The holidays are busy and stressful for everyone – especially for small business owners who are trying to capitalize on holiday promotions to bring in additional revenue while keeping up with day to day operations. Because of that rush, it’s understandable that holiday SEO isn’t likely a high priority for you, but the right strategy can help you bring in more customers during the holidays. Use these tips to guide your strategy. (And it doesn’t have to relate to holiday shopping – it can work for any business that focuses on seasonal stuff – and can be done in preparation of any season.) For example, if you sell outerwear, now is the time to prepare for your new fall and winter line. Craft a gameplan and start preparing now for the end of the year in 2019 and to be ready 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 find new words and phrases to target. With Google Trends, you can look at the historical performance of a keyword, so you can start to make predictions about when those keywords may increase in popularity and work that into your strategy. Doing so ahead of time gives you the ability to plan a strategy that lets you capitalize on that increased 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.
