In a seasonal region your website is talking to two different people on two different calendars. A year round resident planning work, and somebody who is here for part of the year and searching from somewhere else. Most local sites are built as though every month is the same, and it costs them in both directions.
We have worked from here since 2013 and it is the thing that most reliably surprises marketing advice written for a city. A plumbing company in a metro has one busy pattern. A plumbing company here has a summer pattern, a leaf season pattern, a frozen pipe pattern and a shoulder season where almost nothing happens, and the website is the same in all four.
Who is the second audience?
The part year owner. Somebody with a second home, searching in March from a New Jersey or New York address, trying to arrange work before they arrive, and unable to be there when you are.
That customer needs different things on the page: whether you will work on an unoccupied property, how you handle access and keys, whether you can send photographs, whether you take payment remotely. Almost no local site answers any of that, and answering it is close to free.
What does the seasonal calendar change?
What is on the home page, mostly. The service you most want to sell in October is not the one you most want to sell in June, and a home page that never changes is optimized for neither.
This does not mean rebuilding anything. It means one editable band near the top that changes four times a year, and somebody whose job it is to change it. That is the difference between a site that reflects the business and a site that reflects the month it was built in.
Does your site know what month it is?
Send us your web address. We will tell you which of your two audiences it is written for, and what the other one cannot find.
Get a free website and marketing auditWhat about hours and availability?
Say when you are actually available, and update it. A business genuinely running different hours in February than in July should say so on the site and on the profile.
| What | How often |
|---|---|
| The band at the top of the home page | Four times a year |
| Hours on the site and the profile | Whenever they change, and before holidays |
| The service area | Twice a year, summer and winter versions |
| Photography | Add from both seasons, use the right one |
The one that produces real annoyance is holiday hours. In a tourism region the holidays are your busiest days and also the days people most expect a closure, so being explicit is worth more here than it is elsewhere.
Does the seasonality change when you market?
Completely, and it is the single biggest local difference. Advertising has to land before the season rather than during it, because during it you are bidding against everybody and the customer is already in an emergency.
Content and search work should be done in the quiet months, when you have time to answer questions and the click costs are lower anyway. A business that tries to start its marketing in June is trying to build a thing and use it in the same two weeks, and it never works. We tell clients to do the building in February and the spending in April, which sounds backwards until you have watched the alternative.
What about the towns?
Be honest about which ones you serve in winter. A drive that is twenty five minutes in August can be an hour after a storm, and a service area drawn for summer produces calls you regret in January.
This is the kind of detail that also makes an area page worth reading. Writing plainly about what the roads do, what the older housing stock needs, what happens to an unoccupied property in a hard freeze, is content that no national competitor can produce and that a local customer recognizes immediately as true.
What about the shoulder season?
The weeks when nothing much happens are the ones to plan for deliberately, because for most businesses here they are predictable rather than surprising.
That is the window for the work that never gets done: rewriting a service page, taking photographs, getting reviews from the summer customers you never asked, sorting out the things that annoyed you in July. It is also the right moment to run a genuinely useful offer, because a discount in the shoulder season fills capacity that would otherwise be empty, while the same discount in season just costs you margin on work you would have got anyway.
The mistake we see most
A beautiful summer website. Green trees, blue lake, outdoor photography, and it is the same site in February when half your inquiries are about ice, heating and a house nobody has been inside for six weeks.
You do not need two websites. You need photography from both seasons and one band that changes, and a habit of updating it four times a year. It takes an hour a quarter and it makes the business look like it is paying attention, which in a region where a lot of businesses genuinely do go quiet for months is worth more than it sounds.
How we build sites that can change with the season is on the Growth Engine page, the seasonal marketing calendar sits in the digital marketing work, and the plans that include the quarterly updates are on the pricing page.