3 types of seasonal SEO blog content perfect for the holidays
If you’re hoping to climb the rankings and catch the eye of your target customers this holiday season, then you need to create the content they’re looking for.
Throughout the year, many merchants and SEOs will focus on evergreen content so that if it takes longer to rank, it will still be relevant no matter the time of year. But when it comes to the holidays, search starts to become more seasonal. Search users don’t want just up-to-date, relevant content, they want it to be fresh and recent. After all, if they search for an ongoing news story, they don’t want information from months prior. The same applies to the content they’re looking for around the holiday season.
However, seasonal content as a concept sounds easier than it is to create. Knowing exactly what your audience will be interested in, along with what keywords and topics will be valuable to your SEO, can become challenging. It’s often easier to show than tell, so today we’re going to look at 3 types of seasonal blog content along with examples of merchants who use them successfully.
#1 - Homesick - Gift Guides
Let’s start with the most obvious holiday focused content - gift guides. Especially during the holiday season, customers are often shopping for gifts for more than one person. There’s a good chance that they won’t be familiar with every single interest or brand each person likes, so they’re going to need a helping hand. 57% of shoppers actively look for recommendations for gifts - that makes gift guides highly relevant and therefore highly valuable.
It’s important to target different types of search intent and different keywords that relate to your products, not just the product itself. With the example above from Homesick, they aren’t writing a “Best Homesick gifts for Winter”, it’s a bit more subtle than that. That’s because these are the kinds of gift guides they’ve identified their target audience is actually looking for. They can then weave their products into that guide.
The other great thing about Homesick’s seasonal gift guide content is that it isn’t specific to a holiday but rather a season. This extends the relevance of the content beyond just Christmas. They also publish guides that don’t mention the holidays or Winter, but will still be relevant to customers like how to put together a gift basket.
This targets those customers who may not search specifically for a season or a holiday. They might search “gift basket ideas” but not necessarily “Christmas gift basket ideas”. This extends the shelf life of this content even further than just seasonal. Publishing these three different styles of gift guide allows Homesick to strike a balance between very specific, seasonal, and evergreen content that is highly relevant and therefore very attractive to search engines and users.
#2 - Yummy Bazaar - Seasonal Products
From gingerbread to candy canes, sledding to snowmans, everyone has something they associate with the holiday season. It’s common for people not to think of these seasonal treats and activities until the end of the year rolls around. That means seasonal search volume is going to go up, and so too does the opportunity to create content that targets this.
Yummy Bazaar sells a variety of food and drink from around the world, from the USA to Japan to Germany. When it comes to the holidays they make the most of the seasonal items that customers may be searching for in the weeks before events like Hanukkah and Christmas. Some examples include Lebkuchen, a German style of gingerbread, and panettone from Italy.
They focus on talking about these seasonal treats in an education-led way that allows them to address and target lots of different question-based keywords. That may be as straightforward as explaining what the product is, or more complex like different varieties, recipe ideas, and origins. This means no matter what the customer is looking for, they’re bound to find an answer in the blog.
That question-based content alongside the high seasonal relevance of the topic is the key to building SEO around the holiday season. Sometimes, users won’t be searching specifically for gift ideas, or using search terms that will lead them to gift guides. This helps to diversify your seasonal content beyond just gift guides. Yummy Bazaar also internally link to the products being discussed, making it super easy for readers to become customers, and for search engines to see topical relevance between these pages.
This kind of content is easier if you sell seasonal products. If you don’t have any products specific to a particular season or holiday, it can be a little more challenging. Instead, you can adapt your products to the season. If you sell coffee, then that may be seasonal recipes using your products e.g. “5 unique holiday coffee cocktails”. Perhaps if you sell apparel, it could be “Top Winter coats for hitting the slopes”.
#3 - Fresh Patch - Seasonal Topics
What’s the best way to prepare for colder weather? What are the best decorations for Christmas? It isn’t just types of seasonal products that customers will be looking for, but topics! Creating educational content around topics of interest related to your products is something which is beneficial not just for your evergreen SEO, but seasonal also.
While our previous example has a very broad catalog of products to draw from, Fresh Patch has just a few niche products in theirs to inspire their content. Their product is also related to pet care and wellbeing, so they want to position their brand as knowledgeable on that subject. This boosts trustworthiness with both customers and search engines, and in turn helps SEO and ranking.
That means Fresh Patch looks instead at the kind of topics dog owners may be searching for around the Winter and holiday season. By providing education on these topics, they’re also able to introduce how their product is a solution to some of the common woes and concerns of puppy parents.
This kind of wider educational content helps to give your brand a stronger position of authority in its chosen niche. It also adds more seasonal keywords to your site that wouldn’t fit in a regular blog just discussing your products.
As with any SEO-led content, the key to seasonal content is to think about everything your customers may be looking for at that time of the year. That sounds simple, but it involves considering every and any topic your products and brand can relate to. The first thought might be gift guides, however there are many different angles you can approach that topic from. Once you start thinking about seasonal products and topics, the scope of content gets much wider and you’ll be climbing those seasonal search rankings in no time.