on year, it is then possible to expand an offering or approach to SEO based on the different conversion trends at different times of the year. For example, B2B SEO will lead to a greater number of leads in January and April – dependant on financial years and contracts coming to an end but there may be conversions, such as downloads, video views or the visit of research pages that would happen in the run-up to this.
Understanding where traffic, search trends and buying trends fluctuate across the year will be a huge benefit to planning year on year SEO campaigns.
POLARIS is an SEO and digital marketing agency. For more information please email info@polarisagency.co.uk
