SEO strategy for events, seasonal sales, and pop-up stores

Recurring events and seasonal stores can provide fantastic opportunities to improve commercial performance and create meaningful engagement with a wider repeat audience.

From smaller local fairs and pop-up shops to major music festivals and industry-leading shows, the opportunity to immerse yourself in this organic seasonal marketing campaign should not be overlooked.

Several good articles have been written about optimizing Google event packages and searching carousels by schema, so I won’t re-discuss this item here.

And, if you’re looking for a seasonal marketing calendar for new inspiration, here’s a handy 2022 marketing calendar.

This post will help you shape your SEO strategy to make the most of recurring seasonal events like Black Friday, Christmas, and Cyber ​​Monday, which apply to both online businesses and offline pop-up stores.

It will also help event-oriented brands of all sizes effectively optimize recurring industry fairs, festivals, and other forms of presence-based SEO campaigns, no matter how local they are.

Servicing Consumer Intent Thoroughly

Basically, you should be visible in the conversation for each dominant area of ​​intent around your event in the major search engines.

There are many ways to collect data about the topical information people associate with your event.

You should also explore data around larger, more established competitors who may be better known than your event but are a great fit for your own niche position.

The easiest data points are directly in Google search results and predictive search.

The example below shows the dominant predictions from Google based on the breadth of historical search data.

This cuts through a lot of the initial data work and leads you to the main sub-topics that you should cover comprehensively through curating valuable content.

Screenshot from tracing [glastonbury 2023], October 2022

Consider the above as your initial keyword topic or theme that you can develop into a content summary, with the goal of developing a number of content-rich lead goals to grow your SEO success.

Targetting In-SERP Organic Visibility

The greatest opportunity to showcase your brand, seasonal event, or pop-up store in front of new and existing audiences is through pre-click targeting, rich results on Google search engine results pages (SERPs).

If we stick to the same Glastonbury Festival example, you can identify and prioritize which rich and mixed search results to target through your SEO strategy.

Initially, four main areas stood out.

First, the “People also ask” segment. It appears directly below the first result in the SERPs in this scenario.

Often, this is an opportunity for some opportunity for the brand to appear on page one or for any coverage you may have placed on a highly relevant external site.

Screenshot from tracing [glastonbury 2023], October 2022

You’ll often see industry-specific media sites occupying this space alongside deeper content forms such as guides and white papers.

The bottom line is that these are non-competing sites where you have a compelling reason to place content directly on their site and be present in more than one top ranking position on Google.

Next is the video section, which is often used for the event-related and recurring type of seasonal intent search queries.

To help rank video content, apply traditional video optimization tactics.

Screenshot from tracing [glastonbury 2023], October 2022

Another leading SERP result to target, in this case, is the image:

Screenshot from tracing [glastonbury 2023], October 2022

And the “Related searches” results, which appear at the bottom of the page:

Screenshot from tracing [glastonbury 2023], October 2022

Completeness of single page coverage is a fundamental factor to be present in this rich result, on top of prerequisite content types and technical optimization via schema.

As a tip, always look at who is currently filling the space in this SERP and consider where the topical gaps in external content are and what signals you can improve on (social media, backlink value, authorship, trustworthiness, credibility, quality of different types of content, etc. )

Mastering The Local Landscape

Local SEO is a common thread across all recurring events and seasonal or pop-up store SEO strategies.

Locality is the trigger from which all mobile searches are filtered.

Local intentions have also grown much faster over the last two to three years.

In fact, search trends related to location intent, including “shopping near me”, have seen significant growth since 2017:

Screenshot from Think With Google, October 2022

There are many practical tactics for optimizing your website for local SEO, and some of the most effective include:

Taking Always-On Approach To Seasonal Marketing

Just because you’re targeting an event at Christmas, or an exhibition in September, doesn’t mean you should look at SEO a month in advance.

According to the latest consumer insights from Google:

“…40% of U.S. holiday shoppers. say their holiday shopping experience has made them consider shopping early for another milestone this year.”

Google goes further with this in the same article to say:

“By June 2021, 31% of US shoppers had already started their holiday shopping and 37% of shoppers who shopped last holiday season wished they had started earlier.”

So what does this mean for your SEO strategy for recurring seasonal marketing and pop-up stores?

The immediate impact of this behavior change is that you need to have an always-on element for your seasonal SEO.

This provides an opportunity to grow authority on the topic year after year.

This means that you can stay active for core topics that cannot be changed (“music festival”, “local pop-up shop”, “Christmas hampers”, etc.) to maximize initial purchase intent.

You can also limit previous years’ events by having a landing page on an annual basis that continues to drive value to the site and support next year’s profits. An example is Glastonbury 2022.

It also presents a means for targeting future intentions.

Sticking with the same example as above, we can look to Glastonbury 2023 (and beyond).

You might be surprised that people are planning 2+ years ahead with bigger seasonal events. Here are the existing rich results ready to be optimized on Google:

Screenshot from tracing [glastonbury 2023], October 2022

Being the first to identify and act on this type of future user intent opens up the opportunity to rank first and become the company that dominates this key visibility item.

Final Fast Tips For Seasonal Marketing

So many important strategic items fall into the realm of seasonal and event-based marketing for SEO.

Here are a few more tips to help with your own marketing efforts:

Featured Image: Rohappy/Shutterstock