The Art of SEO

Trending, Seasonality, and Seasonal Fluctuations in Keyword Demand

One of the subtleties of keyword research, and of any fully developed SEO strategy, is that the use of keywords varies significantly over time. For instance, major holidays inevitably lead to bursts of keyword volume related to those holidays. Examples could be searches such as Halloween costumes, gift ideas for Christmas, or Valentine’s candy.

If you want to write holiday-related content, it will be important to have your site visible in the SERPs for those search queries prior to that holiday’s buying season so that you’ll get optimum traffic for those terms. And since the search engines take considerable time in ranking your pages, advance preparation is required. To investigate this further, let’s examine the Google Trends data for a period of 12 months for the search term halloween costume ideas (see Figure 5-37).

Figure 5-37. Google Trends highly seasonal data example

As you can see, searches begin gaining traction toward the end of August and into autumn; thus, if you are doing SEO for Halloween-related terms, you would want to have the related content and links in place by the beginning of the summer so that search engines can find and index your content, and therefore you’re more visible to searchers when they start doing research. A long-term SEO approach would take this into consideration as part of the overall ...