Whether you run a retail business or any ecommerce brand, the holiday season is deemed as a shopping season, when tons of customers rush to websites just to lay their hands on the best deals on gifts for families and close relatives. Thus, if you run a brand that depends on this season for a significant percentage of your yearly sales, the need to optimize SEO efforts for eCommerce cannot be overemphasized.
Remember, SEO isn't a day job neither is it a short term game, and as such, you need practical plans - such as good content, user experience, technical SEO, and more - in place to attain good SERP positions, Thus, to help you journey through SEO holidays 2021, this article covers a few SEO holiday tips you'd find helpful.
Practical tips to skyrocket SEO traffic and sales this Holidays
Find a convenient time for every stakeholder
To get the best out of your SEO holidays 2021 plans, you must have a team that is ready to work. So, before even trying to create a holiday-centric strategy, you must be aware of the time the relevant teams or contractors are ready to work for you. Ensure that you all are resonating on similar frequencies in terms of goals, timelines, and processes – otherwise, you might never actualize the optimization.
Examine trends of the previous years to find keyword opportunities
One of the most effective approaches to identifying keyword opportunities for the holiday season is conducting research on the trend attributable to the previous year. If possible, start finding the right keyword to target earlier. Such keywords should be able to drive high search volumes while maintaining their relevance to the brand. Once you’ve found the right keywords, your team can then group them into themes considering search intent and attribute each to a pre-existing landing page or content gap. Now, you can adopt these themes as roadmaps for on-site optimizations and in your content creation efforts.
Cater to your content accordingly
With a knowledge of the best keywords, you can now start reviewing your content. In the journey of holiday SEO, it is best to begin on the path of minimal resistance. Evaluate your website and check for existing holiday content you can modify for the current season, using the appropriate keywords. Also, do well to update your gift guides with newer products. Get your copy rewritten by the relevant teams and breathe a breath of fresh air into your contents with new, refreshed, and high-quality images. Of course, backlink review is another vital aspect you don't want to neglect.
Set up holiday landing pages
Keyword research reveals a great deal of content development opportunities, and with this, you have a clear insight into a range of holiday contents to mine from. For holidays, some common holiday landing pages include cyber Monday and Black Friday pages. Get your team copywriting team working to optimize your SEO elements and as well, drafting your copy with the right keyword target. Do this earlier to give enough time to make your optimized page ranking prior to shopping. There are unlimited opportunities embedded in SEO content like best of products, gift guides, products review, comparisons, and online catalogs. Insert internal links to the newly created or existing landing pages to enhance their chances of ranking reasonably.
Deal pages optimization
As you design new landing pages to target holiday keywords, it is equally important to set aside time and resources to enhance these pages. However, this could be a somewhat uphill task. Thus, when the reverse is the case, you can look forward to other relevant pages you can optimize for the relevant holiday keywords. Your best bet in this regard I.e. the alternatives you can look forward to updating is your deal pages. Deal pages are usually evergreen and boast robust page authority as they normally would have existed for an extended period. As holidays approach, start focusing on deal pages optimization with relevant headings, descriptions, titles, etc. If possible do this several day before to ensure that search engines properly crawl and index your content.
Pay attention to on-site interstitials
Suppose you are looking forward to advertising sales and discounts during the holidays on your website, you want to ensure that every slide-ins are in check, all plugins are well tested and pop-ups are responsive. Essentially, you want everything to run smoothly without glitches or hiccups. Thus, ensure that you've set them up and they’re working far enough in advance. Besides, make sure they’re going live at the appropriate time- else, you might risk significant revenue loss. Factors such as page speed, core web vitals, and other factors that can improve your CTR and overall organic traffic, should be actively catered to.
Out-of-stock product strategy
To stay afloat SEO-wise in this holiday’s season, you'll need a plan that keeps you running even when a product is out of stock. The first thing is communicating with your suppliers about when the delivery will be ready. Next, you don't want your customers tuning to competitors in cases of unavailability. Thus, you should consider setting up options such as pre-orders, email notifications when the product is back in stock, or creating internal links to lead customers to related products. These are practical SEO plans you can leverage in this situation.
Adequately update your local business listings
As you cater to your SEO holidays 2021 efforts, never forget about your shoppers at brick and mortar as they often seek information online prior to visiting a store. To promote and encourage in-person shopping, your SEO team should look forward to updating the brand's local listing on Google My Business, Yext, Bing Places, as well as other services, each displaying relevant holiday hours and messages. Different stores have varying operating hours in holidays, and as such, it is crucial to reflect these online to make sure customers never cease coming into the stores. Besides, as everyone is increasingly leaning towards the digital landscape, the significance of online presence cannot be overemphasized.
Final Thoughts
SEO plans are not usually easy to implement. Therefore, advisably, begin as early as you can to give search engines sufficient time to crawl and index your pages. Also, remember to focus on developing a responsive FAQ page, and most importantly, ensure that your website is set up in a way to accommodate the expected increase in traffic.
Author Resource:
Pamela Powers is an experienced writer and presently writing about software and e-commerce platforms.
Article source: https://article-realm.com/article/Product-Reviews/Music-Reviews/18049-SEO-Holidays-Tips.html
