Don’t panic. Christmas is only three weeks away, and if you haven’t already started your website’s holiday SEO and digital marketing, you’re behind the curve. In fact, studies have shown that the summer months are the ideal time to start planning and implementing your digital marketing strategy for the holiday season. Although never too late to start optimizing your website for the holidays, starting earlier will give you a head start among your competitors and help you take advantage of the increase in online shopping we saw this year.
Remember: Holiday search engine optimization and digital marketing efforts aren’t just limited to the Christmas season. Whether you offer a service, sell unique gifts or any kind of holiday specific items, it’s never too early to be aggressive with your SEO tactics and move ahead of your competition. What better way to get ahead of your competition than to have your site ranking for some of the top holiday keywords? If you can move up in the search engine rankings and get ahead of your competition, you’ll gain an edge without having to compete through prices.
So, want to know some ways you can go about improving your rankings for specific holiday keywords?
On-Site Optimization
- Holiday pages – Creating new pages for your holiday-specific merchandise or promotions is one of the first optimizations you should make. You don’t want your visitors to land on a generalized page when they’re looking for Christmas gifts. This will help them find what they are looking for quickly and efficiently. Be certain to include your targeted holiday keywords in both the meta description and title for these pages.
- Optimize your homepage – Your website’s homepage is a great place to feature your holiday merchandise and promotions. This could mean creating some fun banners or images that will promote the holiday pages you just created or show off some of the items you have for sale, making them easier for people to find.
- Keep holiday pages year round – This is often overlooked but is something you should always do, even if you aren’t actively promoting the page. The reason behind this is that it can build SEO value for your website throughout the year. You could even take this a step further and create a holiday specific section in your navigation. It’s important to remember that there are many shoppers who look for after-holiday sales so you don’t want to delete or hide a page that could win you a sale.
- Utilize a blog – Blogs are always a great way to bring in more traffic from your readers as well as more backlinks. During the holidays, announcing special deals and promotions through your blog can help boost your sales.
Off-Site Optimization
- Press releases – Creating a few press releases announcing your holiday sales or promotions is an often overlooked technique. Not only will this give your website a better chance of getting picked up by news feeds and other websites, it can also yield you some backlinks, which will help increase the SEO value of your holiday keywords.
- Article distribution – Similar to how press releases work, distributing your original blogs or content to other websites is a great way to get your message to holiday shoppers while gaining some backlinks to boost your rankings in the process.
- Link building – Building high-quality backlinks should always be one of your top priorities. With the holiday season officially here, you should be shifting your link building efforts to focused on holiday keywords you are trying to rank for. It’s good practice to shift around 50% of your efforts towards your holiday digital marketing. However, this is just a safe estimate so that you don’t lose rankings for your year-round keywords. Feel free to devote as much effort to this area as you feel comfortable.
With the Christmas season starting earlier and earlier every year, it’s never been more important for you to stay ahead of your competition by keeping your website optimized and ready for the holiday season. Ready or not, here comes the season to be jolly so begin planning your 2016 holiday SEO and web marketing efforts and contact Post Launch today.
