Picking the appropriate keywords is an essential part of optimising any site and increasing traffic and business. Most online businesses try very hard to ensure they are at the top of the search engines for the keywords they offer.

Some online businesses however don’t always take into account seasonal trends. Seasonal trends refer to searches that only appear at certain times of the year. A great example of this is searches at christmas time. At this time of year far more people are searching online at for gifts, for this reason as SEO’s we should be optimising their sites for keywords like ‘CD presents’ if they sold CDs online.

Although these keywords are fairly uncommon during the rest of the year, they will be obtaining lots of traffic towards xmas time. Research is the most important thing to do if you want to be successful with seasonal keywords. Firstly you should implement a thorough in depth keyword analysis of the keywords related to your industry. The next most important thing is timing, SEO is a slow process so you will need to optimise these pages nice and early for them to get a kick start in the search results. Getting some quick links from directories or social media site is a great way to give the seasonal pages an early boost.

One great way to calculate seasonal trends is to use a program called Google Insight. This simple program from the search giants will show you seasonal searches for an entered term. This easy to use tool even provides you with related search terms which can be filtered by country, it also provides an overlay of news events.