Increased traffic is the name of the game during the holiday season, and if you have a good SEO programme throughout the year, your traffic should remain steady over the course of the winter holidays, right? Not so fast. Assumptions like those are dangerous as holiday shopping begins to take off. Paying slightly more careful attention to your SEO work and adjusting your strategy a bit over the holidays is an absolute must.
Fun Fact: A Google Consumer Study suggests 62% of shoppers will FINISH their holiday shopping before December 16!
Getting Started
The key to improving your holiday SEO work is getting it off the ground now. If you plan to make holiday blog posts or social media posts, creating that content and getting it out there immediately is an absolute must. This is going to help with both the linking and ranking side of things. The key, though, is to make sure you have enough time to gain the momentum necessary. Publish to your site. Contribute to other sites. Get your name and brand out there immediately.
Add Some Architecture
You probably spruce your home up a bit for the holiday season, right? Why not spruce your site up as well? Add a few category pages for your holiday services or merchandise. Create a gift ideas section to help push those packages as people land on your site. This is a great space to get that holiday content out there, but it’s also a good way to get your new content as close to your home page as possible, something search engine crawlers love.
Don’t Forget to Do Your Research
Just because it’s the holiday season doesn’t mean you can ignore the necessary research for your keywords and trends. You have to understand the data to get the most success out of any campaign, so build a holiday list of keywords to target to make certain your content gets noticed immediately.
Even your site needs a little something extra during the holiday season, and shifting your standard SEO efforts a bit can help.