I thought it would be a good idea to make a list of major trends to go after to maximize traffic from holiday to holiday, season to season and any other special events coming up. Just to help us prepare for the next big thing.
My current strong performer is of course anything Christmas related, since I saw a very significant spike for one of my websites. In fact, I saw a doubling of traffic just by adding some Christmas related content, I figured it’d be good to talk about what has been working well for you all. What keywords have been good for you to target.
I’ll be happy to update this post as (or if) this thread develops, I think it’d be really neat to really list some trends in one place, there may be some we would otherwise miss out on. I for one just realized I should probably start looking into Valentines and the Superbowl soon.
November: Thanksgiving December: Christmas, New Years
This year is a major year in politics, since a presidential race is occurring.
If you read the wikipedia, which I know can’t be taken too seriously, it comments on how much media attention the Iowa Caucus receives nationwide. Therefore, suggesting National Politics as a search trend in January.
First of all, remember that Sitepoint is a global community. Although Christmas isn’t celebrated in every country, it is pretty international. Politics, on the other hand, is very much dependent on where you are targeting your site. In the UK, for example, politics is a pretty dead topic in January. If you’re only talking about US-based targeting, it’s better to make that clear from the start.
Second, this looks awfully like spamming. If Christmas isn’t relevant to your site, or if politics isn’t relevant to your site, don’t mention them. Trying to cheat the search engines by randomly including popular search terms that have nothing to do with your content is likely to backfire, because you will get a reputation as a site that doesn’t deliver.
Stevie, why are you assuming I would mention off topic keywords on one of my websites? I never said I intended to do so. I urge you to re-read my post and see that I was never planning on including random search terms…
I was merely excited to talk about this subject due to the relevant-to-my-website christmas content I had posted on my website resulting in a major uptick in traffic.
I take offense to being called a spammer and someone wanting to cheat search engines, I have been an active member here for over 7 years.
For example, barrykins’ comment, I dont plan on implementing the presidential elections in any of my websites, but it is a great suggestion nonetheless if it is a subject your website could benefit from and that is why I started this thread. Of course I’d like to hear about topics that will benefit my website, but I welcome all suggestions to get an idea of what upcoming trends people are preparing their websites for.
And by preparing a website I mean posting real and useful content… Not anything and everything to attract traffic by just placing keywords randomly. I still can’t believe that you are accusing this thread of that. Especially because there is zero mention of planning to do so at all!
My intention is not to talk about link building, or google algorithm’s.
As google algorithm show what people are searching for right now, I want to be ahead of the curve by talking about some things in the near future that we should be preparing our websites for.
I’m sorry if I misunderstood what you were saying.
If you are actually adding content that is relevant to the changing seasons, that’s great … but I would say that goes way beyond SEO and out into general marketing and business strategy. Kind of like a department store that stocks up on Christmassy things during the autumn and beachwear in the summer. To me, it’s the difference between actually doing something (business strategy), and trying to make it look like you’re doing something (SEO). I don’t count “content” as part of SEO, it’s more fundamental than that.
That’s why when you asked in the SEO forum (which, let’s be honest, does get a huge number of spammers and scammers) about how to pick up search engine traffic from seasonal-related keywords, my first reaction was that there was something not entirely legitimate going on there. Thank you for clarifying that that wasn’t what you intended.
In my opinion it is good to add some Christmas related content to your website that would definitely benefit in fetching more traffic. Choose the trending keywords what readers are looking for as it increases the chances of getting found.
If you are keen to know the current trends of keywords for your website then you can try using Google Insights, where you can get the insights of five keywords at once.
