Scary, isn’t it?
The holiday shopping season is almost upon us.
In just a couple of weeks, shoppers will begin their quest to find the best gifts for friends, family, coworkers….
And that gives you just about enough time to implement some last minute SEO strategies to get the most of the holiday traffic.
Here the most important ones:
Publish Holiday Gift Guide
It’s a given:
Soon many customers will start turning to Google in search for gift ideas, suggestions and recommendations.
And there’s no better content to intercept them with than detailed holiday gift guides.
These 2000 – 3000 words long mammoth posts always do well in search results. Sure, you might not be able to rank them for the head terms anymore. There’s still enough time though to position those guides for long terms keywords.
TIP: Use Keywordini, our free keyword research tool to find keyword suggestions.
Here are some ideas for holiday gift guides:
- Create guide to specific products in each category,
- Collect best gifts by theme (i.e. “A guide to best gifts for your dad”)
- Offer something quirky (e.g. “Top 10 tech gifts for your granny”).
Research Holiday Keywords Ideas to Optimize Landing Pages For
Keywords you optimized landing pages for will not be enough during the holiday season. Most customers will search for their unique variations, often including one or some of these terms in the query:
- Deals,
- Gifts,
- Sales,
- Discounts,
- Cyber Monday,
- Black Friday,
- Free Shipping,
- Free Delivery.
Therefore, research the most popular keywords in your category including those words.
And then optimize content to rank for them as well.
Update Your Black Friday / Cyber Monday Landing Page
Or if you haven’t got one at all, create it now.
A dedicated Black Friday landing page will help you intercept more traffic during the Thanksgiving weekend.
One, if you manage to improve its rankings through the update, you could attract a much greater organic traffic.
You could also use it as a landing page for your Adwords campaigns to increase relevancy of your Black Friday ads and reduce cost per click.
And finally, by making a link to it prominent in the navigation you could intercept shoppers on the rush. People wanting to see the best deals as fast as possible and unwilling to invest time in review your entire catalog.
At minimum your Black Friday landing page should include:
- List of deals you’re offering,
- Discounted products (or at least holiday related categories),
- FAQs and other Black Friday and Cyber Monday related information that could help visitors make a decision to buy from you, instead of any other retailer.
Improve Site Loading Speed
I’m sure know:
Page loading speed is one of the ranking factors.
As Brian Dean points in his amazing guide to ranking factors:
“Both Google and Bing use page loading speed as a ranking factor. Search engine spiders can estimate your site speed fairly accurately based on a page’s code and filesize.”
Page load time can also affect conversions. According to Kissmetrics for instance, even a one second delay in loading time could result in 7% drop in conversions (source).
Therefore, check your site’s loading times with Pingdom Tools and improve whatever’s necessary to speed it up.
Improve Internal Linking
A proper internal linking structure will help your site in a number of ways:
It delivers a much better customer experience. The point of linking various pages on the site together is to provide a quick reference for users looking for more information. By linking the right pages together, you can guide a person through your site and present them everything they need to know before purchasing.
Passes on Page Rank. From the SEO point of view, interlinking passes page rank from high authority pages to its lower counterparts.
Helps Google index you content quicker. Googlebot crawls pages a site by following links. Therefore, the better your interlinking structure, the easier it will be for it to index new pages and content on your site.
Include Holiday USPs in Meta Tags
It’s not a secret, holiday shoppers are attracted to deals and promotions.
According to this research by Experian, the most popular deals during the shopping season are:
- Free Shipping,
- Deal of the Day,
- Discounts.
And if you want to beat the competition, include any deals and promotions you offer in your title and description meta tags to improve organic click-through rate.
Entice Customers to Leave Reviews
Reviews play a major role in your holiday marketing.
They encourage customers to buy.
Bazzar Voice, after analyzing data from a major US retailer established how increasing the number of reviews would affect the number of orders across various industries. Here’s what they found:
They also send a strong trust signal.
You know:
61% of customers are more likely to buy from a site that features user reviews (source).
And the reason for that is simple, the sheer fact that a site allows for unedited reviews makes it more trustworthy.
They also provide fresh and unique content for search engines
Every new review a product receives adds more content to its page. And what’s equally important, expands the number of keywords the page could rank for.
Therefore, start encouraging customers to leave reviews right now:
- Include review requests in emails, invoice and even on the packaging.
- Make it easy to review a product by providing clear instructions.
- Display calls to actions on product pages asking customers to leave feedback.
Run a Complete Site Audit to Identify Potential SEO Problems
I agree, you should be auditing your store on regular basis. But doing so is particularly important right before the Holiday Season.
Run a complete site audit to ensure that your site is free from any potential SEO threats that could threat its rankings.
Conclusion
The Holiday shopping season is almost upon us. There is however still enough time left for you to implement strategies to help improve rankings and attract organic traffic.
Last updated by at September 23, 2015.