In this article, our team of digital marketing experts at Wildcat Digital uncover how to prepare your site for the busiest times of the year. Whether you’re seeking advice for a small non-profit business or a larger eCommerce company, we’re versed in discovering unique ways of preparing sites for seasonal trends as they come and go. So, how do you prepare your site for the busiest times of the year?
The best ways to prepare your site for the busiest times of the year include:
- Getting ahead of seasonal trends
- Creating the right content
- Optimising your site for user experience
- Improving your site’s discoverability
- Implementing long-term customer retention strategies
Keep reading to discover what we mean by the ‘busiest times of the year’ and the key benefits of preparing your site ahead of key events.
What Do We Mean By The ‘Busiest Times of The Year?’
When we talk about the ‘busiest times of the year’, we are referring to the periods of time, usually seasons, that are particularly busy or active for businesses. It is totally normal to notice a shift in site traffic depending on the following factors:
- Season
- Weather
- Holidays
- Cultural Traditions
- How well you market through slower times
- Whether you sell seasonal products and/or services.
As a digital marketing agency who deal with a range of different clients, from regional businesses to nationally, recognised household names, we understand the importance of identifying peak traffic periods. A big part of our role as digital marketers is recognising when businesses experience these ‘busy times’ and helping them prepare efficiently for these periods.
How Do Seasonal Trends Impact a Business?
It is crucial for businesses to understand and adapt to seasonal changes as they can have a significant impact on consumer behaviour and purchasing patterns. For example, as the weather changes, so do people’s needs, preferences and spending habits. The first step is to identify these shifts and respond accordingly to make sure you are catering to your customers needs.
One of the most obvious ways in which season trends affect consumer behaviour is through the shift in demand for certain products or services. During the summer months, people tend to spend more time outdoors, engaging in activities such as barbecuing and travelling. Consequently, businesses related to outdoor recreation, such as travel agencies tend to experience a surge in demand for their services.
Much in the same way, during the winter months, people tend to spend more time indoors and focus on activities such as home improvement and staying warm. This shift in consumer behaviour creates opportunities for businesses in sectors such as home improvement and heating systems.
Seasonal trends also influence customers’ purchasing decisions. For example, consumers are far more likely to make impulse purchases during certain times of the year, such as during the holiday season or when they receive tax refunds. As a business, you can leverage these patterns by strategically timing promotions and discounts to coincide with these periods of increased spending.
Our Top Tips On How To Prepare Your Site For Holiday Traffic
In order to utilise the power of seasonality and ‘busy periods’, a systematic approach is needed. This includes understanding your market’s dynamics, planning effectively and employing seasonal advertising strategies.
Get Ahead of Seasonality Trends
Time to do your homework! It’s vital that you take the time to analyse your business’ performance during the previous year’s holiday rush. Pinpoint key busy periods you need to prepare for by using:
- Consumer data reports
- Industry trends reports
- Google trends/search data
- Owned business data – sales, revenue
- Website data from GA – traffic, conversions and goal completion
It might be useful to create a website review and highlight which specific areas you need to improve. Identity which pages gained the most traffic or what products were sold quickly. Then, you can add more stocks and boost online content as needed.
*One of our top tips is to create buyer personas for your customers so that you can understand exactly what they are looking for. Setting up customer personas can help inform the tone of voice and language used in your content and help you target the right customer at the right stage of the buyer journey.
Create The Right Content
Reusing and recycling your pre-existing content is a great way to prepare for the busiest times of the year. Remember to take advantage of the holiday period and boost your content with relevant keywords. You may also want to promote other content by adding internal links that will make your visitors stay longer on your website.
*Don’t forget, you’ll need to upload the content to your site at least two months ahead of the seasonal event, so that it has time to start ranking.
Below, we outline some of our top tips for getting your content ready:
- Popular Products – Consider which products perform well at different times of the year. Which products do you need to optimise further to increase sales?
- New Content – Think about whether you need to create any new content surrounding your popular products. This might include advice articles, guides or inspirational content for the user to enjoy.
Here are some examples
- Inspirational content about the best holiday destinations for families
- Quirky gift guides for something a bit more unusual
- Advice article about how to put up a tent for the summer holidays
- PPC – Think about whether you need to create any pages for specific ad campaigns or marketing campaigns. For example, could your business benefit from having dedicated PPC landing pages?
- Updating Content – Do you have any evergreen sales pages which need updating with the correct products, information, availability or key dates? For instance, Mother’s Day is a different date each year, whereas Christmas Day remains the same.
- Seasonal Newsletters – Newsletters are a perfect way to greet your members on holidays. If you make an eye-catching subject, users are more likely to open it. This might encourage them back to your site.
- FAQs – Think about whether your FAQs need updating.
Optimise User Experience
Whilst having a stunning website design is important, making sure that it is user-friendly is what generates revenue for your business. User experience should be highly prioritised when considering how to prepare your site for the ‘busiest times’. When your customers are satisfied with the way in which your web functionalities work, they will be more likely to take action.
Here are some of our top recommendations about how to improve your UX (user experience) and CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation):
- Time on page/Load times – On average, a one-second delay in page loading can reduce conversion rates by up to 7%. Aim to reduce your page loading time to 3 seconds. Google’s PageSpeed Insights is a fantastic way to assess the loading speeds of your website.
- 404 Errors – Products out of stock should redirect to the category page.
- Ease of checkout process – Cart abandonment is a problem across all industries. The best place to start is by troubleshooting your checkout process to make sure that the purchasing process is as straightforward as possible.
- Add Extra Server Capacity – During peak seasons, you want to make sure that your web server can handle the surge in traffic. If you’re using a cloud hosting company, you may want to consider purchasing more storage.
- Customer service – Does your site feature contact details such as phone numbers, emails and contact forms?
- Site security – It’s vital that your site’s SSL certificate is up to date and that your checkout process is secure for customers during the purchasing stage.
Improve Your Website’s Discoverability
Some of the best ways to improve your site’s visibility include:
- Optimising content for search
- Google My Business/local SEO if you want to drive footfall
- Link building to boost rankings
- Brand building PR – general awareness of the brand to increase brand search and preferences when searching
- Product PR – e.g. inclusion in journalists round ups of “Best tech gifts for teens”
- Ad campaigns
- Email marketing – Direct people to specific pages onsite based on demographics, where they are in your buying journey
- Social media campaigns – Don’t forget to utilise social media marketing whilst preparing for seasonal website traffic. This way, you can easily track your website activities while getting a notification on your social media page.
- Seasonal Discounts – Many businesses take advantage of the holiday season to give back to their customers. For example, during the Christmas period, people become more giving; buying bulk gifts and giving back to charities.
Longer-Term Customer Retention
Another great way to prepare your site for busy periods is to spend time considering longer-term customer retention strategies. This includes:
- Data capture for future sales
- Discounts offered for future purchases
- Adding existing customers to mailing lists
- Incentives to share on social media
For more information about how to prepare your site for high traffic, take a look at Adobe’s interesting 5 p framework for peak season performance.
What Are The Benefits Of Preparing Your Business For Key Events?
Seizing the opportunity offered by the busiest times of the year can be a serious game-changer for your business. In this section, our team highlight the main benefits of preparing your business for key events in the calendar year:
Increased Profitability
If your business is aware of its peak periods, it can give you an upper hand in manoeuvring your production and sales strategy accordingly. Let’s consider the retail industry, who reap considerable profit during festive seasons or special occasions such as Christamas or Black Friday. During these periods, purchasing behaviours change as customers become more willing to spend more. Capitalising on these ‘hot spots’ can open doors for enormous profits.
Capitalising on these ‘busy periods’, will also put less pressure on your business during the quieter months when leads are not as frequent. Rather than panicking when sales are down one month, take this opportunity to focus on strategies your business can implement to take advantage of these seasonal trends. For example, you can plan your PR efforts ahead of time and prepare any relevant newsletters or promotional content.
Improved Customer Engagement
Customer engagement is another sphere where your business can reap the rewards on seasonality in business dynamics. Understanding your consumers behaviours, particular wants and needs according to seasonal changes will ensure that you are meeting their specific needs. For example, an online butchers is likely to attract more buyers during the summer months when barbequing season is underway.
Greater Efficiency
Unbeknownst to many, seasonality doesn’t just revolve around sales spikes but also involves efficient management practices at all organisation levels, from procurement to distribution. Identifying when demand will surge allows your business to stockpile inventory ahead of time or boost specific services when they are in demand.
For instance, a digital marketing agency may want to leverage PR after having won an illustrious award. Similarly, with the rise of AI threats in cybersecurity, a Cyber Resilience Centre might want to focus its PR efforts on this topical subject.
Examples of Key Industry Events
Below, our team at Wildcat Digital outline some of the key ‘busy periods’ across particular industries:
- E-commerce – Black Friday/Cyber Monday and during the Christmas period
- Travel – Many customers seek travel support in the winter months as they do not have the time to research their travel options. Peak bookings usually take place in January.
- DIY – Bank holidays
- Florists/cards/gifting – Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day etc
- Hiking and campaign gear – Camping season/festival season spring/summer
- Hospitality/pubs – Big sports events e.g. Euros, World Cup and during the Christmas period
- Fancy dress – Halloween, St Patrick’s Day, World Book Day
You might be interested to learn more about one of our most successful campaigns which drew on several major events in 2022/23 :-
During our campaign with Flagmakers, we noticed an opportunity to capitalise on significant national events where flags would be popular, including the Queen’s Jubilee in 2022, the 2022 football World Cup and the Coronation of King Charles III in 2023. In just one month, we were able to draw on these major events to increase organic visits by, at its peak, 523%.
To Conclude
Even with the best planning and preparation, sometimes things do not go as planned. This is why it’s important to have a backup plan or procedures in place should your server crash, you run out of stock quickly or if a security incident occurs. Saying that, if you have followed all of the steps outlined in this article, we’re optimistic that you’ll be able to maximise your profits during the ‘peak periods’.
Prepare Your Site With Wildcat Digital
Wildcat Digital is an award-winning digital marketing agency located in the heart of Sheffield’s city centre. Committed to supporting start-ups and small businesses compete with bigger brands through smart digital marketing strategies, Wildcat Digital are passionate about helping businesses punch above their weight online.
So, what are you waiting for!
Get in touch with our team of digital marketing experts ahead of any upcoming peak periods to receive the support your business needs to capitalise on sales.
Rachel Davies
Senior SEO Executive
