How to Find Effective Seasonal Content Ideas in Less Than 10 Minutes

During special holidays, seasonal content comes to the rescue like a precious pearl hidden in an oyster. Because with a high-quality seasonal content aiming for user intent, your website can be the holiday season’s champion. 

Unfortunately, creating the best content is easier said than done. Looking for content ideas and timing their releases can be more challenging than you expect. Especially if you have no time to find the perfect topics. Moreover, the paid SEO tools you need to use to target the correct keywords is another sad story you encounter in this long journey. 

What if I told you that you could find seasonal content ideas in less than 10 minutes and make the keyword research in another 5 minutes with the help of lovely free tools? 

You would be delighted, right? Then, buckle up your belts and get ready for this journey! 

Finding Seasonal Content Ideas

Just think you have a website specialized in different recipe ideas, and you want to publish Christmas themed recipes since Christmas is right around the corner. How would you search for ideas? You would probably start with something like this: 

In this scenario, it would take many hours to dive into the search results and find the best ones or find out what your competitors have done up to now. However, you would probably need to do other things because of your daily work schedule, right?

Actually there is a more straightforward way: Examining your competitors with the help of Google Search Operators. 

How to use Search Operators for Content Ideas 

With the help of basic search operators, you can easily examine your competitors’ seasonal content. For example, consider Tasty as one of your competitors. You can explore Tasty’s pages containing the word “Christmas” with a combination of site: and “” operators. Just like this: 

With these basic operators, you can find 394 Tasty pages containing the word “Christmas” with these basic operators, then how about the titles? 

Actually finding the pages with titles containing “Christmas” would narrow down your research a little bit. We can achieve this by using a simple combination of site: and intitle: just like this:

And ta-da! We narrowed the results down from 394 to 39. Now you can skim these pages in a few minutes to get some content inspirations. 

How about scheduling the seasonal content?

Sometimes it can be useful to learn what your competitors’ publish in which month in terms of seasonal content to create your monthly content schedule. For this, you can use the simple filtering mechanism of Google along with the operators. If we stick to our Christmas example, we can check in which month Tasty published Christmas related content the most very quickly. 

As you can see, during November 2019 only three articles were published on Tasty, while this number goes up to 10 during December 2019. From this point of view, you can plan the density of your upcoming content in your monthly schedules quickly. 

If you want to see the exact trends just like me, you can also use Exploding Topics as well as Google Trends. Here is a free fancy chart from Exploding Topics on Christmas: 

With the help of this chart, you can see when the trend started to increase last year and you can create your Christmas content schedule very quickly for the next season. 

As an alternative to Exploding Topics, you can also use Search Trends by SEOmonitor. In this tool, you can check the monthly trend of your keyword and you can also search for related keywords via clicking the Explore button. Upon clicking the button, the system sends you to another free tool called Topics by SEOmonitor, which I have examined in detail below. 

How can you find the right SEO keywords for the seasonal content? 

Thanks to the simple tricks you’ve successfully found the topics and created your content schedule. Now the only thing you need to do is to find some good SEO keywords, but you do not have any access to a paid tool. Then what can you do? 

Actually, you do not need to worry about this, because there are plenty of good tools that can help your keyword research. Let’s check the subject “Christmas dinner recipe” on a few of these tools. 

Topics by SEOmonitor

As I just mentioned in the previous tool section, this tool is also provided by SEOmonitor. Thanks to this tool, you can find keywords and check their monthly trends and volumes very quickly. The tool also shows the performance of the main competitors in this keyword. The tool gives the opportunity to add up to 15 competitors without having to sign in. 

For the keywords part, you cannot download the ones you choose without subscription, but you can always copy and paste some of the ones you want to use in another sheet, right?

Ahrefs Keyword Generator

Another tool you can use quickly is Keyword Generator provided by Ahrefs. Although it is not as detailed as the Topics I previously mentioned, but here you can find keyword ideas for Google, Bing, Yahoo, or Youtube in a few seconds.

Alsoasked.com 

If you are curious about what subtopics you should write about you can use the lovely Alsoasked.com. 

For example, if you enter “Christmas dinner recipe” the tool shows you this web of questions in a few seconds according to user intent: 

With the help of these questions, you can create the best subtopics for your article. 

Keyword Sheeter 

If you want to return your old friend Google Autocomplete suggestions, you can find them for free. However, instead of doing this manually, you can pull these suggestions in a few seconds with the help of the Keyword Sheeter. 

You can also use a basic filtering mechanism to narrow your search and export the data you prefer to use. 

There are many other free tools available I have probably forgotten to mention. Thanks to them, keywords search becomes no longer a nightmare for most of us. 

To sum up

If you have a heavy work schedule and a limited budget for tools and you need to promote seasonal content, you can use your time efficiently with the help of search operators and money thanks to the tools I mentioned above. 

You can also watch this video to follow each step, I mentioned above.