SEO is a crucial part of the online success of any business. Although it’s generally seen as a long-term project – the goal of achieving higher online visibility can be affected seasonally. The holiday season includes Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Hanukkah, which all drive extremely high traffic to websites. While you can completely change your landing page, a focus on SEO can make huge changes. The top holiday SEO strategies can be condensed to these three below.
Start Immediately
Chances are if you’re just now seeing this at the end of October, you’re already behind on holiday SEO strategies. I always feel like the holidays sneak up on me, one day it’s summer and I’m on the beach then the next minute I’m lining up in the middle of the night for those Black Friday deals.
The best thing you can do is to start planning your company’s holiday marketing campaigns early. This could entail offering special deals or certain promotions to encourage purchases or just overall traffic to your site. The main goal in all this is to build up your website traffic before the holidays begin.
Update Keywords
Next up for holiday SEO strategies is updating keywords. WordStream defines keywords as “the key words and phrases in your web content that make it possible for people to find your site via search engines.” The focus is to connect searchers to your site when they are looking for a specific topic. These words are seasonal. Around Valentine’s Day popular keywords might include “love” or “gifts for girlfriends/boyfriends” but these same words might not be trending during the Halloween season.
An article from Marketing Artfully states each specific holiday season and the trending keywords. Halloween includes DIY, decorations, party, costumes, and candy. Thanksgiving focuses on recipes, crafts, turkey, and parade. Winter has boots, coats, wedding, snow, and break. Black Friday is as expected, with sale, countdown, deals, and ads.
The whole holiday season has a push for keywords including “gift”. Implementing these seasonal keywords can increase traffic and reach.
Focus on Brand
This is a time of increased online activity overall. The Washington Post names multiple companies and their reports of higher sales and traffic to their sites during the holiday seasons. It’s a good idea to keep your usual landing page and just add new holiday content, instead of changing the whole landing page.
Utilizing this technique will help sell your brand – not just temporary products/services – while personalizing the experience of visitors on your site.
Conclusion
To conclude, begin implementing holiday SEO strategies ASAP. This will ensure your reach has achieved its widest potential by the time the actual holidays happen. Update keywords to specific ones such as parade, gifts, or sale based on the traffic you are trying to increase. Overall, never stop focusing on your brand. The products come second to building brand loyalty and a strong customer base that will outlast any holiday season.
Thank you for sharing this, its very useful and something new to learn