With the holiday season right around the corner, now is a better time than ever to give you some tips for optimizing your holiday SEO. But why is this so important?
Well, in mid-November, people start to spend a lot more than they usually do. We all buy presents for our loved ones or ourselves, and of course, all companies know that. It’s an excellent chance for them to earn money, so they’re promoting their deals all over the web. No matter where you look, you’ll see an ad for something.
Naturally, you want to get a piece of that cake, and getting your SEO where it needs to be is the way to get there. However, it won’t be as easy as it might sound. Since everyone will be putting similar efforts into their sites, you have to start early and do things right to make it work.
So, don’t even think about whether SEO is worth the expense or not. If you care about your business and follow all the tips we’ve got for you, it will pay off. Let’s dive right into it.
Start now
When we say now, we mean it. SEO isn’t a magic brush that changes how your site behaves overnight. It takes time for it to deliver results, and if you want to see more traffic and sales before Christmas, you need to begin the process as soon as possible.
Look at it this way. If you publish your content one week before the holidays, you’ll boost your results for sure. But the question here is by how much. Why would you settle for a 50% increase if you can get 90%? And that kind of result is what you can expect if you start before the middle of November.
So buckle up, and start developing your content strategy.
Check your keywords
The first thing you want to do is look at how your site is performing at the moment. If you already have some pages that work great, don’t touch them. On the other hand, if you see good opportunities for updates, feel free to do them. As long as you’re helping your visitors, you’re doing a good thing.
Next, go through your keywords. Try to find all the places where you can insert some holiday-related terms and do it. Of course, pay attention that whatever you add makes sense with the content that’s already there.
It’s a good idea to check Google Trends to see what’s popular these days. You’ll find out what people are searching for, which should help you get more of them to your site.
Work on your links
We all know that link building isn’t anything new in SEO, but links are still very important. As a matter of fact, they might be even more important than they ever were, and the holiday season only makes this more prominent.
Hence, now is the time to up your game and work on your links harder than ever. Here are a few ways you can get them quickly.
- Reach your partners and ask them if they’re open for cross-promotion. You help them, they help you, and everyone wins.
- Work with influencers. People trust other people, so it’s always a good idea to get a good word rolling, and influencers are great for this.
- Make your content shareable. If you can strike an emotion with your content, people will share it. Focus on creating something relatable and heartwarming at these times.
Create holiday content
Besides reworking some of your old content and giving it a holiday spin, you’ll need to make something new as well. So, the next of the tips for optimizing your holiday SEO is to create content that works well with who you are. If it doesn’t fit your brand, avoid it. It will bring you more harm than good, and you don’t need it.
If you’re selling something that can be a gift, it’s clear what you should do. Write articles or film videos that showcase your products and their use cases. Explain why they’re so great to give as presents, and people will buy them. If you’re not that skilled with creating content, you can always outsource it. Good content will bring you lots of sales, and you shouldn’t try to save money on it.
If you want to take it all the way, create unique holiday landing pages. Use the tips for improving customer retention on them, and watch the revenue pile up. You can even make a holiday-related blog and post all these things there. This way, you won’t distract people from your regular site offering, but you’ll give them something new to explore.
Tease and create hype
Once you have your strategy in place, you have everything you need to start. But before you do, it’s smart to spark the imagination of your audience. Use your social media and email to show them teasers of what you’ll do in the next couple of months and get them excited for it.
For example, if you’re building those holiday landing pages we talked about, release them sooner, but as ”coming soon” pages. This will get your visitors interested, but search engines will love it as well. Google algorithms will favor your site if you update it regularly, and this is one easy way to do it.
Integrate a mobile plan
It’s no secret that optimizing for mobile is one of the things you can do to strengthen the online presence of your small business. People use their phones and tablets for shopping more than ever, which won’t change during this holiday season. So, focus on your mobile SEO and take it seriously.
You want your site to be responsive and load quickly. Try it on lots of devices and make sure it works great in every scenario. If you see any problems, get onto fixing them right away. The more time you spend running away from these issues, the more sales you’ll lose.
And those were all the tips for optimizing your holiday SEO for this year. Start early, pay attention to every detail, and enjoy the fruits of your labor.