There’s nothing quite like seasonal merriment to get people searching online. Whether we’re looking for gifts, gift ideas, family musings, heartwarming stories, or yule log recipes, we all use the relative inactivity of the holidays to spread our digital wings — and you can take advantage of this uptick in activity to bring more traffic to your Joomla site.
What that means for you depends on your overall website objectives, but it’s sure to have a positive impact. If you’re building a personal brand, you’ll boost your exposure at a time of year when busy people have a bit more time to consider new opportunities. If you’re trying to sell something, you’ll pick up interest from those with holiday savings to spend. And if you simply want to discuss some topics with friendly visitors, you’ll have a much busier comments section!
Of course, despite all the buzz, winning seasonal traffic is easier said than done — everyone else is trying to get it as well. So how can you compete? Let’s run through some tactics.
Write about seasonal topics
Seasonal traffic is about seasonal themes, unsurprisingly! Search strings fill up with keyword-rich constructions about everything anyone would ever want to know about particular holidays. Christmas searches will be all about “sleighs” and “jingle bells” and “reindeer”, while Halloween searches will be abuzz with “spooks” and “ghouls” and “trick or treat”.
If you want that traffic, then you’re going to need to talk about those things. Having a website full of actionable tips but absolutely zero mention of Santa Claus will leave you quite disappointed as the big day approaches. Not only should you try to work some seasonal terms into your general content, but you should also write some pieces specifically about seasonal things.
What can you write about? Well, anything you want to. Embrace the opportunity to get creative and be more playful than you usually are, because people tend to feel less serious around the holidays. If you ran a site all about trains, for instance, you could write a piece called “The 10 Most Festive Trains Ever Made”, or “5 Christmas Movies Featuring Fantastic Trains”.
Revamp your site theme
The holidays are great for referral traffic. People are more likely to talk to one another, and thus more likely to share links to sites and pages they like. So when you’re trying to bring in traffic, you need to look beyond your search rankings and think about your site leaving each visitor with a really strong impression.
Try changing up the colors to give them a seasonal twist. For Halloween, go with black, supplemented with some rich purples and reds. For the 4th of July, don the classic red, white and blue. And for Christmas, it’s red, green, and white. But don’t stop there. Try throwing in some extensions for added flavor, such as Snow Fall.
This may not make a huge difference overall, but it won’t take long to set up, and it will slightly add to the seasonal feeling of your site — even if they’re not aware of it, visitors will likely leave your site marginally more likely to recommend it.
Provide some themed merchandise
I may be somewhat biased in favor of ecommerce, but I happen to love holiday merchandise, and will never miss an opportunity to pick up a spooky skeleton mask or a stick-on Santa beard. Most people love seasonal novelty so much that they’ll spend surprisingly-large sums on really basic holiday-themed items.
If you’re interested in ecommerce and you’re running a Joomla store on something like VirtueMart, you can try a dropshipping extension and throw in some relevant items. If your Joomla site isn’t set up for ecommerce, it shouldn’t take too long to make the adjustment — you won’t need inventory if you use dropshipping (you can disable it after the holidays).
If you have no interest in ecommerce at all, then why not purchase some pieces of branded merchandise you can send people as seasonal gifts? You could even offer some kind of prize draw through your website, saying that one visitor will be chosen to receive one such gift — this can get some easy visits at a fairly low cost.
Reach out on social media
If you don’t currently do much on social media, holiday time is perfect for changing that. Make sure you have accounts on the platforms most relevant to the nature of your site, put a link to your site in every one of your bios, and start getting involved in conversations around seasonal points and hashtags (if you’re going for sales, here are some useful social media tactics).
If you can impress people on social media with your wit and charm, they’ll be curious about you and want to check out your site. And if you can’t, you can probably still get visits simply by asking people. This is particularly viable around Christmas, because people will feel charitable. If you ask them to help you out by checking out your site, they’ll probably be happy to do it.
In addition, your site content must be completely shareable through social media — you can find numerous extensions to do this, so choose your preference and ensure it’s implemented. Just think how frustrating it would be to create a fantastic piece of content but never get much traffic simply due to people who would have shared it being unwilling to manually copy the URL.
Seasonal shifts may often prove to be uplifting and life-affirming times, but they’re so much more than that in the digital world. Online, they mean traffic, and opportunity with it: opportunity to show expertise, establish authority, sell products, and forge rewarding new connections with other sites, influencers, and consumers.
Your Joomla store is a flexible thing, so don’t be afraid to take the chance to do something fresh with it. Revamp your content with a seasonal twist, change up your style, reinforce your brand, and use social media to your advantage — you’ll soon see a solid bump in your seasonal traffic.
