As far as retail sales are concerned in the UK, do you know that in 2018, people spent over £100 million on retail e-commerce? When online retail business shows such huge prospect, you should better pull up your socks to enjoy a bigger piece of the pie, don’t you?
In the following paragraphs, let’s discuss some effective strategies for holiday season SEO to boost your ranking, traffic, sales and revenue.
SEO for holiday seasons to generate more business
Planning
Unlike paid searches, SEO doesn’t provide quick results. Therefore, you have no better option than planning in advance to secure the most out of any upcoming holiday or vacationing season.
Perform a content audit at least 6 to 8 months in advance to create fresh content or update the existing one. If you want your business to rank for Christmas gifts, there has to be at least a few content related to Christmas. Create dedicated landing pages based on Christmas gifts and create content relevant to Christmas gifts that you sale. These are the basic necessities you have to fulfill.
- At advanced level, create a content calendar that includes various concepts and various types of content to cater to multiple events in a calendar.
- Go through the Google Analytics to see the products that were in demand from shoppers last year.
- Analytics will also help you learn how your target audience found those landing pages.
- Know what queries drove traffic to those landing pages.
Work closely with your paid search team and optimize both the content and keywords that performed well last year. At the same time, you’ve to keep a close tab on social media too. According to a topnotch SEO agency, new buzz words and new content ideas are always welcome in holiday season SEO strategies. Pinterest is a great platform for promoting content for holiday season content.
Reusing old, existing content is also a helpful strategy. If you have the last year’s Christmas guide, it is a good idea to update it with new products and use it this year.
Content promotion is crucial
Creating fresh and captivating content is just not enough to boost conversion. You’ve to promote your content in a smart way to reach out to as much of your audience as possible. Create a concrete content plan to promote your blogs and articles. Consider social channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others while promoting content. In short, you’ve to make every possible effort to make your content viral across the web. The more viral the content is the more people will come across it. This will improve your chances of conversion.
Make amends for the technical issues
Take care of the following technical issues to ensure your site performs smoothly during holiday seasons.
- Fast load time: Under no circumstance your page load time should go beyond 2 seconds. Ideally, it must be under 2 seconds. Else your mobile customers are more likely to abandon their carts increasing your bounce rate.
- Page deletion and redirects: If you delete a page or pages in your website, do redirect the respective category and product level pages. On the other hand, if you delete product and category pages, specially the ones that have authoritative links, high-quality content and organic ranking, make sure to create a brand new page if you’re not redirecting them.
- Never ever change the URLs for landing pages: In case you have to do it, make sure to set up a 301 redirect to the newly created page.
- Running out of stock: Your site may run out of stock during a holiday shopping season. To counter this you should always have a sound redirection strategy in place to provide your customers with relevant products. This holds back users on the site and helps your site avoiding high bounce rate.
- Site monitoring: Keep monitoring your site for issues like dead pages, crawl error and others that may impact site performance.
Structured data
This is a way to provide additional information to search engines in a way they can understand easily. All the product-related pages as well as other important pages on your website must be marked up with both product schema and review schema. The more popular reviews you get, the more popular your product becomes. The more popular products you have the better ranking you will enjoy.
A well-defined checkout process: According to a statistics report, during holiday seasons shopping cart abandonment rates usually go above 70%. In order to provide a memorable shopping cart experience to your customers keep the checkout process very simple. It is also important to optimise the checkout process from time to time to maintain its simplicity. Additionally, you must take care of the following aspects:
- Minimise the number of your checkout pages.
- Minimise the number of forms and information that your customers require filling out.
- There must be a guest check option.
- Last but never the least, include the A/B test.
Internal links and external links
If the website has inter-related pages, then the main category page must have one internal link related to them. Analyse your website to identify such internal linking opportunities. At the same time, it is important to build external links from high-authority websites. Links to positive reviews from your bloggers and customers also contribute sufficiently to improve your site’s online visibility, performance and traffic.
Comparison and measurement
As a hardcore business man, at the end of everything you must know which strategies worked and which didn’t. This information will streamline your effort in the coming years. There has to be a measurement plan to compare your site’s performance year over year during holiday seasons. Keep track of each and every keyword and every activity that earned you new links.
DubSEO has earned reputation as one of the best SEO agencies in the UK. Search engine optimisers associated with it share some core tactics to ensure a Win-Win situation for you.
- Make sure your content is not just static text but also includes some visual elements and link them with your relevant products and services.
- Do not forget to include powerful call-to-action texts.
- Include other media to promote your message.
Holiday season SEO is not rocket science. If you follow the tips discussed above, your business is assured to grow during holiday seasons.
