Keyword research is one of the necessary steps that must be undertaken as part of a search engine optimization plan. That being said, you have to be careful when doing it for a seasonal site.

A seasonal site is simply one that is dialed into a particular time of the year. Assume you are selling bathing suits. You are probably going to do most of your business during the spring and summer. There may be a few people searching online for bathing suits in December, but not many.

If you have a seasonal site, you are both blessed and cursed when it comes to optimizing it to obtain top rankings. How so? On the good side, most of your competitors more or less shut down their optimization efforts during the down season or at least just do minor maintenance efforts. On the bad side, you can easily be misled when doing keyword research.

I will get a call every so often from someone with a season site that is very frustrated. They have optimized the site. They have top rankings for their keywords on MSN, Google and Yahoo. The high season comes. They make sales, but nowhere near what they were expecting. Conversion rates are acceptable, but the rankings are producing far less traffic than they expected. So, what is the problem? Time.

With a seasonal site, it is vital that you take the time of the year into account when doing your keyword research. Just as your site is seasonal, so are the search phrases being used. Let's go back to our bathing suit site example.

Assume I am going to start optimizing my bathing suit site. I understand that I need to do keyword research to see what my potential customers are using to search for bathing suits. I pop on to Wordtracker or whatever and start hunting. I make a big list and get ready to go. This is exactly what I should do except there is one problem:

It is JANUARY!

How accurate is my keyword research going to be? Most of my potential market is not going to be shopping for bathing suits during the winter. As a result, many of the keywords I discover may be false negatives. They may be used a bit, but I could be completely missing out on the high traffic phrases used during the high season for my site. If you have a seasonal site, you must do your keyword research during the high season without exception.

Okay, so what do I do if it is January? Do I just forget about optimizing my site? Of course not. It is time to start doing bathing suit searches. Think of every possible phrase you could possible use for bathing suits. Now keep an eye on which sites keep popping up over and over. Once you have identified them, see what keyword phrases they are using by reading their meta titles. Compare those to your keyword research and you should be able to identify any biggies you have missed.

Halstatt Pires is a search engine optimization consultant with MarketingTitan.com.