3 SEO Tips for Time Sensitive Pages This Holiday Season

Part of what separates a good company from a great company is the relevancy of their content. The more you can connect with your audience and engage them, the better. While it’s not always easy, part of making this happen is following the news and following the trends that happen during different times of the year, for example, you guessed it, the holidays. It’s about writing and publishing content that ties into what a customer may be going through at the specific moment. In other words, time sensitive pages.

Time sensitive pages are essentially the opposite of evergreen articles—they’re relevant for a short time and a short time only, but they get excellent CTRs because they use headlines that focus on the present time. These pieces are more specific and create a sense of urgency. It shows that you’re writing something with information that can be used right away. The problem is, you only have a short amount of time to get that content ranked.

3 Major SEO Tips for Time Sensitive Pages

The biggest fear for businesses is writing a piece of time sensitive content and then having that content wasted because it didn’t get the visibility it needed while it was still relevant. Naturally, this causes a lot of businesses to shy away from this type of content, and so their websites are full of evergreen articles. While this isn’t the worst thing in the world, you miss out on a lot of potential clicks to your website and your blog can start to feel stale.

So how can you make sure that you’re not writing content that is never going to get seen and is then going to become irrelevant? In other words, what SEO and optimization tips should you employ for time sensitive content? We covered this topic back in 2013 here on Search Engine Journal, but check out the 3 major things you can do with a few updated revisions below:

Start building links and promoting immediately.

Naturally if something is time sensitive then whatever links or promotion you plan to use is also time sensitive, but the question here is really how far in advance you should be preparing.

My advice is to push out a time sensitive page as soon as possible even if you aren’t quite finished with your content and/or don’t have all the information you need just yet. Put something like “stay tuned for updates” or “check out Part II tomorrow when xyz is announced.” This will allow you to publish a page, start building links and even start promoting your page on social media. Of course you need to make sure that what you are publishing is still quality and is still important, but adding updates this way is a common practice. This is probably most important if you’re covering or hosting an event. Don’t wait until the event happens; start creating a page with build-up first so you can begin your SEO. The same can be said for the holiday season. No need to wait until Black Friday to start promoting some future content.

Anticipate changes in your industry or buying patterns. Brainstorm content ideas.

When thinking about content ideas, always think about time sensitive content that may arise in the future. This is pretty easy to do if you’re on top of the latest news in your industry. For example, knowing that Halloween is coming up can allow you to start writing content (similar to the last point). However in general the longer you have been in the industry watching trends or following influencers, the easier it will be for you to pickup on a potential time sensitive story coming in the near future.

I recommend starting to write the content, but also anticipating related subjects that you can write about in the meantime to use as internal links in your near-future time sensitive piece. Start brainstorming those ideas so you’re ready to go when the time comes.

Keep the SEO going: Don’t delete the content when it no longer seems relevant.

This is a big one that we see businesses do all the time. Once a holiday or an event is over, they either delete the content or ignore it altogether. If the time sensitive period is over, what’s the point in spending any more time optimizing that content, right? Well, not really.

If you delete a page, then any SEO value that the page earned will go down the drain. This is of course a big problem if the piece ever was to become relevant again, but even more so because you can always alter the page slightly to become more evergreen for the future. Once you make this change, you’ll be able to keep that link juice. You can learn more about revising content to be more evergreen here.

Keep in mind that some of the ways you optimize time sensitive pages is similar in most ways to evergreen content, but by thinking about this content differently you can give it a better chance of success. Do you have anything you would add to the list? Let us know in the comment section below.

The post http://www.highervisibility.com/3-seo-tips-for-time-sensitive-pages-this-holiday-season/ appeared first on http://www.highervisibility.com