WINNING TRAFFIC FOR TURKEYS - UNDERSTANDING SEASONAL COLLECTION SEO
- Dan White
- Jul 10
- 7 min read
Updated: Jul 13
It's July in the UK and we're on our 3rd heatwave of the year. My energy though is focussed on Christmas, partly because it allows me to try and imagine what cold feels like again, but mainly because we're not far away from the start of Christmas trading season - and that means shaping seasonal category and product pages with SEO to win more sales for stores.
The issue - seasonal pages on ecommerce websites are managed shockingly badly. And that all adds up to being a costly mistake for brands.
Whether it's Christmas or Easter, Black Friday or your Summer store, so many collection and product pages are neglected or deleted when the seasons turn. Each new year and you're starting again from zero, losing accumulated authority, backlinks and historical rankings.
This post is going to convince you to change your ways. Not perhaps with the same redemptive arc as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, but so you can build out a permanent, seasonal URL strategy which continues to support your SEO and seasonal income the whole year through.
The Always On Seasonal URL Structure
First, we're assuming that your store already has seasonal category, collection or product pages. If not, stop reading and go build some. Please do them properly. If you're not sure what proper looks like then hire me as your next ecommerce SEO consultant. This is what your page should achieve...
The URL
Our seasonal URLs are going to be evergreen, meaning we return to using them year after year. domain.com/black-friday-2025 was literally, so last year. domain.com/black-friday is much better.
(If you have old seasonal URLs which aren't evergreen then now is the time to clean them up and 301 permanently redirect them to your evergreen URL.)
Evergreen URLs mean all the authority you build and all the links you acquire are concentrated on one long term URL. You're not binning the page once the time has passed and launching a new URL next year.
The Page
These evergreen pages should never be turned off. In other words, you're not deleting the URLs or redirecting the URLs. They will remain live and on the site so they will remain indexable. It allows them to pick up traffic, even out of season. Plus, it ensures any authority via incoming links are fully accessible to the rest of the site. Not doing so means link authority is diluted (through redirects) or blocked (by allowing the URL to 404), so when we help these pages we help the rest of the website in turn.
The Content
But what are we going to show if we don't have anything to sell? Switch things to a 'out of season' state.
You can display a teaser for what you have coming next season
You can add an email opt-in so customers can be the first to know
Or you can link to other more relevant seasonal content
Any which way, you still have a page which can bring value even when you're not directly selling.
Here's a working example:
A retailer sells a special Christmas cheese. It's the same product sold year after year but only available during 'the most wonderful time of the year'. The page ends up being one of their best performing pages throughout the Christmas sales season - until they turn it off.
The issue? That Christmas cheese was picked up by multiple gift guide articles so has a stack of incoming links. If the page is turned off, it 404's. So, no link authority to help the rest of the website, damaged referral traffic for people still clicking the gift guide link and loss of visibility in Google as the page is dropped from the index.
A Implementation Timeline
Products and collection pages have two states throughout the year. Out of season and in season. Let's start with the former.
Out of season page management
Keeping pages simultaneously live on a website but out of sight can be a tricky balance. We want search engines to keep finding our content but don't want as many eyes on the pages either. We also don't want to orphan them. Much like Christmas decorations put back in the attic, they need to be accessible but not easy to get at.
Each website is going to be different, but typically you want to keep seasonal products linked to seasonal collections but unlink seasonal collections from the main menu. Adding in footer links instead can sometimes be a suitable replacement but it all comes down to the design of the site and how many PDP's and PLP's need managing.
A well optimised site will generally have many of these URLs internally linked already through the blog. These URLs will also be referenced in the XML sitemap. This may be enough to balance visibility between people and bots but you'll need to monitor via Google Search Console's page indexing reports for how hidden may be too hidden when it comes to a page falling out of Google's index.
Preparing for the in-season
So, we know we want to sell in the run-up to Christmas, but when does Christmas shopping actually begin? Google Trends is our friend for accurately assessing seasonal demand.
We cross reference this with UK Google Keyword Planner data to see actual demand and we know that when it comes to christmas tree decorations:
Demand starts to rise from August onwards going from 5,400 searches to 14,800 searches in September
Demand really accelerates at the end of October where for the month demand reaches 27,100 searches
The absolute peak is during November 110,000 searches
So, if we're looking at this as a forecast I would want our collections and products to be ready and waiting for Christmas sales from August at the absolute latest. That means we have a launch date, but what are our plans to get things ready?
Prepping the preparations
There's going to be some big questions to ask ourselves before we can launch ready for Christmas:
Do new pages need building and / or does content need updating?
Are the pages already indexed? Or do we need to wait for Google to crawl them?
Has the site been recently audited? Are there any known technical limitations which need attention?
What is the overall site speed and overall user experience? Even if we gain traffic, will we win sales?
The answers to all of these I'll leave to you. But knowing what you do know, how quickly could you implement the fixes needed? Within weeks? Months? Longer?
Even though a timeline for launching in August can sometimes feel early, a conservative estimate of say 2 additional months to have page content ready and their performance optimised would give us a timeline of starting in June. And if you're an ecommerce manager I can take a wild guess that there's already enough to do at this time of year. Now is the best time to plan for 2027 and beyond.
In season page management
So, when it's time to ready our seasonal collections and launch them into the world, the focus changes and we need need to do everything we can to get humans and bots looking at URLs, mainly through additional links. There's 3 areas of consideration for what this might look like on a site from an SEO angle:
Internal Linking
Scaling up and scaling down the number of internal links (both text and image based) is going to be your biggest driver to increase traffic and increase ranking signals for Google. The core areas where you could concentrate your efforts are:
Updating your home page banner and key home page modules
Updating your main navigation with both text links and image modules
Adding additional pop-ups and site ribbons highlighting specific collections
Internally linking non-seasonal PDP's and PLP's to your seasonal pages
Internally linking seasonal PDP's and PLP's to other seasonal pages
Adding additional internal links to blog posts
The pace at which you add these and remove these will need to be carefully calibrated so the attention one season gets doesn't outshine another (or indeed overshadow key non-seasonal products and collections). The schedule for this will all depend on your commercial priorities.
Faceted Navigation
As so many seasonal seasons create their own set of parameters, be mindful of how many additional filters are created across a website and if these will be handled correctly.
Particularly during key 'gifting' periods, the number of angles you could legitimately use to carve up products takes a big jump. Gifts for him, her kids and so on. Then by price 'gifts under £50, £20, £10' and so on. Suddenly there's a lot of new combinations of URLs to be crawled and potentially indexed. Make sure how your filters are handled through parameters, robots.txt files and canonical tags are all fully up and running.
Structured Data
I'm going to assume that you've got this already in hand. Just in case you need reminding though, your PLP's and PDP's should try and incorporate as many useful structured data elements as possible.
Particularly when your seasonal plans are factoring in price (e.g Black Friday, Boxing Day, Summer sales etc) then 3 key items to make sure are up and running are:
priceValidUntil - for highlighting key discounts on items
ShippingDetails - if you plan to add in items like free delivery and alter your standard shipping options
MerchantReturnPolicy - if your return policy also adjusts for certain trading periods
All of these help to win more real estate on a SERP and add more compelling reasons for someone to click, order and spend their money with you.
Wrapping up
Remember, seasonal SEO isn't a sprint, but getting an seasonal optimsation process in place means you can appear for the right seasons at the right time - and that means much easier access to annual sales, which should continue to compound year after year.
Building such a framework requires a fine balance of technical knowledge, forecasting and creativity. So if you want to stop being so reactive to annual events and build an compounding traffic source, then let's audit your current setup.
Book a free 30 minute strategy call to see how we can work together.