Search Engine Optimization
SEO is an important prospect any day of the year. You might think it’s a little early to start preparing for holiday shopping, but steps you take now could help when the shopping season comes around. According to a survey from UPS and Comscore, over half of customers prefer to do their shopping online for the holidays. Search engines can help people find the perfect gifts for everyone in their life, as well as recipes for holiday dinners, and tips on hosting great parties. Among all the holiday hustle and bustle, did you know that you should be switching up your SEO strategies in 2020 to prepare for the holidays? One of the tricks to increase seasonal SEO traffic is to make a few optimizations for the holidays.
Keyword Research
Incorporating seasonal keywords into your SEO is a huge step to help increase seasonal SEO traffic. Don’t worry about overhauling your entire strategy, you’ll still want the SEO building blocks you use throughout the year. Buyers will be hitting the internet to find the perfect gift using holiday specific terms, so use tools like Google Trends to find out what your audience is looking for weeks or even months before your competitors. Another trick is to add the current year to your keyword, such as “Cyber Monday 2020” to attract shoppers looking for up-to-date deals.
Blog Posting
Holiday-themed blog posts are also a great way to direct traffic to your site. Many consumers feel lost for gift ideas during the holidays and will turn to the internet for information and ideas. Start brainstorming early on good topics for holiday blog posts and plan your posts on a content calendar, and think about buyer-specific personas. For example, you can create one blog post geared towards busy mothers, and another for dads who may struggle with gift giving.
Landing Pages
Have you ever visited a website during the holidays and seen lots of wintery themes and bright colors? Many sites are getting behind the idea of designing themed landing pages for the holidays, but by also optimizing your landing page with seasonal keywords and links to your other holiday-themed content. Consider changing your page title and meta descriptions to be more holiday oriented, as well as adding some holiday spirit to the pictures and videos around your site.
Gift Guides
Holiday gift guides are a great way to increase seasonal SEO traffic. In a world where you can buy anything you want on the internet, many shoppers can feel overwhelmed with gift ideas. A gift guide is a powerful tool to help your audience discover some of the best gifts for their loved ones, and for you to direct more traffic to your site. A well-executed gift guide can decrease the number of clicks it takes a user to get from your home page to a product page that the user is interested in, which is a huge plus to the SEO bots that crawl your site.
It’s never too early to plan for the holidays, especially in the world of marketing. Be aware of all the tools and strategies at your disposal and you might just see one of your most successful seasons ever!
