How seasonal SERP changes affect SEO
2021-02-02 - 12 min read time - by Elizabeth Baggan
Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) are report cards all SEOs grade their strategies by, but what do you do when that report card keeps changing? As SEOs, we understand our industry is in a state of flux all the time. All our work is based on the constantly evolving algorithms and SERP layouts of different search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. and it’s our job as SEOs to ensure we stay on top of the ever-changing landscape (both figuratively and literally when it comes to SERPs).
To fully understand why changing SERPs are imperative to a winning SEO strategy, let’s briefly compare Google’s first SERP in 1998 to today’s:
Source : Towermarketing.net
The differences are quite stark. The SERP from 1998 only shows organic results and sitelinks while the SERP from 2020 shows organic results and sitelinks as well as alternative results like Books, News, Videos, Images, etc., Twitter Cards, and a Knowledge Graph. Those are a lot of changes, and we’ve just scratched the surface.
The reason for the evolution of SERPs is that Google wants to increase the amount advertisers spend on their Ad platform. In order to prove the ROI, Google also needs to have strong user engagement. The best way to have strong user engagement is to provide the best user experience possible.
If you’re reading this article, you most likely already know what a SERP is, but for those less familiar with SEO, a SERP is a search engine results page or the page that a search engine shows to users when they search for something online using a search engine like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others.
SERPs are incredibly important because it is ultimately where SEO battles are won or lost. As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, it is a constant indicator of how well your SEO strategy is working.
There are many components of a SERP, some of which we will go over below, but for more information around SERPs in general, here’s a great guide from Search Engine Journal.
Today, no two SERPs are the same, even if you are searching for the same keyword. Instead, they are personalized for each user. This explains why you sometimes see different search results when searching on different devices or from new locations, but there are a number of other reasons why SERPs are constantly different. Before we dive into them, the two biggest categories for changing SERPs are:
A broad definition of seasonality is when data experiences regular and predictable changes that recur every calendar year. Any predictable fluctuation or pattern that recurs or repeats over a one-year period is called seasonal. In other words, when you see a recurring pattern in your data that happens every year at the same time. Now take this logic and apply it to your SEO data.
How do you spot this pattern? There are several ways, but the two most common are, looking at your traffic or looking at your target business keywords.
Traffic seasonality:
This is a great example of a site capitalizing on their seasonality. Each consecutive year, the traffic around the week of Valentine’s Day grows year over year. Clearly, this site understood the opportunity seasonality presented and ensured their site was well optimized to capture that increase in interest and saw the results in increased traffic year over year.
Keyword seasonality:
Google Trends
Using tools like Google Trends (above) to understand keyword seasonality is key to uncovering major SEO opportunities. From the above, there are three insights that stand out:
From these insights, we might conclude that, despite the season, most users will search for “olympics” and rely on Google to serve them the most relevant results based on the time of year they are searching. This ties back to user intent changing the SERP because Google understands a user searching for “olympics” in July or August is looking for information about the Summer Olympics as opposed to the Winter Olympics. Now, we can put together an SEO strategy that takes these insights into consideration.
Often you will get a sense of a site’s or business’ seasonality by using common sense (i.e. the Olympics only come around once every few years and is a major global event). But if it’s not obvious, check your analytics & Google Trends to see if you can uncover any seasonality potential.
Now that we’ve discussed numerous ways in which SERPs can change, let’s deep dive into how seasonality affects SERPs.
First, let’s pick “winter coats” as our target business keyword to dive into. Logic tells us that peak seasonality for this keyword would be in the winter, and off-peak seasonality would be in the summer.
Google Trends
Verifying our logic using Google Trends shows that we are correct. Now let’s compare the SERPs to see how different they are during peak and off-peak seasons.
We can do this by comparing historical SERPs using SEMRush. In the Keyword Overview tab, we can select the month and year we want to view (boxed in red below), and there is a section (highlighted yellow below) that details what the SERP for that keyword looked like during the time period selected.
First, let’s look at the peak of seasonality for this keyword in November:
SEMRush
During peak season (November), the SERP for “winter coats” includes:
Taking a look at that list, you might be wondering how can there be room for the organic listings?! Which is a very good question. Let’s take a look at the SERP during off-peak season before we answer that question.
SEMRush
During off-peak season (July), the SERP for “winter coats” includes:
It may not be a surprise that in the off-peak season, the SERP for “winter coats” feels almost bare compared to what the SERP looks like during peak season. This indicates that the competition during peak season is two-fold: first, standard competition for organic rankings on page 1 and second, capturing as many relevant SERP features as possible. So even if a site is ranking well organically, with all of the SERP features drawing the eyes of the user, standing out on the SERP is more important than ever.
Now let’s look at a lifestyle example to see if we find the same pattern that we did with e-commerce. For “how to lose weight”, here are the peak and off-peaks seasons:
Google Trends
One noticeable difference between this example and the “winter coats” example is that the peak season for “how to lose weight” is much longer. It’s more of a plateau than a peak.
As before, we will now look at the SERPs to understand how they change between peak and off-peak season so we can formulate an SEO strategy.
SEMRush
During peak season, the SERP for “how to lose weight” includes:
Similar to what we saw for the “winter coats” SERP during its peak season, this SERP is full of features in addition to the normal organic listings.
Now let’s look at the “how to lose weight” off-season SERP:
SEMRush
During off-peak season, the SERP for “how to lose weight” includes:
While this off-peak SERP is less bare than “winter coats”’s SERP, there are still less features. During off-peak season, there is less competition from Paid search (there are no longer ads at the bottom of the SERP). Featured snippets, Ratings / Reviews, and the Video Carousel are also missing, meaning there is more room for normal organic listings to appear on the SERP.
By looking at these two different examples of seasonality and how SERPs can be affected, one thing becomes clear. During peak season, Google’s SERP is loaded with enhanced SERP features as well as PPC ads designed to help the user convert as quickly as possible. During off-peak season, there is less intention of converting (whether monetarily or via lead generation), which is reflected in the SERPs.
Now that we 1. know what a SERP is 2. understand how and why SERPs are ever-changing 3. understand what seasonality is and 4. understand how seasonality affects SERPs, let’s put all of that together to understand how we can capitalize and optimize for SERP seasonality.
Let’s look at another e-commerce example to understand how we can optimize for SERP seasonality.
As mentioned above, first we need to either understand the periods of seasonality from our site analytics or we use a tool like Google Trends to find out the seasonality of our target business keywords. For this example, we are looking at the keyword “swimsuits” with an average of 368,000 searches per month.
You can get more granular search volume data with tools like Clearscope, which break down the search volume per month. As you can see, June is the peak of seasonality for “swimsuits”, interest started to mount in February, with a lift in May before the peak in June.
Clearscope.io
This data is confirmed by Google Trends over the past five years and even shows weekly data:
Google Trends
The insight we gain from these two sources is pretty impactful. Instead of coming away with one golden nugget of opportunity, we now have two! A mini peak in March (for spring vacation we can presume) and the major peak in June (start of summer). Now, marketers have a better understanding of when they should begin to optimize their site for “swimsuits” and what they can expect.
Now that we’ve identified the seasonality for our target business keyword, the question is “how do we optimize for it?” and as we’ve discussed above, the answer lies in the “swimsuits” SERP.
First, let’s take a look at the peak season SERP:
SEMRush
During peak season (June), the SERP for “swimsuits” includes:
Similar to what we saw for the “winter coats” and “how to lose weight” SERPs during their peak season, this SERP is full of features in addition to the normal organic listings.
Now let’s compare to the above to the “swimsuits” off-season SERP:
SEMRush
During off-peak season (November), the SERP for “swimsuits” includes:
Much like the “winter coats” SERP, the “swimsuits” off-peak SERP is bare compared to the full SERP we see during “swimsuits” peak season.
Now the question is, how do we optimize for the enhanced SERP features available during peak season? First let’s identify which enhanced SERP features we have the ability to optimize for.
Here’s the list of enhanced SERP features during peak season (June for “swimsuits”:
In the above list, we can optimize (or influence) for the following enhanced SERP features:
This is all great, but how do you optimize for these enhanced SERP features? Let’s start at the top with the Local Map Pack. As you may have guessed, optimizing for Local Map Packs falls into the remit of Local SEO. So let’s dive in.
First, what is a Local Map Pack? When a user searches for a query that the search engine believes has local intent, Google will provide physical local businesses in the user’s area via Google Map Pack in the SERP (as shown below).
Typically, only three businesses will get the coveted positions in the Local Map Pack, which tend to have a much higher click through rate than other results on the SERP.
Now, how do we optimize for these crucial local results? There are two main ways to do this. The most important step is to create a Google My Business profile. This allows your business to tell Google the most important information for users interested in visiting your location like the name of your business, address, phone number (these three big ones are referred to as NAP – name, address, phone), hours of operation, ratings and reviews, etc. As you can imagine, this information is very powerful to help users quickly move through the purchase journey and convert and therefore Google loves using it. This just scratches the surface on how to optimize for Google Local Packs. For more detailed information, check out Google’s guidelines on optimizing for Local Packs.
The second step is to create and maintain your “citations” elsewhere on the web. For example, on other search engines like Bing, Yahoo, Apple Maps and on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and even online review sites like Yelp or TripAdvisor. These additional business citations in other reputable places sends signals to Google that your business is legitimate and helps cement the authority of your business in its eyes.
On to the second enhanced SERP feature, ratings and reviews. Of course this is super important because users trust other users’ opinions, especially when there are a lot of them. This can be implemented fairly easily once you ensure that product / services ratings & reviews can be crawled by search engines by adding them into the HTML on the relevant product / service pages.
From there, you can use schema markup, which is code (semantic vocabulary) that you add to your site to help search engines better understand its context and return more informative results for users on SERPs. Google provides documentation for both Review Schema markup as well as Aggregate Rating markup (the average rating based on multiple ratings or reviews). Make sure once it is implemented to validate it using Google’s Rich Results tool.
Moving on to the third enhanced SERP feature in our list, sitelinks. Sitelinks are links to other pages that can appear under SERP results and contain up to six links to other pages under the primary page result:
1. Brand keyword example
2. Nonbrand keyword example
Unfortunately, you can’t directly optimize for sitelinks; they are algorithmically generated. It was possible in the past to demote them in Google Search Console, but this alas is no longer an option. However, the most effective ways to influence their appearance lie in how your site is structured and connected:
Ultimately, Google will show sitelinks if it thinks it is relevant to the user’s query and will expedite their conversion journey.
Last but not least, optimizing for the Top Stories carousel enhanced SERP feature. There are several prerequisites to showing up in the Top Stories carousel. The major ones are AMP support (fast page speed), Google News support, and using schema markup. Google News, while not required, but highly recommended, is a news aggregator that gathers news articles from a list of verified sites and serves articles to users based on their queries. There are several different qualifications needed if you want to be accepted into Google News and eligible for the Top Stories enhanced SERP feature. For more information on how to be accepted into Google News, check out Google’s documentation.
So what can you do to capitalize on the seasonality and make sure you stand out amongst the competition when the SERPs change for peak season?
First, check:
Like any marketers, SEOs need to be aware of the ever-changing marketing landscape to get an edge on the competition. Seasonality is just one example where businesses can capitalize on the ebb and flow of consumer interest by developing an SEO strategy around their site’s peak season and ensuring it is optimized for its target business keywords. Check those SERPs often to stay ahead of the competition and to future proof for how Google will inevitably change them. Because whether or not its peak season, Google is always testing, adapting, and evolving its SERPs for the best user experience.
