It’s time to start thinking about holiday SEO with the holidays approaching. With some planning, you can ensure your site’s performance will not suffer during the holidays.
Look at last year’s Search Terms report in Google Search Console to determine which pages were popular during the holiday season. Use this data to create new pages ahead of time and optimize them for these keywords.
Optimize Your Content
Whether you lead a small or large business, it’s crucial to plan and write holiday content, such as Black Friday SEO, before the season. This involves developing new landing pages, blog posts, and articles incorporating relevant holiday keywords.
The holidays are a sales-pitch-heavy time, and customers are overwhelmed by deals and discounts everywhere they turn. This is why focusing on the emotional resonance of your content can help you stand out from the crowd and attract new customers. Using relatable images and evoking feelings of nostalgia and happiness in your content can make your brand more memorable for prospective customers.
It’s also essential to do your research ahead of time when it comes to the best keywords to target. Using historical data can give you an idea of which keywords had high search volume last year and will likely do so again this year. Alternatively, you can use tools like Google Trends to explore what is popular this year.
Lastly, remember to optimize your internal links. This is a great way to increase the authority of your pages and improve your SEO ranking. For instance, you can add your Black Friday and Cyber Monday landing pages to your site’s XML sitemap. This will ensure that your pages are indexed early, and search engine crawlers can find them quickly.
Optimize Your Site
During the holiday season, shoppers search for products to purchase as gifts or add to their home and wardrobe. Using seasonal keywords in your product pages, landing pages, blogs, and articles can help you rank higher in searches, leading to more sales and visibility for your eStore.
When creating new content, optimizing each page for your target audience and the keywords you want to rank for is important. This includes optimizing your meta descriptions, page titles, and alt text for each piece of content. Also, ensure your new content follows SEO best practices by adding a unique title and description for each piece of content you create.
It’s also a good idea to optimize your site by checking for technical issues that might affect the performance of your website, such as slow load speed or duplicate content.
You may also want to consider creating Black Friday and Cyber Monday landing pages ahead of time, then using a 302 redirect so that these pages remain hidden until it’s time to start ramping up for the holidays. Make sure to include these new pages in your XML sitemap and navigation, and ensure that all links pointing to these landing pages point to valid, unique pages.
Optimize Your Social Media
The holidays are a critical time for online businesses. Consumers are searching for gifts, restaurant reservations, year-end donations, and more. Marketers should optimize their sites and content to capture search engine traffic to make the most of this season.
Start by reviewing your top-performing SEO pages from last holiday season. Look at the keywords driving traffic and identify if they are still relevant. This will help you determine your seasonal focus.
If you still need to do so, re-edit your meta tags. Include holiday-related keywords in your titles and descriptions to improve click-through rates. It will take Google a few weeks to process your changes, so it’s best to do this early.
You’ll want to target more long-tail keyword searches as the holidays approach. Shoppers seek specific, relevant results and are less likely to click on carousel ad listings or Amazon product pages. Focus on keyword queries such as “gift ideas” or “holiday gift guides” to attract interested shoppers.
Optimizing your website for the holidays is a time-consuming endeavor, so it’s important to plan. Consider setting aside an hour weekly to review your SEO tactics and update your site with the latest holiday promotions. This will ensure your website is ready for the influx of holiday shoppers!
Optimize Your Email Marketing
During the holiday season, your audiences are inundated with sales pitches across every channel they touch. They want to purchase gifts, find restaurants, make end-of-year donations, and more. As a result, this is an important time for marketers to create content that makes their products and services stand out amongst the sea of ads and deals.
Creating seasonal social media and email marketing content can be a great way to capture your audience’s attention while staying within your budget. This can be done by creating a holiday editorial calendar and involving multiple departments to help plan.
Another great tip is to publish your gift guides and other holiday-focused content earlier rather than later. This will give you an advantage as search engine users demand more relevant and helpful results this time of year. You can promote your early release using “coming soon” and teaser content in your email and social media. For example, if you share your top gift picks for tech-savvy teens, spill the beans on one of those products in advance and mention that the entire list will be released soon.
It’s also good to check that your site is mobile responsive and optimized before the holidays. More and more consumers are shopping and researching on mobile devices, and search engines will take note of that as a ranking factor.