In most cases, retailers focus on email marketing along with traditional advertising to help boost sales during the holidays. However, SEO can help too. You need to plan ahead and start early if you want people to flock to your site. Here are some SEO tips to help businesses with their holiday campaigns.
Holiday Themed Content
Many website owners shift to the holiday theme around October. This is usually the time when owners put up holiday decorations to make their websites look festive. This is a great idea too but don’t neglect holiday SEO in favor of decorations. During the holidays, shoppers are looking for different types of information. Writing content that will provide shoppers information could lead to more traffic to your website. For example, a website that is selling sports equipment would be better off blogging about different sporting gift ideas or the perfect gift for sports enthusiasts compared to something generic like choosing the best tennis shoes. People won’t be searching for gift ideas in October. You have to consider that shopping usually starts late November until mid-December. But, if you want your post to rank high in search engine results page, you have to start blogging about the holidays early. After all, SEO takes time to take effect.
Target Holiday-Related Queries for PPC
Just like changing your content to suit the holidays, you also need to change your PPC ads to target holiday-related searches. Many people are asking if this is necessary because the demographics of the products have not changed. While this is true, the target buyer does change during the holiday season. To continue with the analogy above, the avid sports buff will still love sports equipment, but during the holidays, the target market becomes the wife, son, or friend of the sports buff. These are people who might not be into sports. If changing your blogs to the perfect holiday gift or gift ideas makes sense, so does changing your PPC ads to target holiday shoppers.
Emphasize Local Shopping and Free Shipping Options
One of the reasons why holiday shopping is so hectic is because everybody wants to complete their shopping before Christmas. This deadline can lead to product shortages, delays in delivery, or even shipment of wrong products. Website owners can take advantage of this by making it clear on their website that they offer store pick-ups, free shipping, guaranteed delivery, and the like. A recent study conducted by Eyeview reveals that 52% of shoppers research products online before going to the store. Retailers can use this to their advantage by making sure that the product is available on their website and offering guaranteed shipping will make shopping online more irresistible. As Christmas gets closer, guaranteeing delivery before the 25th becomes more important. Marketers need to get this information out so that their website can enjoy the SEO benefit during the holiday season.
SEO Friendly Images & Review
SEO marketers sometimes forget the importance of SEO-friendly images and reviews, especially during the holidays. While it is considered bad taste for brands to write their own reviews, they should instead search for reviews that mention gift giving. A good example would be to look for reviews that say “best gift for mom” or “best gift ever”. This will increase the likelihood of the page showing up on search engines and it also helps when customers search for the products and the reviews shows up on the results page. Best of all, it also helps customers figure out if the product is good as a gift.
For pictures, brands should include holiday themed images. Descriptions should include words like “gift”, “holidays” or “Christmas”. This is because the alt-text for images is used by algorithms which SEO marketers can take advantage. For example an image of sports equipment with a Christmas-themed background can be captioned as “best holiday gifts for dad” is a good way to legitimately put those words on your website.
