It should come as no surprise that a fire-and-forget attitude is the wrong way to handle SEO marketing. With SEO techniques advancing daily, it’s important to stay current, and that includes staying up to date with the latest marketing trends. Here are a few tips to help you make sure your SEO efforts don’t go to waste!

First, there’s nothing that will increase traffic to your website more than a proactive attitude. One of the few drawbacks to SEO marketing is that it takes some time to become truly effective. If you want to maximize the effectiveness of your SEO campaign, implement the campaign up to three months before you expect to see the largest quantity of hits. For example, searches for the phrase “garden center” tend to peak around April. In order to achieve the best results from your SEO efforts, set up the campaign no later than December (in this case, earlier is better).

Next, realize that there are certain times of the year from which all SEO campaigns can benefit. Holidays like Christmas, where many items are purchased regardless of their usefulness in the current season, see a mass influx of searches of all kinds. You should keep your site tailored to the season by updating your content regularly with keywords that reflect the hottest trends at the time; Google Trends provides free lists of the most popular keywords, and it’s updated daily. The more of these you manage to use effectively, the better the chance you’ll draw attention to your website.

This leads me to the next point: make sure your products or services are marketed appropriately in accordance with the time of year! For example, a department store might sell both swim trunks and fur coats. It’s easy to predict that fur coats will be more popular in winter than swim trunks, and as it starts to warm up, the department store will see a decline in fur coat searches and an increase in searches involving swimwear. Keeping an eye on these trends and updating your site accordingly (i.e., months in advance of the actual trend switch) will keep you current and keep your sales at their highest level possible.

Many people assume that buying trends will resemble search trends. This is not always the case. A perfect example of this is travel. Many consumers will research their vacation and book it months in advance in order to save on last minute fees. This will create a high search rate for travel agents many months before vacation season, resulting in a much lower search rate when many other companies would normally be experiencing a spike of website hits. No matter what your industry is, it’s important to know when your potential consumers are searching for your products and services, and it’s imperative to adjust your SEO campaign ahead of time to be prepared for their demands!