BLOG | Search Engine Optimization Start Preparing for the Holidays with These SEO Tips

When it comes to marketing, you’d want your business to be “at the right place at the right time.” Seasonality can make or break businesses, and this is especially true during the holiday season! It’s almost that time of the year again. The much-awaited season is just right around the corner.

If you’ve been in the business for years now, then you know that this season offers great opportunities to achieve incredible sales. If you’re new in the marketing scene, you don’t need to worry! We have prepared SEO tips for the holidays and more to help you out.

For e-Commerce and retail businesses, the holiday season is also synonymous with the shopping season. Thousands of shoppers rush to stores and online brands to get their hands on holiday deals, sales, and promos.

Aside from the sales result and opportunities that the holidays offer, it’s also that time of the year when small and big businesses alike become extra competitive. If you don’t want your brand to get left behind, now is the perfect time to start overhauling your SEO marketing strategies!

Holiday-specific elements will play crucial roles in the optimization process of every digital medium. From your website design down to your promotional content on social media, these significant changes will help you garner customer attention.

For some brands, a large portion of their yearly revenue and business success comes from the holiday season. Thus, this could also be your chance on expanding your market and gaining loyal customers for your business.

Why Does SEO Matter During the Holidays?

Mainly because the majority of the market is primed to spend since they’re preparing for the year to come or doing last-minute shopping. This is why it’s the best time to ramp up your SEO and marketing game.

Making your services or products easily accessible through SEO can do your business wonders. Not only does it help in achieving incredible revenue, but it can give you a marketing edge against business competitors as well.

Staying on top of the search results at this crucial time of the year will make your brand reputation soar higher. Thousands of potential customers are waiting to get to know your business during the holidays!

Especially to small businesses, the upcoming season is a vital time for your business to significantly boost sales, traffic, and reputation. So, ensure that you are not losing out on a great profit margin. Make the most out of the holiday season by revamping your SEO!

SEO Tips to Boost Sales, Traffic, and More This Holiday Season

Since holiday-related searches are sure to spike during this time of the year, businesses will need a well-planned and winning SEO strategy that provides them a good chance at ranking well.

Therefore, to help out business owners like you improve your SEO strategies before the festivities of the Holiday season start, here are some SEO tips designed to help boost your brand for this seasonal opportunity.

1. Do Your Research and Monitor Your Performance
2. Assess Your Site’s Load Time, Page Speed, and Performance
3. Identify Relevant Keywords
4. Create Holiday-Specific Content
5. Have Holiday-Themed Landing Pages
6. Build Up Excitement with Teaser Content
7. Optimize Your Mobile Performance
8. Create Seasonal Pay-Per-Click Advertising
9. Social Media Is Your Best Partner
10. Learn from Your Competitors
11. Tools Are There to Help

1. Do Your Research and Monitor Your Performance

   First and foremost, knowledge is power. If you’ve been in the market for years, you can gain knowledge by researching from your past marketing experiences. Looking into your previous holiday strategies can help you learn what to avoid or what to retain. However, also take into account that trends come and go. The campaign ideas that work before might not do so this time.

   When researching these data, be sure to be critical. Consumer behavior, lifestyle, and trends change often. So, analyze the product or service search demand from last year and this year. Check out what’s trending. Look into keywords that might bring in more traffic to your brand.

   After doing your research, monitor your performance during the upcoming holiday season. Keep a keen eye on the strategies that you are implementing to stay on top of your data insights. When it starts to dwindle, you’ll be able to make necessary adjustments to keep everything right on track.

2. Assess Your Site’s Load Time, Page Speed, and Performance

   Easy, fast, and accessible website pages are even more crucial at this time of the year. Slow page load times, difficult navigation, and poor performance can cost your business more than you think. According to research, website visitors are more likely to leave a site if it takes more than five seconds to load.

   As per Google’s ranking factors, slow load time, page speed, and performance are indicators of a bad website. So, not only are you losing potential customers but you’re risking your ranks in the algorithms as well.

   During the upcoming holiday season, websites will need to load fast and function well. Improving these areas on your site may seem like a small change in the bigger picture. But with the spike in market demand and shoppers rushing to purchase products and services online, it’s sure to make web visitors stay on your site longer because of the convenience it brings.

   Listed below are some things you can do to improve website performance:

   • Compress images that are obliterating pages
   • Don’t overload your site with heavy plugins
   • Check your server response time
   • Minimize the number of JavaScript and CSS files
   • Use website caching if possible
   • Identify and resolve 404 errors

3. Identify Relevant Keywords

   A big part of a successful SEO strategy during the holidays is keyword research. Irrelevant keywords will just waste your effort and overly competitive ones means that every other business is using them as well.

   One of the best ways to identify relevant keywords for this year’s seasonal holiday is to look into the data from the previous year. Check if there are interesting keywords that consumers used to find your brand. After that, research on the current search trends and behaviors from shoppers this year.

   Once the perfect keywords for your SEO are identified, let your SEO team group them by user intent and match these keywords to an existing web page or content gap. These will be your roadmap for the optimization process and content creation.

4. Create Holiday-Specific Content

   You have already optimized your website with relevant keywords. Now, it’s time to create holiday-themed content! First of all, don’t forget to make sure that your keywords are also strategically integrated. Different keywords represent different intents, so they may require a specific type of content.

   Secondly, when writing holiday-specific content, create one that works well with your brand identity. Authenticity matters. So, don’t force content that does not really fit your business’ image.

   What are the kinds of content you can create, you might ask? Here are some ideas:

   • Blogs
   • Promotional content for deals and sales
   • Gift guides
   • Infographics
   • Holiday-themed landing pages

5. Have Holiday-Themed Landing Pages

   
   Your digital storefront is what customers first see when they visit your website. Smartly optimizing them to have a holiday-specific theme can give you an edge in the market.

   A lot of people do last-minute shopping rush during this time of the year. So, considering their perspective, you’d probably also choose a website that highlights the seasonal products they need over a site with the usual landing page.

   Your landing page can make a big difference in increasing sales and boosting your business performance this upcoming holiday. Make good use of seasonal content to stay relevant in the market.

6. Build Up Excitement with Teaser Content

   Building up excitement through promotional teasers is a great way to garner not only existing but also potential customers. Your social media pages and email marketing are good platforms to entice consumers with sneak peeks. Website landing pages are a good place to put teaser content as well.

   Not only is this a great holiday SEO marketing tip, but it will also be good for your search engine optimization since the algorithms prefer regularly updated pages.

   Create “coming soon” content or teaser for exclusive deals, discounts, promos, or special offers for the holidays. Then, keep your target audience regularly updated with these through social media posts or emails.

7. Optimize Your Mobile Performance

   With more and more people using mobiles for their shopping and other purchases, you’ll want to put mobile optimization on top of your list.

   Last year, the majority of online purchases came from mobile users. With the holidays coming, making your website mobile-friendly can gain your business more profits.

   Take note that mobile performance will not only affect your customer’s shopping experience, but it will have an impact on your Google search rankings as well. Google has already expanded its Mobile-First Indexing practice. So, having your site mobile responsive is not just beneficial for the holidays. It’s a long-term strategy that can improve overall business performance.

8. Create Seasonal Pay-Per-Click Advertising

   Seasonal holiday traffic usually shoots up after Halloween. Thus, it’s not a surprise that a lot of consumers start searching for gift ideas as early as October. This is a perfect time and opportunity to create holiday-specific pay-per-click advertising.

   Let your consumers know what your brand is going to offer during the holidays in advance. This gives you a good chance of being on top of the minds of your target audience when they do their shopping spree.

   Moreover, Ad impressions increase 50% and direct traffic goes up by 150% during the holidays. This means better buying intent, more clicks on ads, and increased holiday revenues for your business.

9. Social Media Is Your Best Partner

   Let’s face it. Social media platforms remain superior when it comes to SEO marketing strategies, especially in the new normal. They are very handy platforms to boost organic traffic and successfully reach your target audience.

   Your SEO efforts might also fall short if you don’t leverage social media. These days, almost all people online spend time on popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.

   Not to mention, using the appropriate and trending holiday hashtags will give your business the much-needed boost to be seen by a lot of people online. Aside from online visibility, targeted content and ads on these platforms are very effective in driving sales.

   This holiday, create social media campaigns or content that highlights holiday-themed offers and messaging. Some social media platforms also have built-in tools to let you get access to customer data. Knowing these valuable marketing insights will make a difference in creating targeted holiday campaigns.

10. Learn from Your Competitors

    Most businesses are preparing their campaigns, SEO strategies, and other seasonal marketing ideas for the holidays. And you know what’s great about this? You can learn from them, too!

    Since the internet is accessible for everyone, there are no stopping business marketers such as yourself from taking a peek and checking out what your competitors are doing!

    Check out if there are trending blog topic ideas or maybe some popular gift suggestions you might also benefit from. However, remember that you will also need to be authentic as a brand. Take inspiration from them and don’t just blatantly copy from your competitors. Get creative so you can stand out from the competition.

11. Tools Are There to Help

    There are search engine optimization tools available to help out business start-ups with their SEO strategies this holiday. These valuable tools can save you time from tedious keyword research and data analysis.

    Some tools also provide helpful reports about how well your brand can hold against competitors and the possible opportunities you can take advantage of. What’s more, if you’re managing more than one website, there are SEO tools that can help you easily assess them.

    We understand that it might be hard for some to properly manage SEO, especially if you’re new to the market. And with the holiday season almost here, optimizing your site becomes an even more pressing matter.

    Fortunately, finding tools that can help you is much easier. Here are some SEO tools that you can check out:

    • Ahrefs
    • Google Search Console
    • SEMRush
    • KWFinder
    • Moz Pro
    • Ubersuggest
    • Answer The Public
    • SpyFu
    • Woorank
    • Google Trends

Wrapping Up and the Key Takeaways

The holidays may be the most wonderful time of the year, but for business owners and marketers, it is also the busiest. We know it can be quite difficult to keep up with all this hustle and bustle, especially if you are a small business. However, these SEO tips and strategies can make a big difference to your sales, online reputation, and more this upcoming holiday season.

It’s tough and overwhelming from the start because of the shopping rush and all. But the good news is, it will get better year after year. Not only that but you will also be able to re-use or take ideas from your previous holiday campaigns. Just make sure you research the trends well, carefully analyze the data insights, and that they are still usable and effective.

After the 2021 holiday season, we urge businesses to not just stop from there! By that time, you have probably gained a lot of new customers, but without forging strong relationships with them, they might forget about your business too soon. Don’t wait for the next holiday season to interact with them! Stronger customer relationships are built through repeat purchases and good interactions.

Plan ahead for January, too! While it will be a new year, the holiday rush will still be thriving during that time. This will put your business ahead of your competitors and might just become the key to growing your brand to new heights!

Kick Off Your Holiday SEO Strategies with Proweaver!

Feeling overwhelmed with all the things you need to do to keep up with the holiday rush? Instead of doing everything yourself, you can turn to SEO experts and specialists who can do the technical work for you!

Proweaver is a custom website design company bringing online success to many businesses in various industries. We transform vision into reality through our experts who will work with you and guide you every step of the process.

Our SEO specialists have helped thousands of clients with high-end and affordable SEO services. With over a decade of experience, we are confident in our skills to expand your brand’s reach in no time!

Let’s optimize your website, build your brand, and grow your business to new heights this holiday season. Work with Proweaver and our SEO experts today! Give our lines a call at +1 (866) 777-8315. We look forward to hearing more from you soon!