SEO for Seasonal Business Activities and What to Do During Off-Season
Businesses whose activity is dictated by seasons like landscapers, swimming pool service companies, golf courses, ski resorts have certain periods of months when there are no customers.
In terms of digital marketing, many business owners will leave it aside as they do not expect to have customers coming in during the inactive period. The online marketing world however, which is prevalent in every industry, does not stop.
Don’t Leave SEO for the Start of the Season
If a seasonal business starts preoccupying itself with SEO just as the season starts, then it might be too late. Improving your search engine rank isn’t done overnight and it can take weeks or months to jump from a position on the second page into the top results.
Your website needs to be optimized for search engines a lot earlier than people start searching for your service. Remember, your business may be closed but the internet is open 24/7. In fact, the off-season might be the ideal period to work on SEO of a website. Search engines don’t care that it’s off-season for your business; they will continue to crawl the web space.
Maintain Your SEO during Off-Season
Businesses that have had successful SEO campaigns in the past and profited from them may be tempted to take a break. Leaving your website without any updates for longer periods of time will see its ranking slowly decrease. This will lead to diminishing effects of previous SEO efforts.
Search engines want to serve the best and most recent content to their users, hence any competing websites that continue to maintain their content and optimization during off-season will have an easier time overtaking your website.
Focus on Your Website’s Content
The off-season is a great opportunity to focus on content creation. Right in the middle of the season can be difficult to find time to grow your online presence. You are busy serving customers and don’t have as much time to spend on tasks such as content creation and optimizing your website.
Use the downtime of your operational activity to improve your website’s content. Create scheduled content that you can use immediately as the season starts and make a plan for the whole season.
Create additional landing pages — for example, if you service customers in multiple areas consider creating a page dedicated to each town or city you serve. Fill each page with unique, relevant and appealing content. Creating these pages during the off-season will give them time to be discovered by search engine and start ranking in the search results page.
