How to make sure readers will find your Fall content

🎃 Best pumpkin patches

🍂 Free fall activities for kids

🥧 Where to get holiday pies

These are searches that readers in your community are — and will be doing — over the next few months.

Will your content be at the top of their search results pages for these — and other holiday-oriented — search queries?

To make sure that you are there for your readers, it’s important you create that content or update that content now.

Let’s talk through how and why to do this.

1️⃣ Write about Thanksgiving now

Sure, I get it that many of us are thinking about the start to school, football and maybe pumpkin spice. And Thanksgiving dinner is probably not on our minds right now.

But if you want to be at the top of those search results pages, it’s actually really important that you are writing and updating that content now.

It may make sense to wait to promote that content on your homepage and social media accounts in a few weeks, but if you build that content now, search engines will start providing authority to you earlier than your competition.

This is an especially important point for the upcoming General Election, where stories on where to vote, who’s on the ballot and registration deadlines should be created in September to win that local SEO game when those searches are really heavy in October.

2️⃣ How should you handle updates?

If last year you created a guide on the best pumpkin patches or places that offer pre-made Thanksgiving meals, don’t create a new story this year. Simply update that story. The reason for this is the URL you used last year, likely has some authority with Google at this point, so you want to build off of that opposed to starting from scratch.

But there are several things you should take into consideration when you do the update:

• Make sure all of the places on the list are still the best places. Whether that was based on personal experience or online reviews, make sure those spots are the best and adjust the list if necessary.

• Fact check to make sure those places are still open and the address and hours are accurate.

• From an SEO perspective, it’s critical to ensure that the keywords you used previously are still relevant. Have a checklist where you review URLs, headlines, SEO titles, meta descriptions, photo file names, links in stories and integrate those keywords into those areas.

• Lastly, share that you updated the article with a note to readers on what you updated, who did it and how you did it. Be transparent. This can go at the top or bottom of your story. Here’s an example. (https://www.chicagoparent.com/things-to-do/outdoors/pumpkin-patches-chicago/)

3️⃣ Create landing pages now

Based on the volume of content you are going to create, it’s important that you have pillar pages or section pages for some of these very searchable Fall themes.

For example, if you are planning a variety of Halloween-oriented content, having a page where readers can find that content, is a good idea. Use keyword research tools to discover the words to use to get people to those pages.

Consider how you can use tools you already have like your online calendar to create stories about the best events for Halloween. You could generate individual roundup stories in a metro area on the best events to go to in each suburb of your market.

A URL like “Best City Name Halloween events activities” would be a great URL for a section page like that and would be really useful to help your audience find things to do near them.

You can take it further than just the large topics and get more specific. For example, it’s terrific to have an election page with all of your coverage on it, but it’s also a good idea to have pages dedicated to major races where profiles on the candidates live, as well as other ongoing coverage about that race. And then on election night, don’t just have a single results page, create individual article pages with embedded widgets of the results for each race. Create those pages in advance to index with Google. This approach makes it easier for readers to get search results they’re seeking around specific races and creates tons of new traffic opportunity for you.

💡 We can help you

We specialize in crafting SEO strategies for publishers. Call me at 832 407 0188 or email me at David@davidarkinconsulting.com today!