SEO Blog

You don’t want to be caught out when there is a sudden surge in traffic in your sector. If you have a decent ranking already, it’s never too late to make that go further and capitalise fully on a gold streak.

Take Christmas as a good example. Okay, so it’s only April, but in 8 months time people will be fighting tooth and nail to get a decent ranking for their ecommerce websites. Shopping spikes in early December, which is when you want your site to be most prominent.

So when do you start optimising for your Christmas goodies? November, October, September? Well, the honest answer is to get on with it as early as possible.

You don’t want to have flash images of Santa on your homepage in July, but you can start building the site behind the scenes. Start planning out PPC accounts and get content written that is ready to roll out when the time comes.

In fact you could choose to feature special pages dedicated to any annual or year round events that are popular with your visitors. They don’t need to be too prominent, in fact they can sit off your main pages and be found only through your Sitemap and search engines (that is until you upgrade them closer to the time).

The same is true of all seasonal events. We’ve just had Easter, Valentine’s Day and have Father’s Day and Halloween to come. But you might also have more niche events that could affect traffic streams, including major sporting events, bad weather (think insurance and repairs) and regional occasions.

Whatever the events is and whatever your association with it, you need to be sure that you’re in a position to tap into that influx of search traffic it receives. Of course you don’t want to neglect your duties elsewhere. SEO is about building strength and employing best practices throughout a site, not just on a single page or for a time of year (unless of course that is your only business).

But preparation for high traffic also has to take into account your own sites ability to deal with large volumes of traffic. Can your server deal with this sudden influx? Are your pages fast enough to carry people through the site swiftly? Is there enough content there to inform them what it is that they’re looking for and to reassure them that you’re a reputable company?

Getting the infrastructure of your site ready is almost as important as getting yourself in the position to benefit in the first place. This is why your SEO and your webmaster hats must be worn at all times when building, developing and managing websites.

If you have taken a huge amount of time to get yourself to the top of Google for your primary keywords, the last thing you want is for a hosting error to scupper your site for days or the actual content of your site not matching the searchers’ expectations. Get your site in order. Don’t get left behind and make sure that you are in a position to maximise your potential.