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Are you looking for new ways to increase traffic to your website? Holidays provide a great opportunity for website owners to increase traffic. Over the years of managing multiple websites I’ve seen big traffic spikes on sites that I’ve published articles geared toward an upcoming holiday. Another thing that I’ve noticed is that no matter what your website is about, you can usually come up with a blog article or contest idea that’s relevant to an upcoming holiday. In this articles we will review why holidays lead to increased website traffic, the best holidays to focus on, how to plan for taking advantage of holidays, and provide a few holiday content ideas for your website.

5 Reasons Why Holidays Lead To Increased Traffic

There are a number of reasons why holidays lead to increased website traffic, but here are the top 5:

Holidays are fun

Holidays are fun events for people. Fun leads to people being happy. When people are looking forward to fun things then they tend to spend more time focusing on those things. For most people, holidays are fun days throughout the year that they look forward to. When people look forward to something thye tend to spend time online looking for ideas on how they can get the most out of their holidays.

Time off from work

I think we can all agree that the more free time someone has the more likely his or her time spent online will increase. These days many of us work so much that we don’t have a lot of free time to spend searching the internet. All of that changes around holidays. Many people have time off from work, which allows them to spend more time doing other things, one of which is searching the internet.

Get together with friends and family

The holidays provide an opportunity to get together with friends and family. Whenever friends and family get together it usually means that they’ll be spending the day together, possibly eating, drinking, playing games, etc. When people get together a lot of times each person or family brings something to the party. If you’re in charge of one aspect of the party, then you might spend time online researching how to make that aspect of the party the best it can possibly be. If you need to make a certain dish for dinner, you may search for a recipe. If you’re in charge of entertainment, you may search for fun family games to play. The list goes on…

Planning leads to researching

Holidays require planning. Whether that means buying presents, decorating, preparing food, etc. many people must plan for upcoming holidays. Anytime someone needs to plan for an event like a holiday it usually leads to increased time spent online.

Traveling makes people look for something fun to do

Have you ever been on the road on or around the holidays? Traffic is horrible! That’s because many people travel on the holidays. When people are traveling, especially long distances or to places they have never been before, they usually spend time online researching their trip. It could be that they are looking for fun things to do near the place they are traveling to. It could be that they want to find places to stop along the way. Whatever it is that people are looking for, the key is that they are online looking for something. Knowing this provides an opportunity for website owners to capture some of that search traffic.

Now that we know the reasons why holidays can lead to increased website traffic, let’s review the best holidays for generating more website traffic.

3 Holidays To Take Advantage Of

All holidays provide an opportunity to generate more website traffic. With that said, over the years I’ve seen that some holidays provide better opportunities than others. Below are the top 3 holidays that you should take advantage of for driving more traffic to your website.

Christmas

Christmas is the number one holiday for organic search. People are performing searches to look for gift ideas, for travel, to find fun things going on in their community, etc. Be sure to have your Christmas content up no later than December 1st. Usually people start searching for Christmas-related information right after Thanksgiving.

Independence Day

Independence Day is a HUGE website traffic driver. Friends and families are always looking for fun things to do on or around Independence Day. A big factor is that July 4th is a Summer holiday and people love to spend it outside with friends and family. People are searching for fireworks displays, fun local events, holiday sales opportunities, and much more. Coming up with a fun July 4th promotion, giveaway, or even a safety tips blog article would do wonders for increasing your website traffic.

Halloween

Halloween is another fantastic holiday that should be leveraged to increase your website traffic. Being that it’s a holiday for young children you get a lot of parents searching the web for the latest costume ideas, hayride and haunted house information, events, ghost stories, and much more. Halloween is relevant to so many different types of websites that it’s almost impossible not to be able to come up with some sort of tie-in. If all else fails, just come up with a spooky story for your blog.

All holidays present a great opportunity to increase your website traffic, but Christmas, Independence Day, and Halloween are the top three holidays to take advantage of based on my analysis over the past few years. If you cannot come up with content ideas for ALL holidays be sure that you at least take advantage of these three.

Planning For An Upcoming Holiday

In order to capitalize on holiday web traffic, you must come up with a solid plan for how you will go about capturing some of that traffic. It’s important to start your planning well in advance of the holiday. Here are a few questions that you should answer when planning for an upcoming holiday:

• How can I tie-in the upcoming holiday to my website topic?
• What type of person am I trying to attract to my website?
• What can I create on my website that might interest the type of person I’m trying to attract?
• What keywords should I use within my holiday-related website content?
• What other tools can I use to attract more website visitors (ie. social media)?

By answering these questions you will start to form ideas for what promotions or content you’ll produce for the upcoming holiday.

10 Tips To Boost Traffic During Holidays

Understanding that holidays are great for increasing website traffic is important, but now that we know that, it’s time to start coming up with ideas for taking advantage of holidays. Remember, with a little creativity, almost ANY website (no matter your website topic) should be able to come up with ideas for taking advantage of holidays. Below are 10 ideas for taking advantage of holidays to help get you started. Not all of the ideas below will be relevant to your website, but you should be able to take advantage of a few of them OR modify any of them to work for your website.

1. Simply offer a holiday discount on a product or service
2. Run a holiday-related contest. If you don’t sell a product or service you can buy a Visa or American Express gift card (or any other cool prize that you think your readers will value) to give to the winner.
3. Write a story on your blog about the upcoming holiday. Ideas include, but are not limited to, the history of the holiday, a little known fact about the holiday, a personal experience, etc.
4. Provide a list of fun things to do with friends or family during the upcoming holiday.
5. Write a short E-Book about the holiday and make it available for free download in exchange for readers’ email addresses and an opt-in to your newsletter or for future email communications.
6. Publish a favorite holiday recipe.
7. Gather Sales information from local retailers and publish it to your website as a ‘Savings Guide’ for your readers.
8. Partner with another website to run a contest or giveaway. This cross-promotion technique can attract organic search traffic, but it also allows both you and your partner to share website traffic (increasing traffic for both parties).
9. Publish a list of local events going on in your geographic area related to the holiday.
10. Create a list of volunteer opportunities that people can participate in during the holiday. Volunteering information attracts a lot of website traffic around the holidays and you can definitely take advantage of some of that traffic by coming up with a list of volunteering opportunities that’s relevant to your website topic.

Again, not all of the ideas above will work for your website, but there should be a few that do. The important thing to remember is that holidays are great for increasing your website traffic. With a little planning and creativity, no matter what your website topic is, you should be able to take advantage of one or more holidays throughout the year in order to increase traffic to your website.

Are you currently using holidays to increase your website traffic? What are some of the things that you do in order to capitalize on holiday website traffic? Leave your comments below.