The Tree Center SEO Case Study: A Seasonal Search Strategy

The Tree Center came to us in 2017, wanting to boost their organic presence across key categories and products. As a highly seasonal business, it was crucial for them to be visible during their busiest months of the year.

We're tree people. We always have been. Our horticultural experience spans 40 years, multiple college degrees and 3 generations.

Industry

Lifestyle

Services

Organic Search

The Challenge

Visibility that had to peak with the planting season

The Tree Center sells across a catalogue where demand for individual products swings hard by month. Spring and early summer carry the year, and a category that isn't ranking by March has effectively missed it.

Their organic presence across key categories and product pages wasn't strong enough to capture that peak, and the window to fix it before each season was narrow.

Seasonal-Based Strategy
Cannibalisation Fixes
Targeted Outreach
Competitor Link Audit
Gifted Reviews
Landing Page Optimisation

%

increase in organic revenue from core category pages

%

increase in page one rankings

%

increase in top three rankings

Our Approach

An SEO strategy built around the selling calendar

We built links to key pages ahead of the peak selling season, then used the quieter winter months to scale back outreach and shift focus onto on-page improvements and new opportunities.

Seasonal-Based Strategy

We targeted specific types of trees based on their peak conversion period, ensuring they had link equity built up in advance of the best-selling months of the year.

Targeted Outreach

We reached out to garden bloggers to earn links that were thematically relevant and aligned with the right target audience.

Gifted Reviews

We sent gifted tree samples to established gardening bloggers to build relationships and promote the brand.

Cannibalisation Fixes

With so many individual products and categories, some pages had become cannibalised over time. We fixed this with an extensive crawl and audit, mapping individual core cohorts of terms to one single page.

Competitor Link Audit

A manual audit of the best links from the main competitors provided additional outreach targets to complement the main outreach campaign.

Landing Page Optimisation

We re-optimised a number of key category and content pages to better meet the search intent of the top queries for each page.

Let's Work Together

Gareth Hoyle

Managing Director

Inside the campaign

Tree Center worker in a straw hat among pink flowering shrubs

The Results

Rankings that arrived before the peak, not during it

By aligning our SEO efforts with the industry's seasonal trends, we got key target categories ranking in time for the peak sales period rather than halfway through it. Scaling back link building after the summer months freed up time to improve the site's on-page and technical foundations, which compounded into the following season.