For any retail business, whether it's online or offline, holiday shopping can be a huge source of profits. Consumers will buy significantly more themed goods for decoration. Shopping will also increase, as people rush to buy gifts for their loved ones.
For some goods, sales can increase by 200% from August to October, according to Adobe research. This means business owners can make a decent part of their profit during the holiday season. But to make use of this increased demand, you must prepare in advance.
An important part of that preparation is making sure that the most important goods are in stock, that you have enough employees to handle shipping, and that your internal communication is great. But getting your promotions in order, both figuring out your paid campaigns and configuring the SEO, is equally important.
Holiday SEO is the most essential part here, as it will take Google time to discover your page, crawl it, and index it. So, it's best to plan holiday SEO improvements and implement them several months before your targeted holiday.
Follow this guide to learn SEO tips for online stores that will make the next holiday a genuine moneymaker for your business.
1. Conduct keyword research
As with any SEO effort, your path toward excellent holiday SEO starts with keyword research. Understanding what keywords you want to focus on is key to success. Most keywords people use to find your business will be used all year round. But during the holidays, there are specific keywords that people might use. Your goal is to identify them and optimize pages for these keywords.
To achieve this, start with the keyword list you already have and expand it. Or you could start with a simple keyword phrase, like "Christmas kids gifts," and find more similar keywords with specialized tools.
The easiest tool you could use to get more ideas is an AI tool like ChatGPT. It can quickly get you started with several keyword ideas.
But don't just take these keywords and add them to your pages right away. ChatGPT and similar tools aren't SEO tools; they're just good for idea research.
Take these keywords and put them through an SEO tool like Google Keyword Planner or SE Ranking Keyword Suggestion Tool. With these, you'll discover hundreds of similar keywords and analyze their search volume, search intent, and keyword difficulty.
This will help you find holiday keywords for your business in bulk and know which to focus on based on keyword difficulty and search volume.
It can even serve as a demand forecasting tool, as it shows the seasonality of keywords.
After this research, you'll have a long list of seasonal keywords you can use to drive search traffic to your website. There are three main ways of optimizing your online store for these keywords.
Add these seasonal keywords to product pages that already rank well. Since they already have the potential to rank for a few dozen keywords used throughout the year, they may rank faster and better for seasonal keywords as well.
Many SERPs for these seasonal keywords are taken up by informational articles that list dozens of gifts. Develop an informational "listicle" as a part of a content marketing campaign and put your products in there. Keep in mind: it's best to target keywords with lower keyword difficulty, as more prominent websites may dominate the SERPs.
Lastly, create dedicated landing pages for the holiday. Learn how to do that in the next section.
2. Create holiday landing pages
A straightforward SEO tip for online stores that can help you capitalize on increased holiday traffic with search engine optimization is to create landing pages dedicated to the holiday. These new pages will serve to catch holiday traffic and direct it toward the products that feel like the best fit.
Even though many seasonal search results are populated with listicles, it's not uncommon to see a landing page among them.
The most widely used template for these landing pages is as follows:
- Create a central hub page centered around the main keyword like "Christmas gifts"
- Create content for the page and optimize for that keyword
- List the most fitting products
- Create a supporting page for an auxiliary keyword like "Christmas gift for fathers" or "girlfriend Christmas gifts"
- Create optimized content for them
- List products that fit this subcategory the most
Most ecommerce sites create these landing pages in the same format as any other category page, like in the example below.
If you want to step away from this practice and create a more interactive landing page, don't forget to use high-quality images or videos of your products and clear, engaging CTAs.
3. Get featured on holiday listicles
If you google most holiday-themed keywords, you will soon find out that most websites in the search results are informational in nature. These articles are lists of products that make a good gift for a certain holiday.
You can find sites that create articles like these and arrange your products to be mentioned. This will give you both a traffic boost. People who are looking for gifts might be interested in your products and click the link. It will also provide an SEO boost—because of that link.
In most cases, you'll have to enter into an affiliate agreement with the best affiliate API, and with the site linking to you and give them a share of the revenue they've generated. If that's okay with you, this is a great strategy for sales and SEO.
4. Update your pages with holiday messaging
A minor update to your site that could help with SEO and holiday sales is introducing the holiday theme on the website as a whole. You could create a holiday banner to let people know that you have a sale and direct website users to the holiday sale landing page.
Optimizing your online store directly influences your sales and helps the SEO of that landing page. As more people discover it from your website, they might share the link online, giving the page an SEO boost. Even sharing with friends might lead to an increase in direct traffic, which might grant a minor SEO boost.
You could also temporarily introduce holiday-themed product descriptions, where you can include keywords related to the holiday in question. Save this strategy for the ones that fit the holiday.
Use the product pages to create internal links to the holiday landing page with the keyword as the anchor. This will give Google another clue as to what the landing page is about and will help rank it better for that keyword.
5. Keep your local listings current
Lastly, if you're doing local SEO, make sure the local listing of your business is up to date. Checking whether your address, phone number, and open hours are the same across your listing on Google Business Profile and all mentions online is a constant SEO job.
During the holidays, update your GBP listing to reflect special holiday working hours to avoid confusing your customers. Add holiday events to your local listing, and they will show in the local search.
Wrapping up
This concludes our list of urgent SEO tasks you need to complete before the holiday. Make sure to start early, as Google has a 4-8 week window to discover your new pages and updated content.
Focus on keyword research, optimize your website for them, create new pages, and try to build links before consumers start seeking gifts. Follow the SEO tips for online stores from this article, and you'll increase your sales this holiday season!