365 Days of eCommerce: Preparing your Site for Seasonal Surges

I don’t know about you, but personally I couldn’t feel more festive if I had travelled to the office by sleigh and descended to my desk through a chimney.

As Christmas is upon us, the temptation is to talk all about gearing up for the biggest event in many an ecommerce website’s calendar, but what about all the shifts and surges that occur throughout the rest of the year?

There are precious few businesses that do not experience seasonality to some extent. Fluctuations in the demand for your products can result from changes in consumer purchasing habits, public holidays or even weather related shifts.

The changing tides of seasonal business provide a number of opportunities and threats, which, with the right preparation, can help you either limit the damage caused by a drop in sales, or capitalise on a seasonal surge.

Standard and non-standard seasonality

Standard seasonality is a fluctuation in demand for your products based on established trends. This affects the availability, cost and relevance of your products or services. As you know its coming, changes can be made to your website to better accommodate the feast, or negate the famine.

Non-standard seasonality occurs when unexpected variation in demand results from a seasonal change. A prime example is the drop in demand for winter clothing due to our unseasonably warm autumn. This is more difficult to account for as it’s almost impossible to predict.

In this post we’ll take a look at a few strategies you can use to prepare your site for a standard or non-standard seasonal surge.

Prime your site for seasonal organic search

Identifying and understanding your organic seasonality is the key to preparing your website for the inevitable rush. Most businesses will have an understanding of the ebbs-and-flows of their bricks and mortar business (if they have one), but your digital operation may be subject to different trends.

A comprehensive analysis of your organic traffic is a sure way to uncover those digital trends.

• The first step is to take a look at your analytics year-on-year for at least the last three years to see when the seasonal spikes occur.
• There may well be some inconsistencies in the data due to successful SEO campaigns on certain products, so the wider your data set, the easier it will be to identify spikes that are purely seasonal.

The next step is to use this data to anticipate the seasonal spikes before they arrive so you can fine tune your ecommerce website to capitalise. To do this you should:

• Use the Search Traffic — Search Queries section of Google Webmaster Tools to see which keywords you’re ranking well for, and how many clicks those keywords are generating.
• Then, pop along to Google’s Keyword Planner to see how many searches your best terms are receiving, and how this changes on a month-to-month basis. This will enable you to assess the monthly search behaviour for each query.
• You can also dig a little deeper by heading over to Google Trends and reviewing the most searched for terms by date range and geographical area.

How can you use this data?

Now you know when to anticipate the seasonal surges, you can launch your digital promotions to coincide with these spikes. Pay-per-click ads that coincide with spikes in particular products might be an affective strategy. Alternatively, you could also display products that trend during particular times of the year more prominently on your website.

This can also have seasonal implications for you content strategy. Understanding when particular search terms are trending, and creating quality content and blog posts with those keywords woven naturally into the copy can make your website seem more relevant for that particular term.

And what do the search engines love? All together now… Prizes Relevancy!

Seasonal microsites

Another strategy that can help you capitalise on seasonal shifts in consumer behaviour is the launch of seasonal microsites. The beauty of seasonal ecommerce microsites is their focus, which is usually just on the one product. This makes it far easier to rank well in the search engine results pages (SERPs) than if the product was buried several layers deep on your main website.

Microsites are also generally easier to market, as all the content is contextually linked to just the one product or service area. Across multiple industries and categories, microsites rank more quickly, and with substantially less investment, than a traditional big brand website with hundreds of products and multiple categories.

As microsites are separate from your main website, they can also be marketed more heavily, as they can simply be removed when the seasonality has died down. Not that we’d encourage any black hat SEO tactics you understand!

Blame it on the weatherman!

It’s not often we can reference abysmal pop songs in our blogs, but this is one chance we’re not going to pass up!

The weather is an example of a sometimes standard, and sometimes non-standard seasonal variation. If the weather is either unseasonably warm, or unseasonably wet, there is an opportunity there for savvy ecommerce websites.

The real boon of pay-per-click advertising is its timeliness. Write your advert, set your bid and visibility is almost instantaneous. If an unseasonable spell of hot and dry or cold and wet weather hits our shores, which let’s face it, is not uncommon, why not launch a couple of ads designed to capitalise.

By adjusting your PPC campaigns in this way, you can maximise your brand exposure and online conversions during periods of opportune weather!

What clever ways do you capitalise on standard or non-standard seasonality? Are you going to try any of the strategies detailed in this post? If you are, we’d love you to share your success stories (or otherwise!) with our readers, so please leave your comments below or send us a Tweet @servertastic.