The holidays can be hectic and stressful for everyone, especially small business owners looking to make the most of holiday promotions to boost revenue while managing daily tasks. Given this busy time, holiday SEO may not seem like a top priority, but having the right approach can attract more customers during this season. Follow these tips to shape your strategy. (And it’s not just about holiday shopping—it can apply to any business that focuses on seasonal products and can be prepared for any upcoming season.) For instance, if you sell outerwear, now is the perfect moment to get ready for your new fall and winter collection. Plan ahead and start getting ready now for the end of the year in 2019 and for 2020.
Review Your Current SEO Performance
Before making any significant changes to your approach, take time to review how things are currently going. You may find specific pages are doing well, and you don’t want to fix something that isn’t broken. Instead, direct your attention to places where you could make improvements.
Conduct Keyword Research
Use Google Trends and other keyword research tools to discover new words and phrases to focus on. With Google Trends, you can see how a keyword has performed over time, helping you predict when those keywords might become more popular and incorporate that into your strategy. Planning ahead allows you to create a strategy that takes advantage of that rising popularity.
Create Holiday Content that Fits Your Business
With the list of keywords, you found in hand, narrow it down a bit. Yes, it’s tempting to use the most popular ones, but those will be hard to rank for – and won’t necessarily provide the best possible benefit to you. Ultimately, you want to choose keywords that are a natural fit for your business, even if they aren’t the most searched phrases on the list. It’s the relevancy of the content that will do you a lot of good in terms of ranking and reaching a targeted audience of people who are more likely to buy your products and services.
Make sure you’re creating content that’s authentic and works your holiday messaging into the content in such a way that aligns with your brand and business. If the content isn’t consistent with your brand messaging so far, it’s going to throw off your audience, which means it’s a waste of your time.
Need ideas and inspiration for creating holiday content? Think about the specific products or services you want to promote, and then use that as the basis for creating content. Showcase the things that make your business stand out, highlighting whatever it is about your offerings that make it an excellent gift – or focus on the sale and promotional items. You can also take a look at what the competition is doing and look for ways to mimic that approach while keeping it different or improving upon it.
Write some blog posts, kind of like this one. In this case, I’m writing about the holidays as it relates to my services – SEO and online marketing – so it fits my business, hits on keywords, and gives me more content. Use the blog posts to share interesting content that’s tailored to your customers. Use it to appeal to various segments of your customer audience and boost your SEO at the same time. Each blog post gives you content to share on your social media channels and increases the likelihood you’ll earn some backlinks, which are also crucial to your search engine visibility.
Create New Pages for the Holidays and upcoming sales dates.
While working on your SEO strategy, you may find keywords that are worth setting up new, holiday specific-pages to drive more traffic to your site. For instance, you can create a page to feature you’re recommended, “Top Holiday Gifts for Mom” and highlight the products or services you offer. Then, the page will be there for the next season so that you can update it every year. You want to keep evergreen, so you don’t have to create new content every year, which prevents you from creating duplicate content.
If it’s a better fit for your business, you can always create a general holiday page that you regularly update for each holiday promotion, rather than creating separate unique pages for each holiday.
When you’re creating these new pages, it’s important to make sure you’re optimizing the pages for specific keywords. Your page titles and meta descriptions should fit with the holiday theme, and you should make sure your product pages are optimized with the appropriate schema.
No matter the specifics of your SEO strategy, you should go beyond creating the content based on your keywords and goals, to develop a content promotion strategy. This way, you can do more to promote the content and drive additional traffic to your site, as it can take some time for everything to rank and bring you organic search engine traffic.
Promote the content on social media channels, your email list, and other marketing channels you have – and encourage your followers to share the content with people they know.