It takes a lot of time and effort to put together a great blog post. Once it's live, you have to share it and try to get the word out. But after a few weeks, blogs can get outdated as trends, tools, and circumstances change. It's vital to keep making updates to ensure the post stays relevant longer than it took you to write.
This is even more applicable to seasonal content. With so many factors already conspiring to bury your blog in the irrelevant depths of the internet, it can be a real challenge to keep your seasonal blogs about holidays, vacations, outdoor sports, or other events relevant. But the more you can do to update your older seasonal blogs and find reasons to share them year-round, the more views you'll get and the better SEO your blogs will command. Here's a few quick tips to help you optimize your seasonal content.
1. Keep them updated every year
What good is an old outdated blog? If someone somehow stumbles to your content, they won't read anything new and relevant. Google anything these days and you may see first page results from blogs published years ago, but that have been repeated updated, added to, and reoptimized as needed, so their content is always fresh and relevant when people find it. For seasonal content, this is as easy as adding another holiday retailer to your list of best bargain sites, or making sure the places you are suggesting people go to vacation are still offering the same deals. By revisiting your older content and making sure it is all up-to-date and relevant, you can keep that blog from gathering dust and becoming useless.
2. Build a plan to share them in the opposite seasons
Just because you wrote a great blog about snowboarding doesn't mean you only share it when snow is falling near you. When the hot summer months are wearing people down, they'll be looking forward to getting back on the mountain, so sharing content in the "offseason" can produce great results. I know I've definitely thought about Hawaii trips when stuck inside during a blizzard, so sharing a seasonal blog can work year-round, especially if you're keeping it updated (see #1).
3. Learn from the past
After the seasons start to change and your blog becomes less relevant, dig into the metrics and understand how well it did and why. What were your focus keywords? Where does your blog rank on Google, if at all? Were there external links to your blog that you can leverage in the future? By studying the patterns of how people found your blog and why, you can optimize that post, and future posts, to better drive relevant traffic to all your posts. Next fall when it's time to start posting about Christmas again, you'll know which keywords are worth optimizing around.
4. Tie your content together
No matter what your business or content is focused on, you should always have a master plan for how you create and promote your content. Even when blog posts about seasonal content aren't immediately relevant, they should tie into an overarching annual plan for what kind of content you are making. For example, our client Pugs Inc has winter and summer vacation guides, and when the seasons start to change, if you've downloaded the summer guide, we'll send you the winter one too. Linking to your own content helps give people access to interesting content that they may not even know they were interested in. By building a strategy that keeps all your content working together year round, and by linking to your seasonal content in relevant "offseason" posts, you can build a framework where people enjoy and share your content because it's been provided to them in the right context, no matter what season it is.
It's easy to write a blog post, share it a few times, and then forget about it. But if you've spent hours to create a really great post, why let it die after a couple days? Optimizing your posts and finding ways to share them, seasonal or not, will help lengthen the half life of your content and keep it from falling into the deep recesses of the internet, never to be read again. Seasonal content takes extra work to optimize and share year-round, but the results are well worth it. Keep revisiting and refreshing your content and you'll be able to see success in the short and long term.