Seasonal Demand and What to Publish When

The timing everybody gets wrong

Demand for a seasonal service starts, the phone rings, somebody says we should have a page about this, and the page is published two weeks later.

By the time it is found, the season is halfway through, and by the time it might have ranked properly it is over.

The following year the same thing happens, because nothing recorded that it had.

A page published six weeks early and a page published two weeks late are separated by two months of effort that is otherwise identical.

Why early matters

A new page is not found immediately, and it does not reach its eventual position for some time.

It has to be crawled, indexed, and then accumulate whatever signals it is going to accumulate, and for a competitive term that is weeks rather than days.

Customers also search before they buy. Somebody thinking about heating in September is reading in September and buying in October, and a page appearing in October has missed the reading.

Six to eight weeks ahead is a reasonable default for most seasonal work, and earlier is better for anything competitive.

Find your own pattern first

Assumptions about seasonality are frequently wrong in the details, and you already hold the data.

Pull twelve or twenty-four months of enquiries or invoices by month and chart them, which takes twenty minutes.

Then do the same for website traffic by month, and for your main terms in your search console, which shows when people start searching rather than when they start buying.

The gap between those two is the number you actually need: how far ahead of the work the interest begins.

For many trades that gap is four to eight weeks, and it is often longer than the business assumes.

What is worth publishing seasonally

• The service itself, as a permanent page kept current.
• Timing advice: when to book, how far ahead you fill up.
• Preparation: what a customer should do beforehand.
• Availability, stated plainly, on the listing and the site.
• What goes wrong when people leave it too late.

The second and fifth are the strongest and least used. Somebody searching in the run-up wants to know whether they are early, on time, or late, and almost nobody tells them.

Update, do not recreate

The single most useful discipline in seasonal publishing.

A page published last year has been indexed, may have links, and has a history. Creating a new one for this year starts from nothing and competes with the old one.

Keep one permanent page per seasonal service, at the same address, and update it each year: current prices, current availability, this year's dates, a new photograph.

Avoid putting the year in the address, since that guarantees the page expires and the work has to be redone annually.

Show a last updated date if it helps a reader judge currency, and change it because the content changed rather than to appear fresh.

A worked example

A chimney sweep did almost all their work between September and December and published a page about booking early in the third week of October each year.

Charting two years of bookings against search console data showed people started searching in the second week of August, about seven weeks before the bookings arrived.

They rebuilt the page as a permanent one, updated it in the first week of August, and added a line to their listing and their invoices saying when they typically fill up.

September bookings rose noticeably the following year.

The owner's assessment was that the work had always been the same work, published at the wrong time, and that the invoice line telling last year's customers when to rebook had been the cheapest part of it.

Build the calendar once

The thing that stops this being rediscovered annually.

Write down each seasonal service, when demand starts, when searching starts, and therefore when the page needs updating.

Put those dates in whatever calendar you actually use, as recurring entries, with the page address in the entry so nobody has to find it.

That converts a piece of thinking done once into something that happens every year without anybody remembering it.

It also survives staff changes, which is when this knowledge is usually lost.

The quiet season is when you build

The other half of the pattern, and the more valuable one.

The months when the phone is quiet are the months to write next season's pages, photograph the work you did last season, and ask for the reviews you did not get round to asking for.

That is also when to do the site work that never gets done in a busy month.

Businesses that treat the quiet period as time to worry rather than time to build arrive at the next season with the same site they had last year.

Six weeks of quiet, used deliberately, is most of a year's marketing for a seasonal business.

The counter-case

Not every business has a season worth planning around.

Plenty of trades are steady year-round, and imposing a seasonal calendar on them creates artificial deadlines and content nobody needed.

There is also a risk in over-fitting to a pattern from one unusual year, which is a live problem given how disrupted recent years have been for most sectors.

Use at least two years of data before treating a shape as real, and be willing to conclude that your demand is flat, which is a legitimate finding and means the effort belongs on evergreen pages instead.

The exercise is worth running once even where the answer is that there is no season, because knowing that is also useful.

The plan

1. Chart two years of enquiries by month.
2. Chart search interest for your main terms by month.
3. Measure the gap between searching and buying.
4. Set update dates six to eight weeks ahead.
5. Keep one permanent page per seasonal service.
6. Put the dates in a recurring calendar entry.
7. Use the quiet months to build next season.

Step three is the number the whole plan depends on, and almost no small business has ever calculated it.

Pages that go out of date are covered in lead times on a page that goes stale.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.