After you conduct your keyword research for your holiday terms using your favorite tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, etc., produce a list of terms including:
General terms: “holiday,” “festive,” “seasonal,” “gift.”
Specific holidays: “Christmas,” “Hanukkah,” “New Year’s,” “Kwanzaa.”
Gift-giving terms: “stocking stuffer,” “secret Santa,” “white elephant.”
Emotional terms: “joy,” “cheer,” “merry,” “celebrate.”
Highlight holiday use cases. Describe how the product can be used during the holidays or why it makes a great gift, and add videos.
Use seasonal modifiers; add holiday-specific adjectives to your product titles and descriptions. Example for clothing:
Original: “Red Knit Sweater.”
Holiday version: Festive Red Knit Sweater, Perfect for Holiday Parties.
Leverage Email Marketing For Holiday Campaigns
While email marketing doesn’t directly impact SEO, it can indirectly help your SEO efforts during the holiday season.
Having targeted email campaigns can bring previous customers back to your store, as long as they’re personalized based on previous purchases, browsing interest, and limited offers.
Plan For Out-Of-Stock Items
With the recent events in the world, i.e., U.S. port strikes by 45,000 dock workers, wars, hurricanes, an uncertain presidential election, and the fact that COVID is still around, there are still some issues with the supply chain.
You always need to have a plan if your products aren’t available if something happens.
In this case, it is recommended to stock up on products that have sold out in previous years and make sure your inventory management system is integrated with your website in real time.
Other alternatives include:
Emailing customers when products are back in stock.
Internally linking to related products.
Engage Through Social Media
Social platforms are critical to engaging customers and driving sales.
Creating useful and shareable content, holiday giveaways, and social media deals can drive engagement metrics and promote your holiday SEO content to attract links and social endorsements. In addition, shoppable posts facilitate discovery and purchases on social platforms.
Add An On-Site Search Functionality
Adding in a site search, if you don’t have one, can significantly improve user experience, increase conversions, and indirectly benefit your SEO efforts.
Users like to search using on-site functionality.
Run A Tech And Internal Security Audit
With the number of cyber security threats, data breaches, and incremental web traffic during the holidays, always run a technical audit on the site and make sure:
Your site has a valid, working SSL certificate installed, so all your data is encrypted and safe.
Your product pages return to 200 response codes and load quickly and properly.
Run a vulnerability scan on your website to make sure there are no issues.
Use Product Schema
Use structured data (i.e., Product schema) so Google can understand your products and show product discounts and sales prices, which could have a positive impact on rankings and clicks.
Have A Simple Checkout Process
While not exactly pertaining to SEO, having a checkout process that is hard for users to navigate can have a detrimental impact on your online sales.
You need your checkout process to be quick and easy to complete a purchase, which will help:
Reduce cart abandonment.
Improve customer experience.
Increase conversion rates.
Complete purchase faster.
Strengthen positive brand perception.
Being Festive With Design
There is nothing better than visiting a website that puts you in the holiday mood.
For example, with Halloween approaching, Target does an excellent job updating its imagery to match the Halloween theme.
It’s also an innovative idea to build out gift guides, holiday FAQs, and holiday categories and optimize them to improve your customer experience, drive customers deeper into your website, and increase product purchases.
Screenshot from Target.com, October 2024
Product Reviews
Don’t forget about your product reviews. It is highly recommended to have detailed reviews of your most popular holiday products, showcasing why they are needed, useful, and relevant and make great holiday gifts.
Review KPIs
To make sure the holiday season is a success, start by reviewing your KPIs such as:
Revenue, traffic, and sales year-over-year.
Rank, impressions, and clicks.
Click-through rates.
Conversions.
Wrapping Up
The holiday season presents an excellent opportunity for ecommerce businesses to drive more sales and build customer loyalty.
To capitalize on the holiday season, it’s crucial to plan ahead and create an exceptional customer experience.
Work with your paid and social teams to develop a blended marketing strategy, run technical and security audits, and ensure a smooth checkout process.
Also, leverage email marketing and other tactics to drive incremental revenue and traffic while building lasting relationships with your customers for years to come.
More resources:
Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock