When it comes to SEO, always remember that content really is king. Thanks to its constantly updating algorithms, reigning search engine like Google put a lot of emphasis on a business website’s content strategy to find out if it’s an adequate enough resource to give the top spot.

But how will you manage to create all this relevant content? It’s one thing to talk about your niche and be generous with insider information, but what else? The answer is seasonal trends.

The Concept of Seasonal Trends and Content

As December quickly approaches, your business is dealing with a rather festive crowd of consumers. So if you’re not changing your tone to match the mindset, what are you doing? Shifting from your regular course of content to something that falls in line with the calendar is seasonal marketing.

It is vital to understand that the customer buying behavior changes throughout the year and these seasonal trends help make sure that only the best businesses come out on top. You need a different strategy to meet such a demand, even if you’re not part of the retail business.

Even if you’re part of an industry that can’t offer much to customers during the holiday season or any other time of the year, you can still create content to match.

Why You Should Leverage Seasonal Trends in your content strategy

In a world full of cutthroat competition, your timing needs to be impeccable, give consumers what they want, at the exact time when they need it. This approach is what converts a lead into a sale.

Need an example? Television streaming network Hulu was able to increase its traffic by 50 percent in its initial years by launching their ad campaign during the super bowl.

Kinds of Trends

It’s easy to learn about the latest trends. The benefit of leveraging such trends is that you can plan a strategy months before the season arrives, which allows you to better target trends. These trends can be based on a holiday or time of the year.

You can associate certain seasons with activities, clothes, food and other trends like illnesses. For instance, winter is associated with snow and cold while fall aligns with Halloween and pumpkin spice flavored foods.

Although holidays and festivals differ everywhere, some are commonly celebrated throughout the world; like Christmas. Despite being a religious holiday, you’ll find people from different cultures joining in because of what it symbolizes for them (stockings, Christmas trees, getting together with family). In other cases, it completely depends on which part of the world you live in.

Searching for Keywords

You need to spot the right trends if you plan to benefit from the season and the only way to do that is through a keyword search. This will give you insight as to what people are talking about and want to know about.

Looking up seasonal keywords will give you a number of different trends like Super Bowl Sunday or Valentine’s Day. However, it’s obvious that trends like these will have most of their traffic coming from a single month; the real meaning behind keyword research is to look up trend search volumes in different months.

If you go to Google Trends and look up a seasonal trend like ‘Christmas’, you’ll find a number of related queries and topics that people searched for. People searched for ‘Walmart Christmas hours’, ‘Restaurants open on Christmas Day’, and films like ‘the man who invented Christmas’.

You should keep track of things like their search volumes based on the month, or whether a search term grew by over 5000%. You should also focus on what’s most likely to be the intent of search, and if you need to create new content rather than make changes to what you already have.

With search queries and topics like these, you’re just getting started. You can comb through various results to find the ideal trend that suits your niche.

Uploading at the Best Time

Tools like Google Trends can help you show when exactly a trend started to gain momentum the previous year. This allows you to plan a date in advance to upload your content.

Take Christmas for example; if you look up the trend to see when people start searching for holiday-themed decorations, articles, and videos, you’ll see that it starts to pick up as soon as Halloween comes closer and everyone has made spooky preparations aka late October.

To prepare appropriately, you’ll need to brainstorm for content, conduct thorough research on the kind of content people want. In addition to planning a proper trend-based content strategy, you can engage with your followers online by hinting at the upcoming content a few days before launching it. This helps generate more interest and getting more people to follow you on social media.

The best time for uploading depends on how much you’re planning to upload in the first place. Let’s say you’ve planned a bunch of blogs on different topics and a couple of videos as well. If you have a lineup of new and engaging content, it’s best to start uploading it a month prior to the event; this allows each piece of content to gain individual attention and pick up momentum. Otherwise, posting it all at once will result in a bunch of confused followers wondering what they should read first.

Giving everyone time to catch up with your content will prepare them for whatever you’re planning to post next. Once the trend month starts or is about a month away, you can begin promoting your upcoming content through influencer promotion and social media ads.

Ask for Help From Influencers

Make social media influencers a part of the trend-centered content campaign, not just by asking them to promote your blogs and videos, but by asking for their valuable input to make your content more engaging and interesting followers.

Let’s say that you have a business that sells children’s items, so the main influencers you’ll target will be parents.

You need to make sure that you ask for input at a good time; asking them too soon means they won’t promote the content when it finally launches because they’ve lost interest but asking them too late will be rude and won’t give enough time for a detailed response.

Putting It All Together

If you’re planning a content scheme that’s five projects in advance, you’ll need a proper calendar that helps you edit thoroughly. It’s crucial that you have an editorial calendar, especially if you’re working with a full content team i.e. specialized people for social media marketing, graphic design, editing, and writing.

If you start with the calendar, it becomes a little overwhelming since you need to brainstorm, create, form ideas and edit multiple times before it’s complete. A much better word for this stage is a roadmap. You should keep deadlines for each phase, whether it’s brainstorming, contacting influencers, editing, publishing and promoting.

Trends make up a huge part of society and greatly influence behavior so what better way to improve your brand’s content strategy than leveraging significant trends and well-known festivals. It helps you generate a bigger following, and you can reach out to many other businesses for collaboration.