I worked in a company previously that had a travel arm, and throughout the period I was there we noticed a trend towards people booking holidays later instead of the traditional rush in January.

So what is surprising to me moving in to the SEO arena, where we monitor and drive traffic for quite a few travel industry clients, is how important January still is for travel.

For retail clients, November and December are the big months, where they rake in a considerable amount of their takings. For business to business clients and for travel, they wait eagerly for Christmas to pass, because come the New Year, that is when they start getting the extra visitors to their site and the extra sales. And even despite the “credit crunch” and spending fears, many of our clients still recorded record traffic months in January 2008.

A little search in Google Trends brings up the result for travel that we would expect from this, but we can also clearly see that there is a build up over summer – when all the last minute people look for breaks away.

In SEO terms it means for us that getting the optimisation in place and the positions mounting before the peak season is positioning our clients to have a great season. Whether they sell holidays, insurance or VIP travel services, a lot of the previous year’s work really pays off in the next. SEO really is a long term investment.