Izzy James
Digital Marketing
No matter which industry your business operates in, whether you’re B2B or B2C, or if even your site is eCommerce or not, it’s important to have a plan in place for seasonal updates. We’re about to get into a busy season of occasions and change, so it’s important your website is ready to go.
Research has shown that consumer’s shopping behaviour is impacted by the range of events throughout the year, so it’s important to make the most of these as a business.
Which Seasons Should You Keep in Mind?
Seasonal events and occasions may differ depending on your target market, but we have listed some of the main events/occasions that you should have in the back of your mind:
New Year/January Sales: If you have an eCommerce site, many shoppers will expect sales and offers from you in the new year and this is even starting to extend to service based businesses.
Valentine’s Day: Over the year’s Valentine’s gifts have very much evolved from the traditional roses and chocolates, do your products or services correspond with this event?
Mother’s & Father’s Day: These are big days if you’re an eCommerce business, especially in the gift space, however something that’s becoming even more popular is gifting experiences like days out or hotel stays.
Easter: It’s all about the food at Easter, but it’s also the time where people start to think about their homes and gardens. We’re all starting to host more people and the weather is starting to brighten.
Summer: This is the season for BBQs, beach trips, gardening, events and more. Does your business peak in Summer?
Halloween: Halloween is a very niche event when it comes to online shopping but if you think your business is relevant to this national event, make sure your website reflects this.
Christmas: Christmas has no limits when it comes to online shopping, so chances are whatever you’re selling or offering online is crucial for more or less any business.
Prepping Your Website Content
As a rule of thumb, ensuring your website’s product inventory is up to date is a must to ensure you’re providing a high-quality service, but also will allow your website and marketing to work to the best of its ability.
Think about your user experience, are your seasonal products and content easy to find? Are you making a big deal about seasonal offers or deals on your homepage?
You can do things like add seasonal product categories to your navigation bar, update your header to include seasonal information.
Seasonal content can play havoc with your website rankings and SEO if it’s not done properly, so make sure to speak to your Digital Marketing team before making any changes. If your website is managed by us and you’re unsure about SEO, give our team a call and we can refer you to our experts.
Blogs
When blogging, people don’t often think about the seasonal changes and integrate them into their blogs. However, this can help keep your blogs relevant and reach more people at the right time.
You can create your blogs around topics people may be searching for during those seasons, leading them to your site. If you’re an eCommerce site, this could be something as simple as seasonal gift guides and if you’re a service based website you could write about preparing your house for Easter or getting your accounts ready for the New Year.
Be creative and think about what your audience may be looking for at that time of the year. Google Trends is a fantastic tool to find out about new and popular searches which could be relevant to your audience.
Images and Visuals
Using images and visuals on your website that reflect the different seasons will appeal to visitors and create a more enjoyable experience whilst on your site. This also gets your customers into the holiday spirit, making them more likely to make a purchase.
This could be larger visuals like your header image or video, or it could be on a smaller, more subtle scale like some of your product or lifestyle shots.
Website Security
Website security is something we talk about a lot here at Daneswood, and for good reasons, it’s so important to keep your website and customers safe. If you’re a Daneswood customer, we cover all of the basic security checks for you, so if you’re expecting an increase in traffic make sure you give us a call so we can ensure your server can handle the pressure.
A dramatic and sudden increase in website traffic can bring down even the largest of websites, so sales and seasonal events can play havoc with websites if they aren’t prepared. All you need to do is contact your developer if you’re expecting an increase in visitors, they will be able to advise you on anything that needs to happen to keep your website functioning and effective.
Seasonal SEO
We recommend SEO to all of our website customers, so much so that we partner with our sister company who are Digital Marketing experts to ensure our clients get the best of the best when it comes to SEO.
SEO is a dark art and seasonal SEO may be the trickiest of them all, it takes a team of experts to be able to make the most of your seasonal products/services with SEO, but when you nail it, the results can be amazing.
If you want more information about anything we’ve mentioned in this blog, from website support to SEO, give our team a call and we can have a chat in more detail about the right route for you and your business.