Seasonal SEO Campaign. What will be your Post SEO Strategy? Here is a Valentines Day Campaign Story

So you created a Seasonal SEO Campaign? Let’s assume you created a specific campaign for the Holiday season or for Valentines Day. For example you came up with a campaign for a Florist. Since Flowers is one of the best seasonal products on Valentines Day.

Let’s go back to the campaign that you created prior to this Valentines Day. You stated a Champaign a few months ago trying to optimize the florist site for Valentine’s Day. You would have probably created specific pages to optimize for Valentines day Flowers. In that page, your content might be history, Facts, etc to create a Valentines Day theme. You would have also give anchor links, internal links to your site and yes also to have them buy products related to that season, probably a link saying Buy Valentines Day Flowers Now. The reason to do this might be to give users not only just Valentines Day flowers but also tips, facts and to share your knowledge since you are an expert in that field. Makes sense to me.

The search engines love fresh content. Again this is prior to this Valentines Day, visits your site, finds some great content for the visitors, finds new information and assumes that this site will provide visitors some valuable information related to the season. Your page view increases eventually ending up with more sales until Valentines Day. Awesome, So far so good.

Valentines Day is over, not every one will look online for this specific keyword. But you have those pages how would you handle? What will your Post SEO Strategy?

Let’s discuss some of the possibilities here:

From a User Point of View:

1. If you decide to either delete or make it inactive or decided to have a 301 redirect? Those pages you created specifically for Valentine’s Day will not be visible, even if some one searched for it.
2. In case they search for it. It will give a 404 error to those searches. Since this page is content related to that holiday, you might still want to keep those pages, so that it is visible only to the searches that specifically search for it. You can eliminate from the visual navigation but still keep the page live
3. This also will help your client to rank for all year round and it will be easy to optimize for the next year same day, since you already have a presence for this keyword
   This page will only be visible if a user knows this URL: For ex: www.xyz.com/pages/valentinesday.html those who search and find this page will find useful.

From a Search Engine point of View:

1. Since this page is inactive, the search engines look at the page and don’t find those pages and will give a 404 error to the searchers. If you have the pages live ( which wont be visible to the visitors, unless they type in specific URL) the search engine will still index and keep it in the database, giving an overall results if someone searches for the terms.
2. Since this is the trend for a few more day still search engine will rank some of the content in the SEPR’s, Which is a good thing.
3. To conclude, having this page live is good from a search engine point of view.
4. Another way to handle this is to do a 301 redirect or Robot.txt and send visitors to another page. Again if you decide not to rank for the keywords after the season. So the next time you try to optimize a site for this theme you will have to start from a scratch.

From the Client point of View:

1. The Florist when searched for it, may see here and there these pages popping up in the search results for a while even after the season is over, this happens for all the sites, since search engines keep the index for a while.
2. Some of the clients might think this is a problem, that they still see some of the pages even after the season, What would you do to get around this? My personal suggestion: Send an email with the above both user and search engine point of view benefit and educate and just inform them this is a good thing.

From an SEO point of View:

1. Ok what would you as an SEO do? Well you might still keep the pages, but be careful with the anchor links which you created to point the visitors to your specific products, why? Because those products you sold only for these special occasions would have been inactive by now. So tweaking the Anchor links and other links will be useful.
2. Tip: Use those anchor links for a different campaign but related to this theme. If you are creative you can link this theme to another theme.
3. You would have probably tweaked some other page Title, Description, content and links optimizing to this campaign. Double check those pages.
4. With the advanced search feature, you can see where all those keywords are appearing, you can search by Specific URL, Title, Body. Scan those places and tweak it .

Conclusion:

So overall having these pages are good for SEO and user point of view, but as a SEO, tweak, fine tune those content rather tan eliminating the page completely.

This is my own personal opinion. Do you have any experience or story to share about seasonal SEO? Feel free to comment