Your Guide to Holiday SEO Best Practices
SEO Best Practices Can Be Your Ticket to a Successful Season
From retail and digital goods to travel and shipping, just about every business vertical sees an uptick towards the end of the year. To make the most of those sweet holiday sales, though, you first need to get traffic to your site, and when the crunch is on, you don’t want to be worrying about directing shoppers your way. A preemptive approach to marketing and SEO best practices can help.
Design Holiday Gift Pages
The first step is to create holiday gift pages. This entails a combination of engaging content, sales language, and effective SEO best practices to funnel viewers from browsing to buying.
Coming up with content ideas is the easy part, because during the holiday season, people are asking you to tell them what to buy. WooCommerce produced a detailed guide to help with creating a solid gift guide, but some popular and click-inviting ideas include:
- Identity-Focused Content:
(Best Gifts for Moms) - Price-Focused Content:
(Best Gifts Under $50) - Interest-Focused Content:
(Top 20 Gifts for Outdoor Adventurers)
Next, you need the category page, title, and meta description to all fit the holiday season and match the consumer you’re targeting.
Of course, you can update these pages later to fit different seasons throughout the year. For example, a list based on active wear or camping equipment can be reused as a summer-focused article. Just tweak the content and boost the posts when they’re relevant.
Use Social Media to Push Your Content
Once you’ve created your relevant content, it’s time to put it on blast.
As mentioned above, a lot of consumers—especially as the days before Christmas start to tick down—are looking for some inspiration to find the right gift for that special someone. That’s why sales listicles and product guides do surprisingly well on social media during the holidays.
Sharing your product guides on social media can help them get picked up by more and more consumers who want to read and re-share them. In this instance, your customers really will do your work for you if you simply let them.
Of course, social media also plays an important role in understanding the items that your customers want to buy. Tools like Pinterest wish lists can be your best friend when it comes to winning over new sales. The trick: getting your products onto shoppers’ lists.
Look at the items your followers and other prospective customers add to their lists. You can drill down a bit and find the items and product categories that keep recurring, and understand that those are the goods you should boost on social media.
Optimize Your Site
As mentioned earlier, the holiday season can be a lucrative opportunity, but it’s also a hectic time of the year. Customers have a lot of things to buy and not a lot of time in which to do it, so if your site isn’t optimized to get them where they need to be quickly, shoppers will take their business elsewhere. Even worse, holiday shoppers may end up costing you money.
You need to check your website and optimize for speed, intuitive design, and responsiveness. Take load time, for example. A load time more than two seconds on a mobile device will not only turn customers away…it will also impact your search ranking. Google accounts for load time as a greater and greater share of your search ranking, so a slow site can cause you to slip away from the first page.
Other tips to apply SEO best practices your site include:
- Scale Images Properly:
Don’t load oversized images when you don’t need to. - Minification:
Minifying code means that there are fewer files the browser needs to load. - Don’t Overuse Redirects:
Page redirects are fine, but too many can bog-down your site. - Don’t Block Assets:
Blocking JavaScript or CSS makes it hard for Google to access your site. - Optimize Tap Targets:
Size tap targets so users can actually click a button. - Avoid Mobile Popups:
These are fine on desktop, but are problematic on a mobile site.
Carry the SEO Spirit Year-Round
Your site should be ready to adapt to any device or display, and still give the user an intuitive, easy-to-interpret experience. Take it from the experts: SEO best practices are the gift that keeps on giving throughout the entire year.