If you’re blog relies on search engines for the majority of your traffic than this post is going to be fairly important. If most of your traffic comes from feeds or referral traffic than this information might be as relevant.

Anticipating seasonal search traffic (anything other than regular traffic) is the art of knowing what people will be searching in the future and capitalizing on that knowledge. Most of the large blogs already do this (Problogger comes to mind) and get thousands of hits every day from this extra search traffic. You may ask “How can I get this extra traffic?”, but there really isn’t one single answer. Here are a few tips for capitalizing on this seasonal traffic.

  • Anticipate what’s going to happen in real life.
    A good part of the seasonal search traffic is knowing what is happening in real life. Lets say for example that its the middle of September and you know that Halloween’s coming up. You could write an article about ‘Safety Tips for Halloweening’ or something like that to capitalize on the search traffic coming from people searching about Halloween. Other things you could post about are: The Olympics, American Idol winners, Christmas (or other holidays), the Superbowl or Stanely Cup, etc…
  • Stay inside your niche:
    Obviously some of the things you could write have nothing to do with your blog. While you could write about these things (for example I could cover the Superbowl but this blog is technology related) you probably wouldn’t get any returning visitors or readers. Think about things you can write about that relate to your blog, so your readers stay interested in your other content. If you’re blog is like this one you could write about the top 10 gadgets for this Christmas, or maybe the new technology in the latest Olympic games.
  • Write great content:
    This point is extremely important when it comes to seasonal traffic. Unfortunately a lot of bloggers try to get their posts out too quickly without reading over what they wrote. This can lead to posts that are of poor quality and make the readers less interested in your blog.While writing posts to capitalize on seasonal search traffic gets the people to your site, if you’re content isn’t up to their standards than the readers will leave without reading any of your stuff. If you write great stuff than the readers will read more, and hopefully sign up to your feeds, or bookmark your site. The main goal for your site is to get people returning and reading your articles.

I have a few ideas for up-and-coming posts that I’m going to write to try to get in on some seasonal traffic:

As Darren over at Problogger puts it “The key is to anticipate search traffic - but not to compromise on your reader experience.”