Competitors on Vacation? 5 SEO Actions Worth Implementing in August to Dominate the Market in Autumn

• Instead of panicking about summer declines, analyze last year’s trends and investigate your customers’ future purchase intent.
• Use August to fix costly technical errors such as indexing problems, slow page loading, or broken product variants.
• Create seasonal landing pages and buying guides now, because Google’s algorithms need time to index them before the sales peak.
• Organize your product data on the site and in Google Merchant Center, making sure prices, variants, shipping costs, and return conditions are communicated clearly.
• Build an advantage over your competitors and increase your visibility in AI tools by publishing unique, hard-to-copy materials such as original research or customer reviews.

If your e-commerce store is seeing traffic declines during the summer, stop and consider where the decline comes from before you rush into hasty fixes. For many businesses, the summer months mean a shift in demand and a low point in seasonality, so lower traffic on the site will usually be a natural consequence of that. How can you check this?

• Compare your site’s traffic trends year over year (YoY), and verify the number of transactions and the revenue in the same way. The chart will show you whether seasonality is visible.
• For more popular products and categories, you can also use Google Trends, which shows interest in Google queries over time.

The summer is often a natural period of calm, and it is worth using this time to rethink your strategy and implement work that will pay off in the autumn and let you build an advantage over your competitors before the season starts. Which actions are worth taking?

Your starting point should be an analysis of seasonality and user intent before the season begins. When planning your optimization work, you need to know which products and categories can deliver the highest profit. Start by checking:

• Which categories grew year over year during the autumn period,
• Which phrases bring sales and not just traffic, and which of them have potential if their visibility improves,
• Which topics your competitors have already started to claim ahead of the biggest season,
• Which products have potential and interest (verified through search volumes) but are missing something, such as a proper landing page.

Errors that may look like a minor problem during the summer can turn out to be costly once traffic intensifies in the autumn season. What is worth verifying in August from a technical point of view?

• Indexing errors

If you have indexing problems with some products, you can lose a lot of potential revenue during the peak sales season, because Google will not show your products to users. Verify indexing for the products you identify as key based on the seasonality analysis mentioned above.

• Category pages Google does not reach, and internal linking

Verify the internal linking to your most important categories, and if you see problems with rankings and with visibility in AI, plan a budget for link building that will support your site’s authority. It is also worth adding tailored cross-selling sections to your most popular products, in the form of links to other similar products or items that complete the set.

• Content duplication

If several blog posts on your site say practically the same thing, and your categories are optimized for the same phrases as those posts, this will lead to problems with visibility and sales during the season. Run an audit for content duplication and plan to consolidate it, especially in the areas that are key from a seasonality standpoint.

• Slow page loading on mobile devices

A study conducted by Deloitte, “Milliseconds Make Millions”, showed that improving mobile page load time by just 0.1 seconds translates into an average 8.4% increase in e-commerce conversion rates and a 9.2% increase in average cart value. This shows how important the user experience is, and how a small technical change can clearly increase revenue.

Source: Milliseconds Make Millions Report

• Broken product pages or variants

Incorrectly implemented product variants, 404 errors, and broken product pages are a trap for both SEO and UX. When a customer lands on a product variant whose photo does not change to the selected color, or sees a size marked as available that turns out to be gone after switching to another variant, they will quickly get frustrated and leave the store. Taking care of product variants before the autumn season is an important step toward reducing abandoned carts and building trust in your store.

Newly created content needs time for Google to notice it and include it in search results. So if your initial analysis reveals gaps in your content around autumn sales, August will be a good moment to prepare them.

Which types of content and pages are worth preparing in August?

• Seasonal landing pages with your autumn offer,
• Buying guides, meaning “how to choose” articles,
• Comparison pages (this type of content also helps with AISO),
• Gift idea pages for various occasions,
• Knowledge bases for customers who will compare different options before buying.

Example topics you can cover in the materials you prepare, depending on your industry:

When making a purchase decision, a customer pays attention to many elements connected with the offer and with buying the product:

• availability,
• price,
• shipping cost and shipping options,
• estimated delivery date,
• return policy,
• customer reviews,
• variants,
• photo quality,
• store credibility.

Beyond the elements indicated above, Google also recommends connecting structured data (schema) with the feed you place in Google Merchant Center. Structured data helps Google’s bots understand product information better and at the same time influences whether elements such as price or reviews in the form of stars appear in search results. Merchant Center, in turn, gives you more control over how quickly data on price, availability, and product variants is updated and can be more effective and faster than Google’s standard crawl of your site.

Below is a short checklist of what is worth verifying in the area of product data:

One of your company’s biggest strengths against the competition is everything that is unique to your e-commerce business. Your experience, the data from the research you run, the reviews and photos from your customers, the materials you create. By showing all of these elements, you gain more trust among new users and increase your brand’s visibility in AI tools, because original materials and data are exactly what LLMs cite most willingly.

What is worth publishing on your site before the sales season if your company has not been doing it so far?

• your own data and analysis results,
• product tests,
• comparisons of products and solutions,
• expert commentary,
• the project team’s experience,
• authentic photos and video materials,
• customer reviews and stories,
• answers to the questions most often asked of your sales and customer service teams,
• calculators, checklists, configurators, and other interactive tools,
• case studies showing how the products are used in practice.

Generic text is easy to copy and rewrite for someone else’s blog. It is much harder to copy company data, experience, customer reviews, or video materials that address a real user problem. Unique and valuable content is currently one of the most important assets influencing brand visibility, both in Google search and in AI tools. So if you are not publishing this kind of material yet, it is high time to change that.

Below we have prepared a summary with an action plan that will let you map out your strategy step by step, without the chaos.

Verifying product data or technical errors is not a task for the turn of September and October. At that point your marketing team should be focused on executing sales, not fixing basic errors. If you want a non-automated, strategic site audit before the Q4 sales peak and want to consult your plans directly with SEO and DEV specialists, let’s talk about a dedicated strategy for your e-commerce business.