Gear Up Your SEO for the Holiday Season

Holidays are just around the corner. Before millions of Americans start searching for ‘best Christmas gifts in 2021’, you may want to gear up your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for the holiday season to increase eCommerce sales and stand out from the competition. 57% of consumers plan to shop for holidays earlier this year compared to 2020, so if you haven’t yet started fine-tuning your SEO strategy, it’s now the best time to do so. The internet influences 8 out of 10 holiday shoppers before making a purchase, usually through a Google search, so without question, you need to find a way to appear in your prospects’ holiday queries. Even though you may already have a well-optimized website, the five methods we discuss below can level up your SEO and help you boost your online rankings during the upcoming holiday season.

1. Use Holiday Specific Keywords

Keywords are how your prospective clients find your products, so they are crucial in SEO. However, many forget about seasonal keywords, and that’s the words and phrases your prospects use to find your products during the holiday season.

For instance, some might search for “Christmas candles” during the holiday season, while otherwise, they may simply search for “scented candles.” The product might be identical; however, if you target seasonal keywords like “Christmas Candles” on your online store and product pages, it will increase your chances of selling your products to holiday shoppers. Besides, the keyword “Christmas Candles” has much lower competition than “scented candles,” which may bring more targeted traffic to your online store during the holiday season. And what about New Years? Can customers use your candles for New Years too?

Remember, when your prospects are searching for your product to use during a specific holiday, chances are they will use a seasonal keyword more than a traditional one. So season up your keyword strategy and make sure to target festive keywords on your website and online store. Use tools like Google AdWords, Moz Keyword Explorer, or SEMrush to find seasonal keywords related to your products.

2. Find and Target Trending Seasonal Keywords

Another essential step to gear up your SEO for the holiday season is finding out what keywords are trending and how people find gifts online. Online Tools like Keyword Tool can show you a list of keywords related to a primary keyword like “Christmas Gift” and how the monthly search volume for a keyword has changed over the last 12 months. It also determines search volume and difficulty – essential metrics to understand the popularity of the keyword and whether it’s possible to achieve desired outcomes by targeting the keyword. It also shows you an estimated cost for an ad with the keyword, so you can see which keywords you can use to spice up your SEO/SEM strategy. Alternatively, use SEMrush, MOZ keywords explorer, Google Trends, or Google AdWords to see trending keywords during the holiday season.

3. Create Holiday Content

Upcoming holidays mean more room for creativity for your writers, who only once per year have a chance to write holiday-specific blogs, guides, product pages, or other forms of content, so make sure to let them use that chance. Plus, writing holiday content will help you drive holiday traffic by targeting more seasonal keywords. For example, people love reading holiday gift guides before buying actual gifts, so they are great to include on your website. If you have already done so in the previous years, then now it’s the perfect time to rewrite them according to the current trends and holiday-specific keywords.

4. Create Temporary Content for Discounts and Special Offers

Your temporary or even evergreen pages you update according to seasons for discounts and special offers are excellent landing pages for holidays. They allow you to bring more targeted traffic to your website and convert more users because people love deals and offers, especially during the holiday season. Here you can target all the trending festive keywords and seasonal keywords related to your products, thus improving your eCommerce website’s online visibility during the holiday season.

For instance, make a dedicated page for your Christmas deals, use Christmas-specific keywords, relevant images, a short description, and a Call-to-Action (CTA) to encourage more sales. Most importantly, make sure to optimize deals pages and if you want to know how to make them rank well in search queries, read Google’s 5 Best Practices for Optimizing Deal Pages from the Search Engine Journal.

5. Use Social Media to Promote Your Products and Holiday Deals

Marketers have long argued whether or not social media affects SEO. Even though it may not directly impact your online rankings, social media is crucial for your SEO strategy for many reasons. First, it can bring more social media users to your website from the links you share on your profile. Second, it can earn you more backlinks by promoting your website’s content online and boost your site’s domain authority. Moreover, a survey in 2020 found that 26% of respondents planned to use social media to assist them in their holiday shopping, so social media marketing holiday campaigns can directly increase your company’s sales and revenue.

Your social media profiles are a wonderful place to share your holiday content and guide prospective customers directly to your website. Here you can spread the word about your seasonal deals and discounts. Make sure to use visuals in your posts, such as a discount poster, as Facebook posts with images receive an average 37% increase in engagement.

Another excellent way to boost your website’s traffic using social media channels is to host seasonal giveaways. Instead of having users interact with your social media post, you can encourage them to visit your website to participate. From there, you can ask users to subscribe to your email campaigns, download your content, comment on your blog, watch a video, etc., to gain entry. With a conversion rate of almost 34%, giveaways are an excellent method to increase traffic to your online store, and holiday sales and social media can help spread the word about them.

Optimizing your website for the upcoming holiday season can boost your holiday search rankings, increase traffic to your website and convert more internet users to your customers.

The essential step in gearing up your SEO for the holiday season is to choose holiday-specific keywords related to your products and trending keywords internet searchers use to find gifts online. Once you know which keywords will drive traffic this holiday season, you can create or update existing holiday content and include them in the headers, meta descriptions, URLs, and text. Moreover, you should create dedicated pages to seasonal offers and holiday deals and include holiday-relevant keywords there too. And finally, use social media channels to increase your brand exposure, share your holiday content, earn more backlinks, and boost traffic to your store through seasonal campaigns like giveaways.

We hope the steps above will help you prepare for the holidays, well perform in relevant search queries, and bring more online shoppers to your online store. Our team at the Internet Marketing Geeks wishes you a happy holiday season! If you still have some questions regarding your digital holiday marketing strategy or any aspect of your digital marketing strategy, don’t hesitate to reach out to us today with your questions!