6 Steps Seo Guide to Succeed in Holiday Season

Do you want to drive relevant traffic to your website and make more sales during this holiday season?

Of course, you do.

If you’re like a lot of brands, you’ve probably wondered whether or not search engine optimization is relevant during the holiday season. May you know it is relevant, but you just don’t know how to do it. Truth is, there’s a lot of contradictory and even outright false information floating around about this topic.

That’s why we rolled up our sleeves and uncovered all the latest steps you need to succeed with SEO during the holiday season. One of the things we discovered is that you need to start preparing for the holiday season at least 60 days in advance.

Surprised?

Then you’ll be even more surprised when you discover the six proven steps you can use to succeed with SEO during this holiday season.

Read on to find out…

Step 1: Create Pages That Are Designed for The Holiday Season

You should title the page accordingly.

For example, ‘Christmas gift for hubby wristwatch’, ‘best mom discounts just for Christmas’, ‘top 10 gifts for this Christmas’, or ‘top deals for dads and teens this Christmas’.

Also, the meta description, and the landing page or category page should match the yuletide period. A side benefit of creating these pages at Christmas is that you can re-use them during summer sales and on valentine’s day. Making the changes is simple, you just need to rewrite the meta descriptions and the titles to fit the season. You may not even have to update the post at all.

A good rule of thumb is to start preparing for the holiday season at least 60 days in advance. This will ensure that the search engines can index your links and landing pages in time.

Step 2: Optimize Your Product Pages

Image Source – shopify.com

As you add or change your product pages to match the season, ensure that you’re also optimizing the pages. I suggest you create a checklist to avoid forgetting any SEO tasks that you need to perform.

For example, have you added structured data to your product pages?

Structured data are the rich snippets that appear under your products in the search results, they display ratings and prices. Adding the structured data to your product pages can give you a slight competitive advantage.

Apart from optimizing your product pages, you should also optimize keywords. Use your favorite keyword tools or Google’s keyword planner to uncover phrases with related to the holidays that you can easily rank. Then, create pages and custom campaigns strictly for the holidays.

Thus, you can have huge amounts of visitors to your store and possibly, make a lot of sales during the holiday period.

Step 3: Re-Use Content

Ever heard the phrase, “old wine, new bottles”? Feel free to re-use a Christmas guide that you have created for 2018 in 2019. All you need to do is to update any details about the brands or popular products, update the year and the slug URL.

For example, if your slug is titled /new-year-2018/, change it to /new-year-2019/ when it’s August. Then, re-direct the old URL to the new one. You don’t have to create a brand-new page. If you don’t use the old URL, you will be wasting nice inbound links.

To even make it easy on yourself, avoid including the year in the URL. Hence, you can repost popular posts from last year (with slight adjustments, if need be) on social media. Cyber Monday might be suitable for daddy’s favorites for Christmas, while you can tweak a valentine day’s post to become secret Santa. Another simple and effective tweak is to add ‘this Christmas’ to the title or meta description. While these might seem like little adjustments, they are very effective.

Step 4: Create Content for The Holiday Season

If you don’t have any content that you can re-use, you can start creating content using the keywords you’ve uncovered.

However, bear in mind that the content you’re creating must also fit your brand. You can target specific customer personas to develop holiday-themed blog posts. Though it is easier for companies that sell physical products to create holiday ‘specials’, digital products can also be bundled into holiday deals.

Step 5: Check and Optimize Your Website for Speed and Mobile

Every year or even every day, search engines are attaching a lot of importance to speed, mobile, and mobile speed. The preparation for the holiday season is a good time to check (or re-check) you’re that your website can be viewed properly on mobile devices, it loads fast on desktop and mobile devices. If you have to make any improvements or updates, do so immediately.

Also Read, Tips to optimize the custom WordPress theme

Step 6: Analyze Your Success

For you to know you focus next year, you need to create a plan, execute the plan and track all your actions. Track your analytics not just after the holidays but during the holidays. The key indicators of your success (or areas where you need to improve) are organic traffic, time on site and bounce rate.

If you are not satisfied with the results of your analytics, seek help immediately. You can enlist the help of SEO experts on outsourcing sites such as Upwork. But you can also optimize your content based on your knowledge about SEO.

Conclusion

You just learned a 6-step SEO guide that you can use to succeed during this holiday season. And that means you can now optimize your website not just for this holiday season but for every holiday season every year. Yes, just knowing all the SEO steps for a holiday season is quite an accomplishment. But the truth is, packing away all this information in your noggin won’t do you any good if you don’t put it to use. And that’s why I suggest you take action – starting right now – by going through the steps again to get a good grasp of them. Because the sooner you get started, the sooner you can turn this knowledge into real results!