Now is that time of year when people take to the internet and search for the perfect holiday gifts for friends, family and loved ones. With the holiday season in full swing, your website’s visibility can make or break your business’ holiday season. You don’t want to miss on the vast amount of holiday traffic your website deserves.
Our holiday SEO tips will help your website’s SEO during the online shopping season. Our easy and effective SEO tips will drive traffic to your website and increase your visibility. Even if you don’t run an eCommerce website you can still use these tips to create a successful holiday SEO strategy. If you don’t have time to make a holiday strategy yourself, you can have a freelancer do it for you. Contact Upwork.com, UnbundledSEO.com or freelancer.com for holiday SEO help.
1. Implement Your Holiday SEO Strategy ASAP
In this day of age, you need to create a holiday SEO strategy as soon as possible…but it’s never too late!
Each year we see customers starting their holiday shopping earlier and earlier. A statistic from 2015 showed that 48% of holiday shoppers began their holiday shopping on or before Cyber Monday.
Shopping holidays like Black Friday and Cyber Monday have changed the timeline for when it is appropriate to implement your holiday SEO strategy. Each year there are record-breaking numbers in online sales. From the trends we have seen more people are starting their shopping earlier and earlier.
So, what does this mean?
Basically, you need to have a SEO strategy ready for implementation no later then November. The earlier you implement you strategy, the more time Googlebots and search engines have to scan your website’s content.
Publishing your holiday content 45 days before the start of the holiday season will increase your holiday traffic by 90%.
2. Optimize Mobile Pages and Website Load Time
Customer use of mobile phones increase during the holiday season each year. Whether a customer is buying directly off your mobile site or is researching product details in store, your mobile pages need to be ready for mobile shoppers.
Along with mobile pages, your website’s load time plays a factor in whether or not you get the holiday traffic. Impatient customer’s will abandon your site because of slow load speed, resulting in a lower conversion rate for your website.
To be prepared, examine and optimize your website’s mobile pages and load speed before the holiday season begins. A quick and effective fix for this is optimizing any images you have throughout your site. Crop and compress any large images that populate your website. Use AMP if possible, for mobile optimization.
3. Research Holiday Keywords
Holiday keywords will increase your visibility in search results.
You already know the importance of seasonal keywords and the role they play on your website’s SEO throughout the year. It shouldn’t be a surprise that holiday keywords will have a positive effect on your website’s holiday SEO campaign.
Research holiday keyword phrases your targeted customers are using when searching for gifts. There are plenty of keyword tools that will allow you to identify the search volume for specific keywords in a target market. Google Trends is free tool that you can use year-round to help with your seasonal SEO strategies.
Get insight in trending topics and must have gifts for the holiday season. Businesses use holiday and Christmas keywords to get their website in front of the right customers. It is an effective tactic for ranking high on search engines and getting your website in front of the right users.
4. Create Holiday Landing Pages for Your Website
Create holiday specific landing pages for your website.
Creating landing pages that are optimized for specific holiday search queries will increase the chances of having traffic driven to your website.
This is often implemented by big businesses, who have category landing pages for just about any holiday season. Successful landing pages focus primarily on one holiday. For example, your Black Friday SEO landing page should be optimized only for that holiday. Don’t clutter category landing pages with un-related keywords or phrases.
However, there is no limit to the amount of landing pages you can create for the holiday season. Publishing holiday pages even before the season still can help your website’s SEO down the line. Specific holiday pages can encourage potential customers to sign up for your mailing list. You can then use these sign ups to re-target your customers through other eCommerce channels.
Optimized holiday landing pages with related search queries will increase your chances of having organic traffic driven to your site during the holiday season.
5. Update Old Posts and Web Content
The holiday season is the perfect time to update old posts and web content throughout your website. The season presents the opportunity to get older content in front of new customers.
Identify where you fell short on a previous page or post. Updating your keywords, meta descriptions, title tags, word count and images can be the solution for increasing your old works visibility. Tools such as the Google Search Console will help you find out what search queries are most valuable for you to use.
Updating small aspects of old pages can drastically increase the performance of that specific page.
6. Use Social Media’s Full Potential
Most of us are familiar with the power of social media and the role it plays in your website’s SEO.
During the holiday season you want your products, services and website in front of as many people as possible. The more valuable content you create and post on social media, the greater the chance you have facilitating shares and mailing list sign ups.
Having people reshare your posts will eventually get your product in front of potential buyers.
When creating content for social media, make sure your posts are valuable and informative. Some of the best content you can post are holiday gift guides. Gift guides encourage social shares because people use them to convey holiday gift ideas to family and friends.
7. Create Shareable Holiday Gift Guides
Gift guides are some of the best content to create and post during your holiday SEO campaign.
A gift guide consists of a collection of related products that share a relationship with one another. For example, a “Sports” gift guide would consist of products such as footballs, baseballs, basketball nets, etc.
Gift guides are great for social shares and can be created with just about any product. Gift guides can also be recycled and implemented for future use. An effective and optimized gift guide can be used for each holiday season.
There is a huge spike in gift guide searches during the holiday season. They are crucial for driving traffic and increasing sales. Do your research and find trending products. Create an informative and optimized gift guide for your products before the holiday season begins.
The pros at Upwork, freelancer or UnbundledSEO can get this all done for you before the holiday season starts.