A Thames Valley content calendar, from regatta week to Christmas

The course goes up along the Henley reach weeks before the first race. By the time the first crews sit on the start, the town has started to behave like a place with somewhere to be, and the businesses that will do well out of the week finished most of their work months ago. They answered the questions while people were still asking them.

That is all a content calendar is. It is a list of the moments that bring people to the valley, and the dates by which your website needs to have said something useful about each one.

Search demand has a lead time

A page published today does not rank today. Google has to find it, read it and decide where it belongs, and on a small site that takes weeks. Meanwhile the people searching are working to their own timetable. Someone choosing where to stay for regatta week is not typing it into their phone on the Monday of the race.

So the calendar works backwards. Take the moment, subtract the time people spend deciding, subtract the weeks Google needs, and what is left is the date your page should already have been live. Our working rule is ten to twelve weeks ahead for a new page and four to six weeks ahead for a refresh of a page that already exists. That is a rule of thumb from our own work and not a Google rule, so check it against your own figures.

Find your own lead time

Three sources will tell you more than any article can, and all three are free.

• Search Console. Open the Performance report, set the range to last year and look at the queries that mention the event or the season. The week impressions start to climb is the week people started looking, and your page needed to be live before it.
• Google Trends. Set the region to the United Kingdom and the range to five years. A search such as Christmas party venue usually lifts at about the same point each year, and the shape of the curve shows how long the build-up lasts.
• Your own diary.When did last year's enquiries for the busy week arrive? Pull the dates from your inbox or booking system, then subtract the weeks Google needs.

The year in the valley

This table gives months and not dates, on purpose. Dates move from year to year and the organisers publish them on their own sites, so check there before you put a day and a time on a page. The last column is a guide based on the rule above.

The big moments, one by one

Regatta week

Henley Royal Regatta now runs for six days across late June and early July, and the demand spreads well beyond the town. People want to know where to stay, where to eat, how to get there and where to leave the car. The page that wins that traffic is practical and specific to the reach. If you run a hotel, restaurant or venue in or near Henley-on-Thames, this is the busiest week of your calendar and the page should have been live in early spring.

Ascot, Windsor and the June crowd

Royal Ascot fills five days in June at the racecourse in Berkshire. The Royal Windsor Horse Show takes over the private grounds of Windsor Castle for four days in mid-May. Marlow's town regatta sets up in Higginson Park on a Saturday in mid-June. Each draws a different crowd with a different question, so each earns its own page and its own timing. A single page about local events that mentions all three will not rank for any of them.

Swan Upping and the Henley Festival

Swan Upping is the annual census of the Thames swans. It runs for five days in the third week of July, working upstream from Sunbury to Abingdon, and it passes through the valley on the way. Most people searching for it want to know where to watch, and few of them are about to spend money. It suits a pub or café on the bank with a short, honest page and a post on the Google profile. The Henley Festival, held at the riverside in early to mid July just after the regatta, is a different audience and a different brief. Evening visitors want somewhere to eat before the gates and somewhere to get home from.

Christmas

Two things happen under the one name. Group bookings for parties and work dinners start to be researched in the autumn, so those pages need to be live by August. Christmas markets and lights switch-ons arrive from late November in many towns and are a day-out search, not a booking. Treat them as separate pages. A venue that sells party menus and also wants market footfall needs both.

Evergreen pages, not annual ones

Keep one address for each recurring moment and update it every year. A page called regatta week that collects links over three summers is worth far more than three pages each starting from nothing. Leave the year out of the URL and the title. Put a last checked date on the page, take down anything that has expired, and refresh the dates as soon as the organisers announce them.

What an event page should hold

• The dates, written as the organisers publish them, with a link to the official source.
• How to get there, in practice. For Henley that includes the Henley branch line from Twyford, and for Windsor it includes the two stations.
• Where to park, and what to do when the car park is full.
• What you are offering on those days, the terms for booking, and the last date for it.
• What changes. Road closures, shorter hours, a different menu.

Do not reword the organiser's own page. It already exists and it will outrank yours. Add the one thing only you can, which is what it is like to stay, eat or park near it. Hotels, restaurants and venues will find the same thinking in our venue and hospitality websites work, and couples searching for a venue follow a similar rhythm, which we set out in how couples search for a Thames wedding venue.

After the moment

The week itself is the easy part to remember. The days afterwards matter too. Change the page to say the event has finished and when the next one is expected. Update your opening hours on Google. Thank the people who booked, and ask those who enjoyed themselves to leave a review while the memory is fresh. Then note down what happened. Which questions did guests ask that your page did not answer? Which dates sold out first? That list becomes next year's brief, and it is better evidence than anything a keyword tool can tell you.

It is also fine to skip a moment. If you cannot serve a crowd, or the people it brings are not your customers, leave it to someone else. A calendar of the five moments you do well beats one that tries to catch every date in the valley.

Keep the calendar small

A spreadsheet is enough. One row per moment, with the page address, the date it goes live, the date it is refreshed and the person who owns it. Three to five moments a year that your customers genuinely ask about will do more than twelve you wrote for the sake of it.

Do the quieter jobs alongside. Special opening hours for bank holidays and event weeks belong on your Google profile as well as your site, and a short post there on the first day of a busy week costs nothing. That side of the work is covered under local SEO and Google Business Profile.

Put the dates in the diary this week. The first one is probably in the autumn.