Seasons and click prices as signals

Every seed card carries a peak month, and every phrase on your long-tail sheet has a suggested click price attached to it somewhere. One tells you when the work should be finished. The other tells you where paying for a place is expensive. Read together, they help decide the order of the year.

Services have seasons

In our US search data for 2023 to 2025, the treatments in the med spa list peak in different months. Microneedling, HydraFacial and chemical peel all peak in March. Laser hair removal peaks in July. Lip filler peaks in January. Botox peaks in February, IV therapy in February, coolsculpting in April, tattoo removal in September.

The method already uses this. Choosing your seeds asks for the peak month on the seed card, and plant says to finish the page before the peak rather than during it. A page that goes up in the busy month has missed the people who were already looking.

This chapter is about reading the calendar more closely, and about the second signal that sits next to it on the sheet.

How much the calendar matters

The size of the swing is not the same for every treatment. Our med spa data gives a peak-to-low ratio for each one.

• Coolsculpting peaks in April and bottoms out in December, with the peak 1.88 times the low.
• Botox peaks in February and bottoms out in December, at 1.7 times the low.
• Chemical peel peaks in March and bottoms out in July, at 1.52 times the low.
• Tattoo removal peaks in September, at 1.42 times the low.
• Microneedling peaks in March, at 1.39 times the low.
• Laser hair removal peaks in July and lip filler in January, each at 1.37 times its low.
• HydraFacial peaks in March, at 1.29 times the low.
• IV therapy peaks in February, at 1.26 times the low.

A ratio of 1.88 means the calendar matters a great deal for that service. A page finished after the peak misses the busiest month and the interest that comes with it, and the next chance is a year away. A ratio of 1.26 means the service brings a steadier flow, so the month of planting matters less and the page can be improved on a calmer schedule.

One service in the list does not follow a season at all. Semaglutide weight loss grows year over year rather than rising and falling with the calendar. A search like that can be worked at any time of year, and the useful habit is to keep the page current as interest grows.

The jewelers' calendar

For jewelers our data gives peak and low months without ratios.

• Wedding bands peak in January and bottom out in June.
• Lab grown diamond engagement rings peak in June and bottom out in January.
• Custom engagement rings peak in August and bottom out in April.
• Watch repair peaks in December and bottoms out in November.
• Ear piercing peaks in March and bottoms out in November.
• Cash for gold and jewelry repair peak in July and bottom out in February.
• Custom name necklaces peak in December and bottom out in January.
• Ring engraving peaks in December and bottoms out in June.

The pattern is worth reading before the year starts. December and January carry watch repair, custom name necklaces, ring engraving and wedding bands. July carries cash for gold and jewelry repair, while the spring has ear piercing on its own. A jeweler with five seeds that all peak in December has a quiet year and one crowded month. A jeweler with seeds spread across January, March, July and December has something to work on in every part of the year.

A spread of seeds

A single seed tied to one season leaves the rest of the year thin. Five seeds with different peaks give the business work in every quarter, and give the owner a reason to keep the monthly cycle going when one seed is quiet.

Take a med spa that offers laser hair removal, HydraFacial, chemical peel, lip filler and Botox. Their peaks fall in July, March, March, January and February. Most of them arrive in the first quarter, and the summer depends on one service. A jeweler with ring resizing, wedding bands, custom name necklaces, jewelry repair and watch repair has a different shape: January, December, July and December, plus resizing, for which our data shows no season.

The useful thing is to know which months your seeds cover and which months have nothing, before the year starts. The seed card is where that shows up. Five cards spread across different peak months are a better plan than five cards with the same one, even when each seed is good on its own.

What a click price tells you

The suggested price of a search ad click is a rough signal of how many advertisers want a search, and of how much a customer is worth to them. Ad platforms suggest a price per click when an advertiser sets up a search ad, and we record it for every phrase on our lists.

In our Brooklyn data, cash for gold has the highest suggested click price in the jeweler list at $36.12. Ring resizing is $6.94. Among med spa treatments, at US average prices, semaglutide weight loss is the highest at $33.81, while microneedling is $6.13 and HydraFacial is $5.87.

The price is not a measure of how many people search. In Brooklyn, cash for gold and ring resizing both get about 280 searches a month, and their click prices sit far apart. Watch repair gets about 5,700 searches a month and its click price is $4.23. A large search can be cheap per click, and a small one can be expensive, because the price follows the value of a customer to the advertiser.

Two conclusions, both modest. A high price means paying for a place on that search is expensive, so the map may be the cheaper route to the same customer. It does not rule the seed out. Cash for gold is expensive because a gold buyer will pay a lot for one seller, which also tells you the customer is valuable. The second conclusion is about competition: a search with many advertisers is one where other businesses have decided the customer is worth paying for. A low price may mean the search is uncontested, or it may mean it is small. The price alone cannot tell you which.

Paid support is optional

Nothing in this book requires an ad budget. If you want to test paid support, keep the test small and bounded.

• One seed, not five.
• A budget you are willing to spend without a return.
• A start date and an end date, written down before you start.
• The same watch sheet you use for the map, so the test is judged by the same measures.
• A check of the platform's rules before you write the ad, and your own counsel where the rules are unclear.

Google restricts ads for prescription drugs such as Botox, which is one reason the local med spa searches in our sample showed no paid results. The rules are a practical limit on what can be tested, not a detail to leave until the ad is written.

No promises come with a test. It tells you whether paying for that seed brings calls at a cost you can live with, and it tells you something even when the answer is no.

Seeing the seasons without tools

You do not need a data subscription to find the shape of your year.

Last year's bookings by month. Your appointment book or booking system already has this. Count the jobs or appointments by service for each month, and the peaks will be visible. A service with a strong March will show up in March.

Google's trend charts. Google publishes free charts of how often a term is searched over time. They show relative interest, not local counts, and they are useful for seeing which month is busiest and whether interest is rising or falling over years.

The front desk's sense of the year. The person who answers the phone knows when the calls come in and what people ask for in December that they do not ask for in July. Ask them once a year and write it down.

The click price is about the value of a customer, not the size of the search.